How is swift messaging done?

The SWIFT secure messaging network were run from two (now redundant) data centers, one in the United States and one in the Netherlands. These centers share information in near real-time. In case of a failure in one of the data centers, the other is able to handle the traffic of the complete network.

SWIFT opened a third data center in Switzerland, which started operating in2009.Since then, data from European SWIFT members are no longer mirrored to the U.S. data center. The distributed architecture partitions messaging into two messaging zones: European and Trans-Atlantic.European zone messages are stored in the Netherlands and in a part of the Switzerland operating center; Trans-Atlantic zone messages are stored in the United States and in a part of the Switzerland operating center that is segregated from the European zone messages. Countries outside of Europe were by default allocated to the Trans-Atlantic zone but could choose to have their messages stored in the European zone.