San Francisco-based blockchain FinTech Ripple is being questioned about its claims that rival cross-border payments firm SWIFT has a 6 percent error rate, AMBCrypto reported Tuesday (Nov. 5).
Banking consultant Martin Walker, director of Banking and Finance at the Center for Evidence-Based Management, said in a paper produced for the London School of Economics, that he questions the repeated claims by Ripple executives of a 6 percent failure rate for SWIFT messages.
Ripple reportedly based its claims on a 2014 paper published by the SWIFT Institute but authored by two independent payments experts, Kimmo Soramäki and Samantha Cook. The error rate projected by the authors referred to the accuracy of the model, not the rate of errors in messages.
“In other words, the ‘6 percent error rate’ was totally irrelevant,” Walker said. “All of … Ripple’s commentary on the error rate and what it meant was also, as a consequence, completely erroneous.”
Walker has questioned Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse about the allegations regarding SWIFT’s error rate. Garlinghouse has highlighted SWIFT’s error rate on a number of occasions, including at the Money 20/20 Asia conference in 2018.
“The creation of the payment instructions by sending banks and the processing of those instructions by banks’ receiving the SWIFT message is only as good as the banks themselves,” Walker said. “While SWIFT was only acting as a network for the communication of messages, it did not have any view how efficient or effective the processes in the banks and other financial institutions were.”
SWIFT — Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — was founded in Brussels in 1973 to establish common processes and standards for financial transactions.
Ripple has continued to add to its cross-border payments roster. In May, Ria Money Transfer, billed as the second-largest money transfer portal, linked with Ripple to offer instant money transfers.
Also in May, Maybank said it had become the first bank in Malaysia to deploy the SWIFT global payments innovation (GPI) service that is tied to speeding and streamlining cross-border payments. The bank joined 160 financial institutions across 200 countries.
Job cuts in government, technology and retail led the way as U.S. employers announced the largest number of cuts in one month since May 2020.
Among the 275,240 job cuts announced in March, 216,215 were in government, 15,055 were in technology and 11,709 were in retail, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report released Thursday (April 3).
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the report. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”
The total number of job cuts made in March was more than three times the 90,309 cuts announced in March 2024, according to the report.
By sector, compared to March 2024, government job cuts were almost six times higher, technology cuts were about 6% higher and retail cuts were nearly twice as high, per the report.
All the government job cuts made in March occurred in the federal government, the report said.
The top reason employers gave for cutting jobs in March was “DOGE impact,” which was cited for 216,670 of the month’s cuts, according to the report.
Other common reasons included store, unit or department closing, to which 17,666 job cuts were attributed, and market/economic conditions, which accounted for 11,594 cuts, per the report.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas also said in the report that employers are planning to hire fewer workers than they were a year ago. Companies’ hiring plans dropped by about 37%, from 21,102 in March 2024 to 13,198 in March 2025, according to the report.
The specter of uncertain job security may accelerate a spending pullback that is already in motion, PYMNTS reported Wednesday (April 2). Consumer confidence that was already shaken may have been further impacted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest snapshot of the labor market released Tuesday (April 1), which found that the labor market slowed in February, with a decline in job openings over the past year.
The Conference Board reported March 25 that consumer confidence slipped for the fourth straight month in March, due in part to a plunge in consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions.
