Global dollar transactions exceed 50%—

The dollar’s prowess in global trade climbed in January, accounting for just over half of all the international foreign-exchange traffic sent via the financial messaging service Swift, according to a report by BusinessMirror.

The portion of worldwide payments involving the greenback rose to 50.2% in January, up from 49.1 percent a month earlier, Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, said in a release. That’s the highest figure since the Belgium-headquartered consortium revised how it collects the transaction data in mid-2023.

As the world’s primary reserve currency, the dollar continues to account for an overwhelming amount of traffic on Swift. Over the last roughly year-and-a-half, it has averaged around 48 percent of the world’s total. The next largest currency, the euro, constitutes some 23 percent on average, followed by the British pound with 7.1 percent.

The foreign-exchange figures underscore the economic realities underpinning the dollar’s central role in international trade as a debate brews over finding ways to avoid using the US currency.

“If there’s going to be an alternative to the dollar, it can’t just be as good as the dollar,” Marc Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex and a veteran of the currency markets, said last week at an industry conference in Miami. “It has to be better.”

More akin to a vast communications network than a payments system, Swift is used by global banks to send messages to each other as they manage currency deals. Swift began assembling the data in 2010, but the figures since July 2023 reflect a technical adjustment to how it tracks the figures based on recently revised trade reporting standards.

Of course, far from all transactions in the $7.5 trillion-per-day foreign-exchange market are sent via Swift, which in 2022 began excluding several major Russian banks from the service following the invasion of Ukraine. The data, however, does shed light on the vast flows of money that drive trade over time. Some 11.9 billion trade instructions were sent via Swift in 2023, according to its last annual review published in June 2024. That was up from 11.2 billion the year before.

A growing crowd of challengers has emerged in recent years seeking ways to trade without using the greenback or US financial institutions, in part driven by Russia’s desire to develop its economy in the face of sharp sanctions.

That debate has mainly centered around the BRICS bloc, a group of emerging-market nations including Russia and China as well as Brazil, India, and South Africa. The yuan now ranks fourth in share of total payments traffic on Swift and accounts for nearly 3.8 percent, the group said Thursday — about double compared to a decade ago. South Africa’s rand tallied some 0.3 percent of the total last month. The currencies of Brazil and India were not included among the top 20, according to the Swift report.

US President Donald Trump has sharpened his focus on the greenback’s role in international markets, reiterating threats of 100 percent levies on the BRICS group should they move to their own currency. While tariffs have become a centerpiece of the new administration’s policies, so far few major actions have yet to take effect.