MARTIN: I'm glad you mentioned that because there's been some dispute about how effective a measure this really is as a part of a sanctioning process. It has about - averages about 42 million messages daily and accounts about half of all the high-value cross-border payments in the world, linking those 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories. So its principal function really is a main messaging network, which enables to have international payments initiated. And it plays a pivotal role in supporting the global economy, but it has absolutely no authority to make sanctioned decisions itself. So SWIFT is a Belgian messaging system whose acronym you just pronounced, and it connects about 11,000 financial institutions around the world.

MARTIN: So to start off, could you just tell us a bit more about what SWIFT is and why it's important? Professor Rehman, thank you so much for joining us. We wanted to better understand how it works and what these new sanctions could mean, so we called Scheherazade Rehman, professor of international finance at George Washington University.

SWIFT is an acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communications. It's a key system when it comes to a country's ability to participate in international trade. That's a global messaging system used by banks worldwide to conduct their business and issue payments. and its allies ramped up their sanctions against Russia when they announced that certain Russian banks would be shut off from SWIFT.

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