According to data released by SWIFT, the use of the euro as a settlement currency for international payments has fallen significantly. Its utilization share has decreased by 6.83% compared to 2014, with only 22.29% of global payments employing it.
Euro Usage Tanks, Leading Decline Among Currencies on SWIFT Over the Last 10 Years
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Euro Tanks, Dollar Thrives in Swift Share Charts
The future seems bleak for the euro, as its popularity as a settlement currency is waning in international markets. Recent data released by SWIFT, the de-facto standard messaging system for making international and interbank transactions, indicates that the euro is now the currency that has lost the most usage share in the last 10 years.
SWIFT numbers show that in 2014, the euro’s share reached close to 30%, accounting for almost a third of the payments made inside the system. However, only 22.29% included the euro, declining by nearly 7% in November.
Other fiat currencies also showed a decline in utilization, but none as large as the one experienced by the euro. In opposition, the dollar’s share has increased by 4.68% during the last decade. This might signal that the de-dollarization actions and calls from several non-western-aligned nations have not had the desired effect.
Nonetheless, some of the largest international players have been banned from using SWIFT, so the landscape depicted by this data might be incomplete. China and Russia, for example, are conducting most of their international trade in national currencies, and these volumes would not be included in this report.
Read more: BRICS Beats Dollar Dependence: National Currency Settlements Exceed USD Payments
This is also the opinion of Leonid Khazanov, an independent industrial expert who told Ria Novosti that the rise of the dollar share does not imply its adoption has increased. He stated:
Individual countries are developing and using their own transaction systems, and Russian businesses can also use them to make deals. Therefore, the increase in the share of the dollar in payments via SWIFT indicates a decrease in the popularity of both of them.
To make matters worse for the euro, analysts have stated before that, due to the way that intra-European Union transactions are registered, the share of international euro transactions is even lower. The Atlantic Council’s senior fellow Hung Q. Tran assessed that true international transactions leveraging the euro account for 43% of the numbers reported.
