I didn't get the sense that the author is implying that anything is or is not a big deal. I believe the author was just correcting for a technical audience that

I didn't get the sense that the author is implying that anything is or is not a big deal. I believe the author was just correcting for a technical audience that can understand it what SWIFT is. As the author said, the media makes it sound like an API for moving money around. There were some other posts on HN about the consequences of misunderstanding what SWIFT was, I recall one person mentioned being assigned a project to "integrate with SWIFT" which turned out upon deeper analysis to be impossible as assigned, because the people handing them the assignment didn't realize what SWIFT actually was and also had the same misconception.