International Man: "A Former SWIFT Insider on Financial Warfare, the Fate of the Dollar, and Bitcoin"

To be honest he doesn't say much about bitcoin aside from its potential to be disruptive to the banking industry, but the brief history of SWIFT is well worth reading.

http://www.internationalman.com/articles/a-former-swift-insider-on-financial-warfare-the-fate-of-the-dollar-and-bitc

"Tjerk Veenstra: I like to refer to SWIFT as the dot-com of the 1970s, when it was conceived in Europe. Building SWIFT in the 1970s was like building an Internet for the global banking system decades before the actual Internet was available. Back then, communications systems were telephone and telex systems and nothing else."