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Western nations intensified their campaign of financial sanctions against Russia on Wednesday by taking the unusual step of cutting off seven Russian lenders from a Brussels-based platform that administers payment instructions for global transactions.

On Wednesday morning, the European Council, which represents the EU’s 27 nations, ordered the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, also known as SWIFT, to cut ties with Bank Otkritie, Novikombank, Promsvyazbank, Rossiya Bank, Sovcombank, Vnesheconombank and VTB, Russia’s second largest lender by assets.

The order requires the consortium to disconnect all seven banks from the platform by March 12, and do the same for any subsidiaries in which those lenders hold a stake of more than 50 percent. Each of the seven has already incurred sanctions in the past week from Britain, the EU and U.S. following Russia’s latest military offensive against Ukraine.

“Banks will already have cut off these institutions or put their traffic into a mode where every payment is looked at,” said Bob Lyddon, a payments consultant based in Norfolk, England. “Traffic to and from these BICs [bank identification codes] will be overseen by somebody from the financial crime unit of the bank.”

Global banks almost ubiquitously use SWIFT payment messages and their BICs—a string of eight to 11 numbers corresponding to a specific bank or branch—to screen and trace transactional information for sanctions-compliance purposes.

Wednesday’s decision, which comes nearly 10 years to the day after all Iranian lenders lost access to SWIFT pursuant to nuclear-related sanctions against the Islamic Republic, heaps additional pressure on lenders already scrambling to suspend or sever ties with the seven Russian banks by government deadlines.

On Friday, the U.K. Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation issued a general license for financial institutions to wind down transactions with VTB by March 27, 15 days after the SWIFT ban takes effect.

Whether and how banks will still transact with the seven lenders during the 15-day interim is unclear.

The uncertainty could carry major implications for firms that trade in securities or have loan obligations, revolving lines of credit or staff in Russia, said Denisse Rudich, director of Rudich Advisory, a consultancy in London.

“I don’t think [western] banks will be able to do it without SWIFT, even if they have the license in place,” Rudich said. “There are other banking rails, but if you’re looking at clearing one currency to another using blacklisted banks, there has to be some kind of government intervention to open up or point to the gateways for those payments to be processed.”

The ban will force the seven Russian lenders to find alternative channels for international payments, costing them time and money, but will not block them from the international financial system altogether.

They could, for example, increase their reliance on a messaging platform created by the Central Bank of Russia after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, or transact in renminbi, using the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System built in 2015 by the People’s Bank of China.

Lyddon, the U.K. consultant, said “unscrupulous” third-party lenders could profit from the ban by secretly giving the seven banks new BIC codes to access SWIFT as part of a strategy akin to “wire stripping”—the practice of hiding key details from payment messages to obscure transactions tied to Iran and other heavily sanctioned countries.

The SWIFT ban does not apply to Sberbank and Gazprombank, lenders blacklisted by the West after the latest Russian military offensive began.

Analysts have pointed out that the EU may have shielded the two banks from the ban to ensure that the bloc can continue making payments for energy imports from Russia through special licenses.

The EU on Wednesday also prohibited companies in the bloc from involvement in projects financed by the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and banned the sale, supply or export of euro-denominated banknotes to Russia.

Contact Koos Couvée takcouvee@acams.org