Swift: Plans Are on Track Despite Leadership Change

Following the resignation of CEO Lazaro Campos, Swift quickly sought to provide assurance that its broad plan to expand into new markets, tap new technology and create collaborative venues for members to better understand standards would not be interrupted.

"All systems are go for these things such as MyStandards (a collaborative standards portal) and the [Swift2015] strategy," says Yawar Shah, COO at Citigroup and chairman of the board for the member-owned Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The board is looking internally to replace Campos, and has nominated Gottfried Leibbrandt, the current head of marketing, to replace Campos effective July 1.

No reason was given for Campos' departure beyond his intent to seek opportunities outside Swift, nor was Leibbrandt made immediately available for comment. Campos did provide a statement reflecting positively on his time at Swift and saying Leibbrandt, who's been part of Swift's executive team for five years, was "well qualified" to take over. Prior to joining Swift, Leibbrandt was a partner at McKinsey & Company. He holds an MBA from Stanford and a PhD from Maastricht, a business school in the Netherlands.

Under Campos' leadership, Swift emerged from slower growth during the financial crisis. Its most recent messaging volume report showed about 1.5 billion messages for April, up about 5.5 percent from the previous year. And Shah noted that costs have been reduced by 30 percent and prices have been slashed by 50 percent over the past couple of years. Given that recent progress and the expansion of Swift's technology further into compliance, the cooperative was putting a "stay the course" face on the resignation. "The message is one of continuity" Shah says.

Swift's ongoing 2015 strategy is aimed at moving Swift into new markets and new processes and deeper into compliance initiatives. This has included acquisitions such as Arkelis, which has enabled Swift to provide added messaging infrastructure for banks and tech partnerships to expand messaging capabilities.

The 2015 strategy also includes a focus on building partnerships in specific jurisdictions, called "go local" by Swift execs. That features collaboration with central banks, regulators and local banks to extend the use of Swift messaging to grow local transaction networks, such as its collaboration with Indian authorities and banks to increase speed and reduce costs for real-time gross settlement (RTGS) by creating a version of Swift India that's owned and designed by local stakeholders. Swift has also hired more than four dozen staffers across Asia as it looks to develop similar strategies in the region.

In the U.S., the 2015 strategy contains efforts such as its ongoing partnerships with The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and XBRL US, a business reporting standards group, to produce a new corporate actions taxonomy, in other words a dictionary governing terms used in corporate actions announcements for mergers, acquisitions, dividends and stock options. Swift is also part of a proposal to help produce legal entity identification, or standard identifiers for participants in securities transactions.

Shah says Leibbrandt will do his own assessment and make recommendations on changes to the 2015 plan and other strategies, but he said he did not anticipate any vast changes, since Leibbrandt is already an indelible part of existing strategy. "Leibbrandt has been head of marketing and strategy for some time," he notes.

The management change is also not expected to impact individual initiatives such as MyStandards, a web-based application designed to reduce the time and risk involved in standards implementation by providing content and collaboration to help financial executives adhere to emerging standards.

"There are a lot of flavors of standards for certain markets. This is an environment where people can discuss how they are adhering to standards and understand what their counterparts are doing," says Marc Delbaere, head of research for Swift.

While the standards considered in the forum can vary broadly, Delbaere says most of the standards considered include the various Swift and ISO standards governing the exchange of information between financial institutions and between financial institutions and other parties, such as ISO 200022 and the myriad Swift standards that guide messaging.

Swift's standards and message formats are complex, and Swift spends a lot of time explaining standards and providing education. One of its links is even called "demystifying standards," an eight-part series covering various components of standards adherence.

The Swift standards, which are designed to allow banks to execute transactions in any jurisdiction with minimal explanation, govern how Swift messages are put together. Each message contains data points identifying the originating bank, the receiving bank, the type of financial instrument (such as payment, cash letter, securities market, etc), the stage in a financial transaction lifecycle, and actual messages about the transaction-though these messages are limited. Swift is the registration authority for ISO 20022, another standard including a repository for syntax, or descriptions of financial practices that are included in messages.

As regulations and the speed of transaction processing increases, these standards are subject to frequent revision and local interpretation providing what Swift sees as an opportunity to use web collaboration to bring agility to standards adherence.

"There are regulations that play an important role in how standards are used and implemented and what we're trying to do is achieve a common ground and provide an environment in which people can better understand standards and how they relate to their business," Delbaere says.