Longtime banking and tech executive named CTO of Swift

Cheri McGuire, a 30-year-veteran of technology and banking, has been named chief technology officer of Swift, the Brussels-based financial messaging service, the company announced Monday. In her role, McGuire will oversee Swift’s core infrastructure.

Swift has been working for some time to enable real-time transactions across its network of 11,000 financial institutions in 200 countries.

“I am excited to join SWIFT at such a pivotal time as it is re-tooling cross-border infrastructure and fundamentally transforming payments and securities,” said McGuire in a press release.

In June, six major global banks, including Bank of New York Mellon and Citigroup, announced a commitment to test a new transaction management platform that Swift has been developing and expects to take live in November 2022. In early July, Swift announced its payment pre-validation service, which will let banks check and confirm payee details related to the payment beneficiary before moving the transaction. At the end of July it launched Swift Go, a streamlined way for businesses and consumers to send cross-border transactions under $10,000 at more competitive rates.

McGuire previously served as group chief information security officer at Standard Chartered PLC and led cybersecurity policy and programs at Microsoft and security vendor Symantec. She was also director of the National Cybersecurity Division and U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“I was immediately impressed both by Cheri’s extensive knowledge in the cyber domain but also her experience and strategic understanding of technology transformation taking place within the financial services industry,” said Javier Pérez-Tasso, CEO of Swift, in the release.