SWIFT announces the appointment of Cheri F. McGuire as CTO

By Joy Dumasia

SWIFT announced the appointment of Cheri F. McGuire as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). McGuire, previously Group Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Standard Chartered PLC, has extensive technology and banking industry experience and will oversee the co-operative’s core infrastructure to ensure it remains strong, resilient and secure.

McGuire is an established thought leader and industry advisor on cyber risk management and resilience. As CISO at Standard Chartered from 2016-2019, McGuire established a new global cyber risk management function across 60 countries and 85,000 employees.

Before that, she led cybersecurity policy and programmes at Microsoft and security vendor Symantec and was director of the National Cybersecurity Division and U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

SWIFT CEO, Javier Pérez-Tasso, commented: “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. I am confident in her leadership capabilities to drive our technology platform transformation as we continue to execute on our strategy, while also ensuring high levels of trust within the community on operational excellence, business continuity and risk and control.”

Cheri McGuire, incoming SWIFT CTO, said: “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. I look forward to working with Javier, the rest of the SWIFT team and SWIFT’s member institutions as we help to drive the future of cross-border financial transaction management.”

Recently, IBS Intelligence reported that SWIFT announces the launch of SWIFT Go, a new service that enables small businesses and consumers to send fast, predictable, secure, and competitively priced low-value cross-border payments anywhere in the world, direct from their bank accounts.