How does a technology company with a near-50 year pedigree adapt and grow in a world of rapid technological change? How does a company like this meet the challenge of embracing new opportunities while remaining true to its core competencies and values?
“Our core mission has not changed,” Nick Kerigan, Head of Innovation Execution at SWIFT explained in an interview for Finovate TV. “But we are moving from a world of point-to-point messaging to end-to-end transaction orchestration.”
Watch the rest of the conversation to find out how you can collaborate to Innovate with SWIFT.
On the ways SWIFT’s new strategy benefits the payments industry
In payments, we believe we can unlock huge opportunities that help our community strengthen their many existing market segments like core banking, B2B, and cross-border payments. We also think we can open up bold new opportunities for the future around SME and consumer segments. What we’re essentially trying to do is to create instant and frictionless, account-to-account transactions anywhere in the world. The vision is to make international payments as simple and easy as domestic payments.
Obviously that’s a big goal and it won’t be accomplished overnight. But we do think, particularly with our transaction management platform, that it’s fully achievable.
On the key areas of focus in SWIFT’s new innovation agenda
Innovation is not new to SWIFT; we were created to solve a big industry challenge 40 years ago, so that’s at our heart … A few things are high on our mind: one is cloud and simplifying the journey to cloud. All large financial institutions – and smaller ones as well – have important programs around bringing their services into the cloud. Everyone knows the benefits of doing that – and they also know that can be quite a challenging task.
What we’re doing is aiming to ease that journey for our customers. We’ve launched new cloud-based products and we are also making our existing products cloud-ready so when our customers are ready to migrate and move, we are ready for them.
On the collaborative innovation and the importance of partnership
Organizations in the financial community often find it challenging to balance the imperative of innovation with everything else they have to do on their agenda, which are often driven by forces such as regulations and others, that means that they are “must do.” What we say with collaborative innovation is that one way of unlocking that challenge is to work much more together as a community so the burden isn’t on any one bank or institution, but the burden is more shared.
SWIFT is well-placed to help the industry collaborate because we are a neutral, member-owned organization that sits in the middle of this great financial community. We think that by enhancing collaborative innovation and working together we can maybe unlock some of these problems that individually we struggle to solve.
For more from our Finovate speakers, check out our Finovate TV YouTube playlist.