When Cheri McGuire arrived for her first day at Swift as the new chief technology officer, most of her team were working from home. While Swift was maintaining its operations at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, only a core set of staff were physically in the office.
“I thought it was important that I come in physically to see the folks who were here to understand the lay of the land and what my new role was going to be,” says Ms McGuire. “I'm a visual person.”
Career history: Cheri McGuire
2021 Swift, chief technology officer
2016 Standard Chartered, group chief information securities officer and managing director
2010 Symantec, vice-president, global government affairs and cyber security policy
2008 Microsoft, director, critical infrastructure and cyber security
2005 US Department of Homeland Security, director, National Cyber Security Division/US-CERT
With a strong background in security, Ms McGuire is quick to point out that all the appropriate Covid precautions regarding masks and vaccines were carried out before she arrived on the Swift premises.
“From my perspective, we really can’t ignore the human and behavioural aspects around security – it’s one of the reasons that we put a very high emphasis at Swift on security awareness for our employees and colleagues,” she adds.
Swift runs a programme called SAFE – Security Awareness is For Everyone – that is focused on ensuring “everyone understands that security is our collective responsibility”, says Ms McGuire.
Prior to Swift, she served as managing director and group chief information security officer at Standard Chartered in London. Previously she served as a vice-president at Symantec, director for critical infrastructure and cyber security in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, and director of the US Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Security Division/US-CERT.
“I now have a chief security officer that reports to me,” says Ms McGuire. Security is a “critically important part of my role heading our technology platform group, but I also have other responsibilities including production operations and stability of the platform, enterprise business applications, and developing architectural strategy. They’re all part of my portfolio now.”
The past two years have seen a lot of activity. Recently, Swift launched a new technology platform strategy, which is all about ensuring that the organisation continues to evolve and transform its infrastructure to be both future ready and sustainable, she adds.
Some of that work includes undergoing major infrastructure upgrades to be ready for the ISO 20022 transition as well as the launch of Swift’s Transaction Manager to help improve instant and frictionless payments globally.
“That has been our big drive and big push,” she adds.
Another push is making sure that Swift is environmentally sustainable for the future. That includes its data centre footprint, data centre renewals and evaluating services that can be moved to the cloud to serve business and customers in the future, she says. Swift is also looking at its strategy for quantum computing and security automation to enable security to be more frictionless in the future, she says.
our number one priority ... is always focused on keeping the core secure and resilient
“Those are the types of things that we’re working on from a technology platform perspective,” says Ms McGuire. “But all that being said, our number one priority in the technology platform function is always focused on keeping the core secure and resilient – that is the heart of what we do.”
While Ms McGuire says she has always been a “fan of Swift” and the level of resiliency, security, and trustworthiness that the organisation has in the financial services ecosystem, she was also attracted to its projects concerning digital currencies, tokenised assets and blockchain, and the potential Swift could play in that world in the future.
“When I think about [the] industry – the way it’s partnering – it’s not just amongst the financial and corporate institutions, but also with the central banks,” she says.
Swift is now working with 20 central banks and more than a dozen financial institutions to experiment with digital currencies. Those experiments include standardisation for cross-border transactions, and the trade of digital assets.
“We’re also looking at what are the necessary safeguards to ensure that those kinds of networks or financial instruments are safe and secure,” adds Ms McGuire. Those safeguards include standing up to cyber-attacks, addressing operational risks, cross-border digital currency risks, financial crime, and so on.
“For me this is probably one of the most exciting things … folks talk about it being on the horizon, but it’s moving pretty quick,” she adds.
Swift launched its digital currency sandbox last year and began testing an application programming interface-based central bank digital currency connector. In addition to central banks, other participants included BNP Paribas, HSBC, NatWest, the Royal Bank of Canada, Société Générale and Standard Chartered.
Swift is now holding a second phase of sandbox testing, which includes securities settlement, trade finance and conditional payments.
“We’ve got to make sure that it’s not being created with vulnerabilities,” says Ms McGuire.
“When we think about the finality of digital transactions, the human factor cannot be underestimated in this – we have to design systems in the future that account more fully for the human factor.”
