EXCLUSIVE: “Keeping The Rubber on Track” – Nick Kerigan, Swift in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Swift will screech around two significant technology corners this year – one based on existing rails, the other on what could replace them

When asked which companies sit front-of-the-pack in global FX innovation, Swift may not immediately spring to mind. While crypto and AI muscle in on the headlines, the 53-year-old financial telecommunication cooperative continues to motor along, moving the equivalent of global GDP across a network of 11,500 institutions every two or three days, all achieved with a 99.99 per cent availability rate.

As cutting-edge new breakthroughs beckon in Swift’s future, though, the engine of cross-border payments is about to show off who really sets the pace in global payments. More than 50 banks from around the world are supporting Swift’s retail payments scheme, and more than 25 banks have committed to processing payments under the framework by June 2026. Early beneficiaries include consumers and small businesses in five of the world’s largest remittance markets – Bangladesh, China, Germany, India and Pakistan – as well as Australia, Canada, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the US, and more payment routes are expected to be active by the end of the year.

Among the banks to have signed up are JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BBVA, Citi, NatWest and Bank of China. It’s reflective of how major this innovation will be. The framework delivers something cross-border retail customers have been asking for since the dial-up era: full-value delivery, upfront transparency on fees and FX, end-to-end traceability, and instant settlement wherever domestic rails allow.

As Nasir Ahmed, Swift’s Head of Payments Scheme, put it in March: “The financial community has made strong collective progress to improve the speed and transparency of cross-border payments, but there is room to go further. Everyone should be able to transact internationally at pace, safe in the knowledge that the full value will arrive with the recipient and that the fees will be affordable and fixed from the start.”

The retail payments framework also answers the G20’s long-running challenge to the global payments community to make cross-border transactions faster, cheaper and more transparent. Five of the 11 Swift launch corridors sit inside the world’s top 10 remittance markets, the routes where ordinary people sending money home feel the cost of friction most acutely.

“In this new world, it’s vital that we continue to upgrade the existing systems and the existing experience, because those systems are going to be with us for many years to come” says Nick Kerigan, Managing Director and Head of Innovation at Swift. “In parallel, we’re also looking to the future and thinking about how we can bring the capabilities of new technology and the acceleration of trends like tokenisation to continue to uplift that payments experience.”

That is evident in Swift’s twin-track strategy in 2026. The retail payments scheme is in one lane; in the other is a blockchain-based shared ledger, developed with more than 40 financial institutions in partnership with Consensys and built on Hyperledger Besu, an open-source, Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible foundation.

“We recently announced a blockchain- based ledger will be implemented on top of the Swift network,” Kerigan explains. “We’re now moving into the MVP phase of that initiative. That ledger is built with interoperability at its core.”

The MVP is scheduled to go live with real-world transactions this year, focussed initially on 24/7 cross-border payments using tokenised commercial bank deposits. Running both lanes simultaneously is no small feat.

“If you watch Formula One, the drivers are trying to go around the corner as fast as possible, but still stay on the track,” says Kerigan. “There’s a similarity to what happens in payments, because we want the payment to happen as fast as possible to give the best possible experience to the customer. Equally, that needs to include those payments always being delivered, being done securely and being done in compliance.”

Migration to the ISO 20022 messaging standard, the common language of modern payments, is now functionally complete, with 97 per cent of instructions over the Swift network carrying the kind of rich, structured data that previously lurked in spreadsheets buried deep in email threads. It is on that foundation that Kerigan builds his case for digital trust in an increasingly tokenised world.

“Seventy-five per cent of cross-border payments reach the beneficiary bank within 10 minutes, but 80 per cent of the transaction time is in that last mile”

“Trust has to be earned, and that trust is built up over time,” he says. “At Swift, we’ve been earning that trust for more than 50 years.”

It resides, he says, in resilience, in the institutions running the infrastructure, in the standards underpinning it, and, increasingly, in the verifiable properties of new technology layered on top. The strategic prize is connectivity rather than speed alone.

“Secure connectivity as the world’s largest financial messaging provider is what we’re about,” says Kerigan. “As new technologies emerge and all of this really exciting innovation, we want to ensure that the world is more connected, and it doesn’t become fragmented, because there are real costs of fragmentation.”

Lee McNabb, Head of Group Payment and Digital Asset Strategy at NatWest, one of the banks participating in the MVP, has said Swift’s ledger ‘provides the infrastructure needed for trusted, real-time, cross-border payments alongside existing ways of moving money’.

Meanwhile, Martin Tricaud, Group Head of Wholesale Banking at First Abu Dhabi Bank, called it ‘a defining moment for the future of global payments’.

The ABC of CBDCs

The shape of the broader landscape explains the urgency. According to the Atlantic Council’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Tracker, 146 countries and currency unions, representing more than 98 per cent of global GDP, are now exploring a CBDC. Three – the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria – have fully launched a retail digital currency, and 77 are in the advanced phase of exploration: development, pilot or launch.

Stablecoins, meanwhile, have reached a transaction volume of $34trillion in 2025, according to Visa Onchain Analytics, though World Economic Forum analysis notes that the majority of that volume reflects digital- asset trading rather than real- economy payments. Without an interoperability layer, that many- faceted tokenised landscape risks producing ‘digital islands’ that don’t speak to each other, stretching the pack out so thin that they can no longer interact.

“We’ve long been advocating that you need to build in interoperability at the start of a design,” says Kerigan. “What we’ve really learned together with the community is that you need trusted parties to ensure that interoperability happens, because you don’t want something to fall between the cracks.”

That is the role Swift is positioning itself to play in a tokenised world: the trusted layer to which every other rail connects. It also reframes the most stubborn problem in cross-border payments: the last mile.

“Seventy-five per cent of cross-border payments reach the beneficiary bank within 10 minutes,” Kerigan says, “but 80 per cent of the transaction time is in that last mile. That’s often determined by local market practices, like operating hours, or need for FX conversion, or local market expectations around, for example, whether the beneficiary needs to know that a payment is arriving.”

These are not problems a faster messaging layer can solve in isolation. They have to be unpicked, corridor by corridor, with local financial communities, which is exactly what the retail payments scheme is designed to do.

Ultimately, says Kerigan: “It means full value transfer. If I send you $100, you get $100.”

While currently real-world settlement and B2B payments in stablecoins account for just around 0.4-0.5 per cent of global GDP, or $300-$550billion annually, according to Boston Consulting Group and Allium Labs, Kerigan says: “I tend to subscribe to the Bill Gates quote, which is that things will take usually longer than you expect and have a bigger impact than you expect.”

He has seen that pattern up close. “I was involved in the transition towards contactless payments in the UK. That took 10 years to come to fruition. But when people adopted it, there was a really sudden shift. Suddenly, contactless became the way you paid in store.”

Apply that thinking to 2026. The headline figures may not move as dramatically as the press releases suggest, but the infrastructure being put in place will define what the next decade of cross-border finance looks like. The metrics, Kerigan reckons, won’t change much:

“Speed, transparency and cost will still be really important. We’re laser-focussed on those for cross-border payments. So is the financial community. And it’s also really important to policy makers.”

But what will change is the substrate underneath them.

“There are many really great things about the existing payment system,” he says. “And there are also many exciting new technologies. We’ll be taking those two together to work with the community to create the financial infrastructure of the future.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 40-41