Latest / Leaders In Payments / Leigh Amaro, Head of North America at Swift | Episode 433

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Leigh Amaro, Head of North America at Swift | Episode 433 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, leigh Amaro, who is the head of North America for Swift.
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: So Leigh, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: Thank you, so wonderful to be here too.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, absolutely.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Let's start out by having you tell a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have a really interesting background.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: My fun fact, you know, when you have a party fun fact is that I'm a citizen of of job opportunities to Vancouver, canada.
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: So I was raised in Vancouver.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: So I consider, you know, canada home and kind of of the four, the main, the main draw.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: And so I was raised there, went to high school there but kind of similar to my parents, you know, had that draw to there's maybe bigger opportunities, you know, south of the border as well.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: So ended up applying to Cornell University, which wasn't common back then, I wouldn't say a lot of Canadians kind of went to school in the US.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Luckily got in and so made the move from Vancouver, which when people think Canada they think snowy and cold.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Vancouver really isn't like that, it's more like Seattle, it's a little rainy.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: But then made the move to Ithaca, new York, which is quite chilly at times, but had a wonderful four years there and then really enjoyed my time at Cornell.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: But then after then, with your family being on the West Coast, I really was kind of missing that same time zone.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: So decided, you know, started looking for roles, decided to accept a role back in San Francisco.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: So I decided, you know, started looking for roles, decided to accept a role back in San Francisco.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: So I moved to San Francisco in 2000, which is a really interesting time to move.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: Here I mean just for a couple of fun facts, like in 2000, one of my friends worked at Google.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: Google had 200 people in the year 2000.
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: And so now of course the book's been written on that.
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: So it was really interesting to be in Silicon Valley over the last kind of 25 plus years and watch the market kind of evolve and grow and see that journey.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: So yeah, that's a bit about myself.
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: And now I spend a lot of time with our customers.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: I'm on the road a lot because I lead the North America market, which is its biggest market.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: So my job really is to manage, you know, manage the market, manage the customers.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: I would say you know other than New York, it's an airplane where I spend a lot of my time these days.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Right, Got it Well.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Thanks for sharing that.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: So I think most of our audience will know who Swift is, but maybe give us the high level overview of who Swift is and kind of where you fit in the payments market.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Swift's actually kind of fascinating.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: So Swift is a cooperative.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: We're probably one of the last standing financial services cooperatives, if not the last standing one.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: You know we all remember kind of Visa and MasterCard used to be cooperatives and then of course they went public.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: So Swift is, you know, one of those longest standing ones, from 1970 is when we were founded, and so what we do is we connect about 11,000 financial institutions across 200 countries to move messages, payments, seamlessly.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: So just a couple of kind of fun facts, because I don't think people always understand the scale of Swift and the impact of Swift is we move the world's GDP every two to three days across our platform.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: So huge volume and as an employee it's kind of cool to work at a place where you can have such a big impact on global money flows.
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: Another fun fact is, just from a scale perspective, the dollar amount is the world's GDP every two to three days, but the messaging it's 50 million messages plus a day, so just tremendous kind of financial flow.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: We're like the backbone of kind of financial services around the world, so that's really exciting.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: So the core product, of course, is messaging.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: We are a messaging platform but, like many, you know cooperatives and folks in this space.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: You want to deliver value added services that sit on top of that core messaging platform.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: So think around tools for compliance, fraud, speed and transparency.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: Where is the payment?
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: When's it going to arrive?
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: All of those are kind of core value-added solutions that you know we provide to those 11,000 financial institutions that we provide to those 11,000 financial institutions.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: Employee-wise, we're a lot smaller than people think For the impact that I just walked through.
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: We have 3,000 employees and so we punch above our weight when it comes to impact of what we're delivering in the market.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: We're headquartered in Belgium ever since the 1970s, but major offices all around the world.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: Again, we want to be where the banks are and support them in driving their business forward.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, so in the end, swift's all about, you know, securely, safely, at scale moving those messages around the world to drive the ecosystem forward.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Are you mainly sending these messages between banks, or are there also merchants involved?
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: No, it's between banks and fintechs.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: So the ecosystem is there's two kind of sides.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: It's between the payment side and the security side.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: So on the security side it's still financial institutions, but it could be, you know, brokers and then on the payment side it's traditional financial institutions.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, maybe explain your competitive landscape.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: So like, what differentiates you?
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Who do you kind of compete against?
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: A little bit about that would be awesome.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: So from a competitive perspective, we really just look at the market and the ecosystem to.
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: You know how the banks want to move money, so how we want to be there to support the banks which are our owners, because it's a cooperative and how they choose to move money.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: So banks may choose to move money on the SWIFT ecosystem.
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: They may choose to move money within their own kind of book-to-book transfers.
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: So if Citi has a branch in Hong Kong and Citi has the branch in the US, they may not need to move that through the SWIFT ecosystem, but that's fine because we want to support the cooperative and how they choose to move money.
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: So from a competition perspective, we really don't think of it that way.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: What we want to do is provide the messaging tools to the community to support how we want to move the messages that move the money in the way that they want to do so.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: So I would say less competition and more listening to the ecosystem and making sure we're providing those tools and those interoperability options to support them in their end goals.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: One example is like the blockchain right, you can start a payment on chain, move it off chain, go back to chain.
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: We still want that swift messaging layer to be there to support you on that journey.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you mentioned something I want to double click on is the value added services.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: Could you maybe walk through some examples of what that would be?
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: A great example is like sanction screening.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: So we've got tools in place where you know, as you're looking at those 50 million messages a day, swift has robust tools that can look at you know, does that hit a sanction screen?
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: Share that back with the financial institution so they can decide if they want to take action on that screening item.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: So that's probably one of the biggest ones.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: The other thing too is you know we see patterns in the data, so we'll see patterns around fraud and so we'll give advice back to the community of hey, this thing looks a little off, maybe you want to revisit before you release the funds for that transaction.
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: So a lot of that comes down to kind of the AI tools we have in building, kind of those robust AI models that we can share back with the community to drive that impact forward for their business.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: Where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next three to five years?
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: It's really exciting.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: So at Swift, it's such an exciting time to be in this space because of the speed at which payments are moving faster through this system.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: So speed and transparency is one of the biggest innovations we see.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: If you think about payments a few years ago, it was kind of a black box.
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: You would institute a payment and you did not really know when it was going to arrive at the beneficiary, so Coca-Cola would try to play a supplier, maybe get there five days, maybe three days.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: Now, with the big investments in what we call the GPI tracker and the community really invested in speed, we're now at a place where 90% of payments hit that end beneficiary within one hour.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: So speed and kind of digital first has been transformed in cross-border payments, which is super exciting.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: I think the other angle too for innovation is ISO.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: So with ISO coming in November for Swift it's already come for Fed and many other market infrastructures.
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: But with the launch of ISO in November, that data layer is just going to get richer.
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: And when you have a richer data layer you're able to do a lot more compliance screening, reducing errors, boosting automation, which will drive the community forward too.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: So post-November we're going to see a lot more innovation and once that data gets richer, all these new services can be launched to support the community and drive those missions forward.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: So that's super exciting.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: Then I think, longer term, you're going to see again this continued push for digital, whether that's tokenized assets, tokenized money, stablecoin, which is kind of the buzzword of the last couple of weeks.
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: We want to be there and support the community in how they want to move money and support our messaging infrastructure to evolve, infrastructure to evolve Again, as I was saying earlier, to move on-chain to off-chain, to back on-chain.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: We want to be that backbone to support the community on that journey.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: So I think the digital side and then, as I said, ai will be embedded everywhere for my future innovation as you get richer data and as you move to more of kind of a tokenized world.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: So it's really interesting and really exciting to see where payments are going.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you hit on all the core themes that I hear every day.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I get three or four a week pitches for people who want to come on and talk about stable coins.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, when the Genius Act passed, it was like it opened up the floodgates.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: Everybody's willing to talk about it now, so that's a big one.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: And then, of course, ai is the other one.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Right, I think companies, organizations across the world are trying to figure out how they can use AI not only internally, but with their products and with their services to other businesses.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: So definitely huge themes.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: Before we leave, talking about the company and the market, you have a big event every year that's coming up in about a month, do you?
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: want to maybe give that a plug.
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sibos is fantastic.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: So this year, sibos is in Frankfurt at the end of September.
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: It's going to be such an amazing event.
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: It's where the world comes to talk about all those core innovations where we were just mentioning.
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: So there's going to be work streams on AI, on digital assets, on kind of innovation against fraud and compliance.
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: So we're super excited.
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: I think we have record attendance from a registration perspective, so it will be great to see everyone there and go on that journey of learning together at Sibos.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: And you recently had an announcement I assume you can talk about it with Ant Financial about a digital wallet that you're integrating into everything.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: Can you kind of explain what that is?
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: So that kind of speaks to our interoperability comment.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: So the money moves in all sorts of ways, right, it's going to move into.
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: It can move into a bank account, it can move into a wallet, it can move into a mobile, it can move into, you know, a mobile phone, minute components in certain markets.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: And so what SWIFT wants to do with the community is we want to support that movement of money and how the community wants to move those funds.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: And so in this case it's really exciting.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: It's the launch of kind of plugging into Ant Financial's wallet ecosystem.
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: So if you're paying a TikTok influencer, that money could go that way instead of having this slower way of going through their bank accounts.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: So it's really kind of thinking about the new digital economy, what those receivers of funds are wanting and how they want to be paid.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: And at Swift we want to support the ecosystem of how people want to get paid, how the banks want to move those money in those new ways.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: And so that's a great example of an innovation for us and we're really proud of the partnership with Standard Charter and Ant Financial.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Great.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: So, if you don't mind, walk us through your professional journey and how you got to SWIFT.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have spent my career in payments more than two decades now in payments.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: I started my career at Visa, so on the retail side, and I've really seen the evolution.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: I think this is one of my themes is I love the evolution of digital and digitization in payments.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: So back then we even still had the knuckle busters.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: If you remember the knuckle busters like you're in a taxi and call them knuckle busters because it actually really hurt your knuckle and so think about the evolution of that on the retail side, all the way through to where we are today, where you pay with your face, you pay with your thumbprint, you paid by tapping, and so that evolution of what consumers are asking for in digital payments is now, of course, coming on the corporate side, and so for me, that was one of the really exciting things I thought about when I thought about moving to Swift is it's the next frontier of where digital is really going to lead.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: Because if you're a corporate treasurer and you have this one type of experience in this part of your life right the consumer part of your life of how you pay with you know your face and how you do online banking you're going.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: Then you move into the corporate side like, hey, I'm the CFO of this corporate, why does it?
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: operate like this?
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: Why don't I have all this, the transparency and the tools that I had on the consumer side?
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: So that's one of the really exciting things for me that drew me to Swift, because we're on the cutting edge of that and really trying to innovate Again one of those examples around GPI and the tracker for speed and transparency really innovate and give them the tools to bring that consumer experience into kind of the corporate world, and so that was one of the things that really drew me here I would lead as I said earlier, I'd lead the North America market, which is Swift's largest market around the world, and have the pleasure of kind of serving some of the most robust financial institutions out here.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: So in the North America market, you know, some of our key goals are really to drive that payment innovation forward, strengthen that connectivity, that interoperability and just really keep pace with kind of the needs of what the largest financial institutions in the world need.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: To answer this.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: I kind of have to tell like a tiny little story, so bear with me as I tell my story.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: So I'm very passionate about two core things.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: I'm super passionate about women's education and mentorship.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: And the reason why and this is the little story, is the reason why is I was very close to my great-nana, who has since passed away, but my great-nana was born in 1905 in the UK and she had to leave school at the age of 11.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: If you've seen the show Downton Abbey, she had to leave school to go and work in one of those manners as what they call a scullery maid, which is the lowest level, lowest level in the manor.
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: Her job was to empty the ashes from the fireplaces at you know odd hours of the day and what she did was she worked very hard, she took all these risks and she got all the way up to what they called ladies made, which is the highest level you can get in the house, which normally you wouldn't feed from the social economic group she had come from.
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: But she worked really hard to get there and then she got pregnant, left and then started that started her family.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: And what's interesting about that story is she would tell me so many times around like education and the most important thing is to focus on your education.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: No one can take your education away from you.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: Be curious, always be learning, take risks, raise your hand for those opportunities.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: And so that was one of the things that's kind of always grounded me is those messages and the opportunities she did not have, that I've had, as in my life, the privilege I've had in my life to be able to go to college, have a great education, is to really pay that forward in the community.
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: So really support, you know, girls in technology programs, middle school programs.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: I mentor, I speak at a lot of middle schools and high schools around encouraging women to go into tech, staying in tech, and then, specifically at Swift, you know, growing that mentorship community.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: Because you need a village, right, you need a village to grow.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: And so one of the key things that Swift does a great job of actually on these two points of education and mentorship, is they have really robust continuing education opportunities.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: So don't just stop learning once you get your job.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: Take advantage.
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: We were just talking about AI, right, take advantage of any course you can to continue learning and growing.
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: Then the second thing that they do a great job, of which I lead for the North America market, is the women's leadership group, so our business resource group, where we've got robust mentoring in place, a lot of opportunities to share from each other.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: Grow, you know, take those risks, get that coaching.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: So those are that's kind of the second bucket, I would say.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: So women's education and mentorship are really important to me.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, do you feel like those are personal and business kind of intertwined?
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: As far as passions go, yeah, I would.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: I would say there I blend my lives.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: So I would say what I have at home with you know what I do on my, with supporting my daughter, supporting my son in this next generation kind of comes also into the workforce.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: So I think it, I think it overlaps.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: For me, for sure, it's a deep passion.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Well, we just had the Women Leaders in Payments month, which is July every year, so we just had that and we talked a lot about more on the mentorship side than the education side, but we spent a lot of time with at 14 different guests on.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: We'll definitely need to have you on next year.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: Would love to already get that on the books, because I think it would be great to hear your stories about what you've done in that area, obviously, since it's a passion of yours stories about what you've done in that area, obviously, since it's a passion of yours.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Well, one final question before we wrap up.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: If someone comes to you maybe they're right out of college, maybe they're changing careers and they want to get into payments.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: As someone that's been in payments 20 years or more, what would you tell them they need to do to be successful in this industry?
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's such a good question.
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: So I would say in general, my overall advice for payments or just whatever field you want to go into is really like trust yourself more and don't wait for permission.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: We all have imposter syndrome.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: I'm not ready, I don't have the answers, I can't do that role or project.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: I can't do that project.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: And my advice for everyone in payments and across industries is continue that deep learning and bet on yourself.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: Bet on yourself, raise your hand, take those risks, and that will really kind of drive you forward.
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: Early in my career I was really hesitant to do that.
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: I would be hesitant to speak up, go for opportunities, because I felt that I just needed more experience.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: Lee, you just need to crack these two more things before you raise your hand for that project or that new role.
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: And then, looking back, you realize, like no one has it figured out, no one's got all the answers.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: So what you really need to do is just raise your hand, jump in, leverage your community of your support, your tribe, and really go for it.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Because, like, the sooner you believe in yourself, the sooner others will too.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: I think that's great advice and a great way to wrap up the show.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: So, before we go, is there anything else you'd like to cover?
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Any final comments or thoughts?
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: No, just.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me and for doing this amazing podcast.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: I think it's great to hear.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: I've watched a number of your interviews.
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: It's so great to hear from all the various leaders across different industries and institutions, so thank you for keeping this going.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: I think it's a great treat for all of us to have access to.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: Oh, great, well, I really appreciate that.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: Well, lee, thank you so much for your time.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: I know it's very valuable.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: So again, thank you for being here today.
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: My pleasure, thank you.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: And to all your listeners out there.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story next story.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 21:47
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