Former Swift CIO Tom Zschach: Swift Ledger live, banks already settling with own deposit tokens

What the Swift Ledger does and doesn't do

Tom Zschach, the former Chief Innovation Officer at Swift, told the host that confusion persists about what the Swift Ledger actually is. He said Swift is a network built on top of which the correspondent banking business model runs, connecting "200 countries" and, per Swift's Javier, "40,000 plus corridors." The ledger, announced a year earlier in Frankfurt alongside a separate payment scheme program, gives banks another option for cross-border payments rather than replacing existing rails.

Zschach was explicit about the limits of the system:

"It doesn't do settlement... That's not a custodian... Swift is not going to issue tokens. That's not what they do."

Instead, he said, the ledger "orchestrates transactions between two different members and implements a settlement workflow with a tokenized asset regardless of where you want to settle it." He gave an illustrative example where one bank sends a stablecoin and another a tokenized deposit, with settlement potentially happening off-ledger at a central bank like the Federal Reserve or Bank of England, or on a chain such as Ethereum or Solana — Swift itself does not choose, he said; that decision belongs to the members transacting.

He pointed to the first live workflow as evidence of momentum: banks paying each other cross-border using their own deposit tokens, which he said rolled out "just recently" following the Frankfurt announcement. Zschach called the turnaround from announcement to live results "an amazing delivery" for an infrastructure as large as Swift, saying it was done with "no cut corners... no smoking mirrors."

Partnerships, convergence, and what's next

Asked about the broader shift, Zschach agreed with a comment he said Swift's head made on stage, that this is no longer about "trading both sides of the spectrum." He argued that TradFi and DeFi are simply converging into "just finance," comparing it to how stablecoins are no longer labeled "crypto" once mainstream. He said Swift remains deliberately neutral, working with partners across wallet providers, settlement chains, and other ecosystem players rather than "picking winners and losers," because no single institution has the resources to build everything itself.

On where the ledger could expand, Zschach said he is not responsible for Swift's strategy but would not be surprised to see it "step into other asset classes," since "you need to have money as the foundation for everything else that's going to be settled." He did not give a timeline for that expansion, leaving it as speculation about Swift's roadmap.

Pressed on rumors of upcoming news tied to his own post-Swift work, Zschach confirmed:

"Some of those rumors are true. We are going to be making some big announcements about a month from now at Money 2020."

He described gathering momentum from development partners, investors, and "the ecosystem forming," but gave no specifics on what the announcements would cover.