Swift Names Mastercard Vet Stephen Grainger as Americas/UK Chief

Swift has appointed Mastercard veteran Stephen Grainger to oversee operations in the Americas and U.K.

Grainger had worked for Swift in senior business development roles, the financial transactions facilitator said in a news release sent to PYMNTS Tuesday (Jan. 3). His LinkedIn profile shows Grainger at the organization from June 2015 to September 2018.

His most recent position was as executive vice president at Mastercard, leading the development and commercialization of the company’s cross-border services business.

In his new chief executive role at Swift, Grainger “will drive the region’s overarching direction and growth, focusing his efforts on further developing strategic customer relationships,” the release said.

He will also help customers “transform the cross-border payment experience for their end clients, and work with securities players to improve the efficiency of post-trade processing.”

In addition to his time at Mastercard, Grainger has also served in roles at Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the release said.

Grainger’s appointment comes nearly three weeks after Swift’s announcement that Yawar Shah, the chair of its board, was retiring after 16 years.

Deputy Chair Mark Buitenhek will handle the chair’s activities until the board elects a new leader in the coming months, Swift said last month.

Based in Belgium, Swift (formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has been synonymous with cross-border payments since its founding fifty years ago, PYMNTS wrote in October in a profile of the organization.

Today, Swift serves as the primary interbank messaging service for financial institutions around the world and works with 11,000 member global institutions, while facilitating $150 trillion in transactions each year.

“All of this has been happening at a time when Swift — and the entire cross-border payments industry — has been making a steady stream of steps to keep pace with an increasingly digital world that caters to globally-minded consumers and businesses that demand cheaper and faster service,” PYMNTS wrote.

In November, Swift announced that sign-ups for its cross-border payments service Swift Go have tripled since its 2021 debut, with the tool being used by more than 500 banks in over 120 countries.

As PYMNTS has written, the service was created to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) move money across borders. The service caters to SMBs and individual person-to-person senders, as these are more likely to face surprise fees and lack the power of larger players to negotiate a discount on cross-border payment fees.