Swift has appointed former McKinsey partner Thomas Delaet as chief product officer, tasking him with leading the cooperative’s product group and accelerating delivery of services aimed at “instant and frictionless” cross-border finance.
“Thomas’s leadership and broad expertise … is a strong addition to Swift,” said chief executive Javier Pérez-Tasso. Delaet added that he was “excited to be joining Swift at such a pivotal moment” to deliver “meaningful innovation” with customers.
Delaet succeeds Jérôme Piens, who moved into the newly announced role of chief operations officer in August 2025 after two years as CPO. Piens led delivery of Swift’s Transaction Manager and steered the ISO 20022 migration during his product tenure, experience he now brings to core operations focused on resilience and customer experience.
Based in Brussels, Delaet spent 14 years at McKinsey working with banks and market infrastructures on technology transformation, including DevOps adoption, cloud migration, and architecture modernisation for mission-critical platforms.
He led the firm’s global DevOps work and contributed to research and guidance on developer productivity and cloud-ready operating models.
Timing of the essence
His appointment comes as Swift enters a decisive stretch for its multi-year strategy.
The ISO 20022 coexistence period ends on November 22, a milestone reconfirmed by the Swift board, with Transaction Manager central to orchestrating richer-data payments through the transition.
Swift is also running live digital-asset and digital-currency transaction trials with banks across regions in 2025, and has begun rolling out AI-enhanced fraud detection services to strengthen cross-border payment security.
Pérez-Tasso recently told shareholders that 2024 saw the fastest network traffic growth in 15 years, underscoring the momentum behind Swift’s product agenda which Delaet will now lead.
