Swift executive lashes out at Ripple

“Surviving lawsuits is not resilience. Shared and neutral governance is. Institutions don’t want to operate on a competitor’s infrastructure.” With that ruling, Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer of the Swift payment network, criticized Ripple and its governance model.

In a LinkedIn post on Aug. 28, Zschach responded to a comment praising Ripple and its cryptocurrency, XRP, as an example of resilience after nearly five years of regulatory litigation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

According to the person who advocated on behalf of Ripple, this company would have demonstrated “resilience like no other” in the face of legal challenges, while highlighting its joint work with regulators in different jurisdictions to promote innovation in cross-border payments.

The Swift executive not only relativized this vision, but also stressed the importance of the global financial system being organized on “shared standards that do not depend on the balance sheet of a single company”

According to Zschach, regulatory compliance should not be conditioned by the persuasion of an individual actor towards regulators, but by consensus across the industry.

Public chains and their place in finance

Zschach’s statements came as part of a broader analysis of public cryptocurrency networks.

The executive acknowledged that “public and open blockchains have become too big for finance to ignore.” Among its possible applications, he highlighted tokenized Treasury bonds, on-chain collateral, and international payments with effective settlement.

However, he warned that it is often a mistake to assume that “the public broadcaster itself is the solution.” In his words: “It is not. It is raw execution: deterministic code, global scale, availability, and programmable rails. Very powerful, yes. But with no legal enforceability, regulatory compliance, and privacy, it is just a fast engine without a cockpit.”

Zschach’s critique points to a fundamental debate in the ecosystem: the tension between projects such as Ripple, which promote private and centralized payment solutions on cryptocurrency networks, versus proposals based on public networks, which offer openness and decentralization, but lack clear governance and defined regulatory frameworks.

Ripple has designed its native network, the XRP Ledger (XRPL), so that this technology can transform international payments by using XRP as a bridge between fiat currencies.

However, her confrontation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accused her of selling unregistered securities, marked a long judicial process that, although it seems to be coming to an end, still generates uncertainty about her business model.

Zschach’s vision promotes open protocols and global standards, but always within frameworks of collective governance and strict legal compliance.

The counterpoint with Ripple reveals that, beyond technical advances, the future of digital finance will depend, among other things, on figuring out how to balance innovation, regulation, and governance.