The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Fabian Vandenreydt, SWIFT

SWIFT, the Belgium-based operator of the messaging network that facilitates most of the world’s cross-border interbank transactions, set out to promote technological innovation in-house and among its thousands of members by launching the Innotribe program in 2009. Back then “fintech didn’t really exist,” recallsFabian Vandenreydt, who has headed Innotribe since 2013, when its founder, Kosta Peric, left to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (seeRodger Voorhies, No. 20). Today few organizations bring more attention to fintech than Innotribe does; certainly, none has the 200-country reach of the 42-year-old SWIFT cooperative or runs a competition on the scale of the Innotribe Startup Challenge. This year that program attracted more than 370 applications, held demo days on four continents and in October awarded its $50,000 top prize to Hyperledger, a venture acquired in June by New York–based blockchain technology company Digital Asset Holdings. “I don’t believe that new ideas will wipe out everything in one day,” says Vandenreydt, 50. “The new and the old need to coexist.” Integrating the two “is where we can make a difference.” Vandenreydt, who worked at posttrade infrastructure Euroclear and consulting firm Capco before joining SWIFT in 2004, wears two other hats: He’s head of both SWIFT’s markets management and the three-year-old SWIFT Institute, which has sponsored academic research on such topics as mobile money, cybercrime costs and women in finance. “At one point we’ll reach a peak in the number of fintech start-ups,” Vandenreydt says. “You don’t need to have 150 start-ups in distributed ledger technology.” He expects fintech entrepreneurs to flourish in areas that contribute to better data analysis and operational efficiency, including pattern recognition, identity management and digitization of the securities value chain.