Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer at SWIFT, took a swipe at Ripple in a recent social media post.
Zschach has opined that surviving lawsuits does not actually qualify as resilience while touting neutral governance.
"Surviving lawsuits isn’t resilience. Neutral, shared governance is. Institutions don’t want to live on a competitor’s rails," he said.
What neutral governance means
Neutral governance implies that no single company or competitor actually controls the rails.
SWIFT, as a global messaging company, is not controlled by a single company. It is jointly controlled by thousands of banks that are in charge of setting the rules and governance standards.
Zschach implies that banks tend to trust only neutral infrastructure like SWIFT.
Even though Ripple argues that the XRP Ledger is fully decentralized, there have been some concerns about the company's outsized control over the network.
Compliance is more than working with regulators
Moreover, Zschach insists that compliance is more than getting along with regulators and convincing them that you should be allowed to operate.
The SWIFT executive argues that compliance is actually about ensuring that an entire industry is actually capable of agreeing on shared standards.
Absorbing the best of public chains
In his lengthy LinkedIn post, Zschach, who is also former managing director at Barclays Capital, argues that public chains themselves are not the solution.
He claims that a pubic chain is just "a fast engine with no cockpit" if there is no enforceability, privacy, and compliance.
Zschach is convinced that traditional finance will be able to "absorb" the best of public blockchains on its own terms.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team