DAVID SCHWARTZ EVAN SCHWARTZ SERIES

In 1990 he received a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Houston. In high school he was the prototypical nerd: Sports weren’t his thing, but chess was. As a precocious preschooler in suburban Long Island in the 1970s, he began programming his father’s Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard calculators, mostly to create pictures on their tape readouts. “The endgame is just money moving invisibly, as easily as information.”Ĭhwartz’s background mirrors that of many of today’s technologists.

But one where the settlement, the actual movement of money, the actual plumbing underneath the surface, would be a decentralized, open network,” Schwartz says. “We want to create a payment network like SWIFT. In an era when secure emails are transmitted instantly and the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains move millions in minutes, most international money transfers take at least three days to settle, with fees that are opaque and varied. However the SWIFT network is far from efficient.

SWIFT handles approximately 25 million such messages per day, and the result is an estimated $6.74 trillion in transfers.

DAVID SCHWARTZ EVAN SCHWARTZ SERIES

The process involves regulatory oversight, compliance checks and other layers of protection, and is facilitated via a complex series of service agreements. Ultimately this results in foreign currency exchanges and a transfer of funds, often via numerous correspondent member banks. Chase sends a secure message via SWIFT’s vast network to the receiving bank in Bolivia. Let’s say you want to transfer $5,000 from your account at JPMorgan Chase to your cousin in La Paz, Bolivia. In short, Schwartz wants to disrupt SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a Belgian cooperative organization founded in 1973 that counts more than 10,000 financial institutions as its members and is the ultimate middleman in banking. New CTO David Schwartz at Ripple’s San Francisco headquarters in June.

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