Swift has hired Alisa DiCaprio as head of industry engagement for the Americas within its newly created corporate office, based in Washington, D.C.

DiCaprio, who leaves her post at R3, joined late last year and reports to Swift’s chief corporate officer Rosemary Stone.

She is tasked with holding policy dialogues with central banks and international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Her responsibilities also include the production of collaborative research on digitisation and digital technologies and to promote the use of digital public infrastructure within the financial sector.

The hire follows a rejig of Swift’s governance structure last year, as part of which it created a corporate office.

DiCaprio leaves her post as chief economist at distributed ledger technology R3, a role she took on three years ago.

She first joined R3 in 2017 as head of research, before becoming head of trade finance. Prior to this, she was a senior economist at the Asian Development Bank, where she ran a number of large-scale digitisation projects in emerging markets and developed the now-standard calculation of the global trade finance gap.

She has also undertaken research on fintech, governance and trade for the United Nations, the US Department of Commerce and various academic institutions.

“I’d always intended to return to the cross-border space after working in the private sector. If technology is going to actually change the economy, we need the private sector to invent it and the international organisations to scale it,” DiCaprio tells GTR.

“Swift is key to building the digital financial infrastructure that is needed for new instruments to scale globally.”

Trade finance will be one focus area for DiCaprio, she says. “Swift has entire teams devoted to working on trade finance messaging, structure and process. I’m working closely with the excellent people leading those teams, since digitisation is such an important – and thankless – part of international trade and trade finance.”