Addressing recent moves to impose international sanctions on Iran, SWIFT's CEO Lazaro Campos said that “the moment the wording is clear” on the European Union legislation now being drafted, the secure global financial messaging network will cut off that country's central bank and other financial institutions. “We will disconnect and not wait for the approvals,” Campos told the 400 attendees at the annual SWIFT Operations Forum Americas held this week in New York City.

“No one wants to be in the middle of a political discussion,” Campos acknowledged to the session moderator, NPR's David Brancaccio. “We want to work with every community,” Campos said. The Belgium-based messaging network that is integral in enabling financial institutions to move vast amounts of money around the world was named recently in legislation both in Europe and the U.S. “The U.S and Europe are not that far apart. They want the same outcome,” Campos said.

Moving on to other topics, Campos spoke about how the cooperative has changed since 2007, “We were in denial,” he said of the financial industry's immediate post-financial crisis state. Now the operative word is “transformation, and in that transformation we really do not know where we are heading, so we need to be prepared for a world that is changing every day.”