Chief Information Security Officer, CIB and HCIB

Swati Lay is the CIB and HCIB CISO, where she is responsible for supporting colleagues in the Commercial Banking and Markets businesses as well as covering the Europe and Americas markets.

Based in London, UK, Swati leads a team of 50+ staff supporting the business within CIB and EU.

Swati brings over 28 years of experience in information security, infrastructure and software development across the banking, gaming and FinTech sectors.  She joined HSBC in 2023 and headed up Enablement for Infrastructure, including Risk and Controls, Operational Resilience and Regional Infrastructure prior to taking on the CIB CISO role in 4Q2025.

Swati started her career at Merrill Lynch, where she spent 12 years building security functions for the first time at the bank including incident response, threat management and forensics as well as managing Security Architecture and Technology Risk and Controls. At Barclays, Swati was the Information Security Officer for Commercial Banking, Payments and Wealth. Then she joined Betfair, a UK listed gaming and gambling firm as Group CISO, facing off to gaming regulators and launching the first Multi Factor Authentication offering in gaming for customers. Swati moved into FinTech to build the security controls as CISO at Funding Circle and then took on the top tech role at the company as its CTO, reporting to the CEO and responsible for launching innovative products in the small business lending space including a 6 second offer decision process – the fastest in the industry.

Swati attended Princeton University, where she studied Electrical Engineering and Operations Management.