Swaminathan is the Founder & CEO of IRIS Business Services Limited, a global fintech company. In recent times, IRIS has emerged as the preferred partner of regulators in the MENA region looking to modernize their filing platforms through which they receive submissions from listed companies and others. Today, one or more of the company’s products are used in some 24 countries across the world from Singapore to the USA, not to mention Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the MENA region.  

Swami is a Yale trained economist who served at the World Bank in Washington DC before returning to India to pursue a career as a journalist before turning entrepreneur.

As a journalist he has worked in print, television and online. He helped put together the first ever show on Indian business on the BBC called the India Business Report, a program which continues to this day, 25 years after Swami helped conceive it. He has worked in senior positions with The Economic Times, India’s leading financial newspaper and later with Business India, the then premier business magazine.

Swami is a data wonk. It was he who spotted the emergence of Facebook as an important factor that would influence the outcome of the elections to the Indian Parliament in 2014, long before anybody had even imagined that social media could influence election outcomes. In his research which received global attention and which he published in 2013, more than a year before the elections, he even identified the parliamentary constituencies where he felt Facebook could be used as an effective medium to influence the outcome.

Swami is a huge advocate for the effective use of data to make a better world, whether it comes to investing or governance. He has led IRIS to emerge on the world stage as the leading company in the area of structured data generally and XBRL specifically.  

A marathoner, Swami describes himself as the slowest marathoner in the world. While he rehabilitates from running injuries, he is a standup comic who gets invited from time to time to give humorous talks on running.