Martin Goldwyn, CFO of Swift Cargo and industry veteran, reflects on finance, trust, and why logistics must catch up with the digital world.
A finance role rooted in day to day reality
Martin Goldwyn does not speak about spreadsheets the way many finance leaders do. In his telling, the numbers are not a separate universe, but the clearest record of what customers and teams experience in real time. Goldwyn is the chief financial officer of Swift Cargo Solutions, a company that operates across relocation and logistics in multiple regions. When we met at the firm’s headquarters, he framed his job in plain, practical terms. The CFO, he said, is there to protect stability while helping the business stay honest about where it is succeeding and where it is falling behind.
“You are not just protecting the balance sheet,” he told me. “You are protecting trust. In logistics, trust is the real asset. The money just follows it.”
That idea, trust first and finance second, runs through the way he describes decision making. Pricing, investment, cash planning, and risk controls all matter, but only insofar as they keep promises intact. A relocation business touches intimate moments in people’s lives, the move to a new country, a new job, a new home. Freight logistics carries the weight of supply chains that keep companies running and shelves stocked. Goldwyn sees finance as a guardian of those commitments.
Entering a sector that carries its age
Goldwyn joined Swift Cargo Solutions more than ten years ago after working in manufacturing, retail supply chains, and transportation. He arrived expecting a familiar playbook. He understood freight economics, tight margins, and the constant need to manage volatility through careful forecasting. What surprised him was not the complexity of logistics, but how much of it still relied on habits built in another era.
“Relocation and logistics are very old industries,” he said. “People have moved goods since the beginning of trade. Because it has always worked in some form, it became slow to question itself.”
He was quick to clarify that age is not automatically a weakness. The industry has a deep store of practical know-how, built from decades of managing weather, borders, capacity swings, and human error. But age can also harden routines into rules, even when the world around them has changed. Goldwyn believes logistics has been shaped so heavily by physical constraints that it never developed the reflex to rethink its information systems.
“The world outside evolved quickly,” he said. “Everything you use daily became digital. Banking, retail, travel, even healthcare. But logistics, especially relocation logistics, stayed closer to paper, phone calls, disconnected tools. It is like time moved on without us.”
The mismatch between customer expectations and industry reality
Goldwyn’s critique is not abstract. He grounds it in the customer’s point of view. In relocation, families often wait weeks for their belongings, sometimes without clear visibility of where a shipment is or what delay might be coming next. In corporate moves, an employee may be halfway through a new assignment while their household goods lag behind. The anxiety this creates is part of the service itself, whether companies acknowledge it or not.
“Customers used to tolerate a lack of visibility because everyone had it,” he said. “Now they compare us to every digital experience they have. They want clarity. They have a right to it.”
He argues that the industry’s slow digital adoption did not matter as much when customers had few alternatives. Today, almost every part of life comes with tracking, instant updates, and self service dashboards. Logistics is being judged against that baseline, not against its own history. The old norms, like waiting days for documentation, or relying on manual confirmation from multiple points in the chain, now feel like failures rather than quirks.
How his own view of digital change has evolved
Goldwyn admits his perspective on digital transformation has shifted over time. Early in his tenure, he supported technology upgrades mainly for efficiency. Better systems meant fewer errors, lower overhead, and stronger reporting. Those were compelling reasons for a CFO, and they still are. But years of seeing how uncertainty affects customers changed the center of gravity for him.
“I moved from thinking digital was about saving money to understanding it was about saving people from anxiety,” he said. “It is service quality, not a side project.”
This is the point where his language becomes notably human for a finance executive. He described digital tools as a way of reducing the emotional cost of relocation. If a person can open an app and see a shipment at each stage, with clear timelines and early warning on risks, the move becomes manageable. Without that visibility, every delay feels personal and unpredictable.
He sees the same logic in business logistics. When companies lack real time clarity on inbound goods, they hold extra inventory, build buffer time into projects, and accept waste as normal. Better transparency reduces that need for costly caution.
Building a nervous system for a global operation
Goldwyn’s turning point came during a period of international expansion. Swift Cargo Solutions was entering new routes and partnerships, and the company was still operating with a patchwork of legacy systems inherited across regions. The operation worked, but not cleanly. For finance, that fragmentation quickly became a strategic blind spot.
“Data would arrive late. Forecasts relied on partial pictures,” he said. “If I see my numbers a week after the event, I am not leading. I am reacting.”
The company began investing time in optimising their processes and listening to the demand. This meant renewing their accounting methods and widening their payments options. Goldwyn described it not as an IT upgrade but as giving the organisation a nervous system. Cargo is physical and slow, he noted, but information should move instantly.
“Ships still move on oceans. Trucks still move on roads,” he said. “But information should not move that way. Information should be immediate.”
He is careful not to present this as a finished story. Digitalisation in logistics is a balancing act between physical constraints and modern expectations. The value lies in steadily reducing friction and shortening the distance between what happens on the ground and what leadership can see.
Why logistics has lagged behind
Goldwyn outlined two reasons he thinks logistics has been slower than other industries to modernise. The first is structural. Logistics is deeply distributed. A single shipment can pass through ports, carriers, warehouses, inspection agencies, and customs authorities. Even a company that modernises internally must still operate inside an ecosystem that may not be digitised.
“We can evolve,” he said, “but if the industry around us does not, the customer still feels the gap.”
The second reason is cultural. Logistics has traditionally rewarded people who can manage chaos through experience and improvisation. That skill is essential, but it can also become a comfort zone. When systems are unclear, people become the system. They make calls, remember exceptions, and solve problems through personal networks. Digital tools can feel disruptive because they ask people to trust processes rather than instincts.
“There is pride in being the person who knows how to fix everything,” he said. “But the goal is not to remove people. The goal is to remove unnecessary uncertainty so people can do higher level work.”
Martin Goldwyn, Swift Cargo
The financial case for change
From the finance seat, Goldwyn sees a steady rise in the cost of staying old fashioned. Some of it shows as operational waste, duplicated work, manual reconciliations, preventable errors. Some of it is more strategic, like missed revenue opportunities or slow responses to market shifts.
Faster, cleaner data supports better pricing decisions. Real time visibility improves forecasting and therefore investment planning. Integrated systems reduce risk because anomalies appear early rather than after damage is done. In an industry known for thin margins and high volatility, these advantages are not marginal. They are protective.
“Digital maturity makes companies shock proof,” he said. “You cannot stop disruptions. You can only respond faster and with more accuracy.”
His point is that transformation is no longer optional in a competitive sense. It is becoming a baseline requirement for any company that wants to remain stable through volatility, whether the volatility comes from fuel costs, geopolitical shifts, port congestion, or sudden demand spikes.
A CFO closer to operations than stereotypes allow
Goldwyn is aware that many people have a narrow view of the CFO role. He rejects that distance. For him, finance is a bridge between operations and strategy. A CFO who does not understand how shipments move, how warehouses function, or where friction appears in customer journeys will make decisions that look strong on paper and fail in practice.
“A CFO should be the clearest mirror of the business,” he said. “If I do not understand what teams face on the ground, I will not understand what the numbers mean.”
This operational intimacy is also why he sees digitalisation as part of finance leadership rather than a separate department’s project. He believes finance should help define what information the business needs, how quickly it needs it, and how to interpret it in a way that improves service. That is how finance becomes a driver of better outcomes, not just a recorder of past performance.
The industry is turning, even if slowly
Asked what he wishes the wider public understood about logistics, Goldwyn smiled. People notice logistics only when it fails, he said, when a shipment is late, when shelves are empty, when a relocation turns painful. Most of the time, the system remains invisible, and invisibility slows pressure for improvement.
Yet he remains optimistic. He sees a shift underway, driven by customers, regulators, and a new generation of professionals who expect modern tools. Traceability standards are rising. Partners want tighter coordination. Customers demand visibility as a default, not a premium feature.
“The tide is turning,” he said. “Slowly, but it is turning.”
Trust, again, as the true business model
Before we ended, I asked what keeps him motivated in a sector he describes as stubbornly traditional. He returned to the human side of the work.
“People trust us with their lives in boxes,” he said. “Homes, memories, businesses. We owe them an industry that belongs to this era. If the world has evolved, logistics should evolve with it. Not because it is fashionable, but because it is right.”
Outside his office, the physical choreography of logistics carried on. Forklifts moved quietly, containers stood in clean rows, schedules advanced according to the realities of distance and time. It looked timeless. But Goldwyn’s argument is that what happens behind that choreography, the flow of information, the transparency offered to customers, and the speed of decision making, can no longer remain stuck in another century.
In his view, digital penetration is not a trend to keep up with, but the long delayed correction of an industry that has accepted too much opacity for too long. And for a company like Swift Cargo Solutions, the path forward is clear. Make the old industry speak the language of the present, so that trust is not just earned at the finish line, but protected at every step in between.