Another successful Sibos for Team Celent (Chris Williams, Colin Kerr, Ian Watson, Patty Hines, and myself) with 100+ meetings, 1 new report released, 2 panels sessions, 5 videos, 250,000+ collective steps, countless new nuggets and insights and one lost voice! The event itself saw Frankfurt host 12,500 people from 165 countries, and almost to prove the diversity, I saw stands for banks that I’ve never heard of.
We’ll do a deeper dive for any clients who wish, but here are some high level takeaways.
The Usual Suspects?
Every Sibos is marked with discussions around the latest buzzword or trend. While certainly true again, it could be argued that there were some returning themes. Stablecoins and AI are certainly not new topics but were present in almost every conversation. And occasionally if felt even when there was no reason to do so!
Not soon but now, though not quite sure what
That said, it felt different this year. Rather than the usual pragmatic view (and occasional mild scepticism), the sense was that the majority of people felt something was going to happen, and rapidly. Surprisingly, at the same time, there was far less clarity as to quite what and where. Everyone was also clear though that they many things would be multipliers of impact, not additive – imagine a giant Venn diagram.
Rapid change is sometimes outpacing collective understanding
While AI & Stablecoins were part of almost every conversation, what they referred to varied, and often because they were being used in broadbrush ways, or in a few instances, because of a lack of understanding. For example, many people were surprised that the conversations were around stablecoins and crypto, and not, say, tokenised deposits, yet some of the discussions were using the terms interchangeably. That’s understandable when the pace of change is so rapid, but in a deeply technical business as payments, something that needs addressing rapidly. And as many pointed out, there are problems we still haven’t solved for a fiat world, and that’s where we all agree on terms.
That’s not to imply no one knows anything – far from it. I was out of my depth in several conversations. More that for the industry to move and maximise the benefits, everyone needs to at least a base level. Payments are a two sided network that need both sides to work together, and at the same level.
Finally, I was lucky to be invited a panel, entitled Re-defining Cross-border Payments, with MUFG, Swift, Circle and Finastra. A great conversation – and as we expected, we got nowhere near through what we had planned to discuss. We touched on many of the points above, but one that stood out was a reminder that we need to include the customers voice in these developments. Payments are a chain of events that start and finish outside of banks – to maximise the value to the customers, banks need to ensure they understand how it helps the customer.
