Last month the Celent team closed out an action-packed week at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Germany. In the course of four days, collectively we had we had over 100 meetings with clients and prospects from all around the world. These ranged from the global transaction banks to regional development banks in the Middle East, from startup fintechs to established industry vendors, to Big Tech. We really enjoyed every single one of those conversations.

So, what were the main discussion topics?

First of all was advanced AI (of course) - including emerging use cases for agentic AI. I’ve said elsewhere, in many ways the buzz about agentic AI in 2025 is reminiscent of the GenAI story in 2023. At first there was denial, followed by the excitement of opportunity, and then implementation reality. The difference is that the possibilities seem more attainable now than they did on early 2023. However, banks really have to separate the hype from the reality as many process automation solutions will magically become “Agentic AI.” Caveat emptor.

The second thing was Stablecoins. The GENIUS Act of 2025 has blown the doors off the, er…, stable. However, what was surprising was the lack of conversation around deposit tokens especially since this is in large part a corporate and transaction banking conference. Citi and JP Morgan are among the front-runners in this space for global real-time liquidity across their networks. Banks need to understand the different use cases for digital coins/tokens, and Celent has a significant research focus on this fast-changing space.

Thirdly – and in contrast to the first two topics – the current state of ISO20022 migration. This has been going on for years, and many banks are still struggling to get to the finish line.

When you pull these things together, we have this apparent dichotomy. On one hand the desire/urgency to explore the AI and Stablecoin innovation but set against the immediate challenge of completing a decade-long journey to implement fundamental plumbing for fiat-currency money movement.

Celent addressed many of these opportunities and issues in our recent Previsory report and webinar, and they will feature strongly in our research agenda over the coming months.