And so SIBOS ends … until next year

And so the end is near … but we have not faced the final curtain quite yet. There’s still the infamous SIBOS closing party to come, yay.

Meanwhile, SIBOS 2011 closed with a review of the week between Gottfried Leibbrandt, Head of Marketing for SWIFT, and Stephan Zimmermann, COO Global Wealth Management & Business Banking with UBS.

The key themes have been around regulations, emerging markets and the future of banking, although when the review summarised all the discussions at SIBOS 2011 in a word cloud:

I realised there was some SSDD in there too.

The key areas were reviewed and I think Gottfried summed it all up well when he said that: “Vienna (SIBOS 2008) was denial and disbelief; Hong Kong (2009) was anger at the press and public’s reactions; Amsterdam (2010) was acceptance; and now Toronto is action, getting to grips with the crisis and moving forward”.

It’s just a shame that, as he said this, I was reading the following news:

“The world is on the eve of the next financial crisis, with sovereign debt its epicenter, said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., which runs the biggest bond fund.  The European Central Bank hasn’t put in place a circuit breaker to contain the region’s debt crisis, El-Erian, who is also Pimco’s co-chief investment officer …”

Do we have to go through all of this again?

Brett King then stood up and gave the bankers a good berating, saying they’re all stuck in the past of banking with branches and paper whilst customers have moved on.

Most of you will know Brett’s message but, if you don’t, it kind of goes along the lines of: “the Web 2.0 creates a new form of customer engagement that banks have ignored as they’re stuck in the Web -1.0”.

He opined that banks are not dissimilar to those of Roman and Persian days with cheques, and Medici Banking days with branches.

It resonates, although most of the guys in the audience were probably thinking: “screwy Brett, you’re talking retail and consumer banking.  Nothing to do with us as we’re commercial and transaction banking”.

Ah well, you can’t win them all.

The plenary was closed by Lazaro Campos who gave us the usual uplifting message that there had been 75,000 people here this week … sorry?  Oh, sorry, 7,500 … must have made a mistake there somewhere, and wished us all well until next year in Osaka.

Thanks Lazaro, thanks Brett, thanks to the innotribe team – you did do a stellar job this year btw – and thanks to all those who bother to read this … I know who you are.

A final posting tomorrow and then back to blighty.

Oh yes, thanks Toronto.