Key take-away from #SIBOS 2025: it’s no longer banking and payments

Watching Sibos from afar – I haven’t been invited for a while due to being too provocative – I was not surprised to see that Quantum computing, AI, CBDCs, stablecoins, tokenization and blockchain are all making the headlines, as these are all the themes I spend my time presenting about around the world.

• Cybersecurity, AI and quantum dominate industry panel
• Cybersecurity and tech partnerships
• The future of digital assets
• DLT interoperability and fragmentation challenges
• Moving cross-border from legacy to cloud
• Why Europe needs the integration of capital markets

But these are all technology-driven headlines, so what has surprised me is the lack of headlines regarding policies and practices of banks themselves, and how banks need to evolve their payments and messaging systems in the future. By way of example, I just googled ISO 20022 related announcements in the past week at SIBOS, and there’s less than ten. If you put in a search using any of the other catchy things above, there are tens or hundreds. Does this mean that Sibos has become a technology conference, rather than a banking and payments meeting, or are these now one and the same?

The answer is yes: it is a technology conference for people in banking and payments.

Anyways, two announcements have caught my eye this week. The first relates to my searching above to find that Chainlink has announced a partnership with SWIFT to tokenize assets via ISO 20022. According to Chainlink, financial institutions will be able to handle tokenized fund subscription and redemption processes using Swift via ISO 20022 messages from their existing systems. The innovation powered by the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) will eliminate a technical barrier to the widespread adoption of digital assets in the international capital market.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

But this is just part of a significant announcement SWIFT made at the conference about  building a blockchain-based system to record digital payments. The aim is for SWIFT, working with Consensys, to develop a global, real-time, secure messaging system to record payments movements between banks worldwide.

Announcing the ledger at Sibos, SWIFT CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso stated: “We provide powerful and effective rails today and are moving at a rapid pace with our community to create the infrastructure stack of the future. Through this initial ledger concept we are paving the way for financial institutions to take the payments experience to the next level with Swift’s proven and trusted platform at the centre of the industry’s digital transformation.”

He also announced working with Frankfurt-based fintech Swiat to support the launch of a European DLT Network Regulated Layer One. The basis for RL1 is the Swiat DLT network, which has been in production for more than two years and successfully completed more than 40 transactions with more than €600m volume. Still early days.

It is also interesting that this is announced just as Stripe launches Tempo, a “payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications” and Circle introduce Arc, which they describe as “blockchain infrastructure purpose-built for stablecoin finance”.

The take-away therefore is that yes, this is banking and payments, but these days it’s all about technology and currencies on networks such as stablecoins and CBDCs. As one bank recently said to me: “Banking is what we do, but technology is how we do it”. So true.