Resiliency used to be an afterthought, said Michael Manos, Swift’s chief information officer. But it cannot be anymore. In his session at Sibos 2026 titled “The intersection of resiliency, security, and AI”, the message was loud and clear: resiliency today has to be worked into every aspect of what we do, and it has to be teamwork.
The interconnectedness of financial systems today has made cooperation a mandatory requirement. “Security is becoming a team sport. It’s not just about you and your own organisation’s security. It’s about all of the ecosystem pulling together,” says Manos.
He revealed that the belief that “you are only as strong as your weakest link” forms the basis of everything Swift does. “When you think about what we do at Swift and how we connect all the financial institutions around the world together, this is a collective risk for all of us.”
Always a work in progress
His advice for firms trying to build resiliency is to begin with the assumption that distruption is going to happen. “Things break. It doesn’t matter how much work you do. It doesn’t matter how much pre-thought you put into it. There’s always some weird strange corner case that’s going to come up and blow things up.”
Thus for today’s tech team, the expectation is that they “are going to have to keep adding and adding” and wil be “in a constant stage of solving from the beginning to the end”.
From an AI perspective, trust boils down to the quality of the data. Manos suggested that firms ask themselves the following questions: what’s the governance of the data and how do you think about the data that informs the answers that AI platforms will use? In the case of frontier AI, do you trust that the systems are finding all the things that they could? “Trust is defined at every level of the stack,” he points out.
Give it a go
Even though the new way of tackling resiliency may seem daunting, he encouraged firms to simply “get in and try” – there is no other option. “There is no end product at this intersection that you can buy to fix for your organisation. It doesn’t matter how great, how wonderful, how feature-packed they are. This touches too many things. It’s too personal for all the products and services in your company. It’s personal to the people that you have working for you. And it’s personal in terms of the outcomes that you’re trying to deliver ultimately.”
Despite the pervasiveness of AI, Manos believes that the human element is still important. “At the end of that chain – or the top of that chain – it’s the human that matters most. The human that knows the process, and how it’s supposed to work.”
Sibos 2026 plays out in Miami from 28 September to 1 October. We are there, view our coverage here.
