The early Monday morning news drop, by financial communication backbone operator and Sibos organiser Swift, that it is launching its own blockchain, could be seen as a token. Improvements brought to financial-services users by growing processing power and ease of connection are at the heart of the marketing messages in a large part of the exhibitor booths. It seems as if, by 2026, every financial services firm will be a tech provider.
Using Adidas’s 1971-designed Stan Smith shoe as his example, Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso, used his official opening presentation to argue for continuous innovation along two parallel tracks: both the radically new and the development of the well-established. In Swift’s case, it could be a metaphor for its global standard messaging network as a classic product, and its now-announced digital ledger as a new one.
Pérez-Tasso’s presentation segued into a dialogue with Deutsche Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel. Nagel clearly singled out the ambition for a digital euro as the most important project of the Eurosystem (the European Central Bank together with the euro countries’ central banks). Starting out by reading a statement from a written script, he determinedly made clear that his country’s central bank will not accept challenges against the euro as the currency within its area. Apparently targeting independent cryptocurrencies, he emphasised that anybody offering financial services should work under the same degree of regulation, on a level playing field. New systems could use DLT, but settle in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).
A quick walk through the main exhibition hall revealed the high level of maturity that artificial intelligence and cloud-based connectivity services have reached. System and data providers make up a large proportion of the exhibitors, and the banks often distribute their products towards the end users. In all, there seemed to be no end to the list of firms who could help you source and AI-analyze data of all sorts, or connect with billions of end-user “wallets”.
As for the number of delegates with the event, Javier Pérez-Tasso cited about 12,000.
Sibos 2025 plays out in Frankfurt from 29 September to 2 October, with about 12,000 registered delegates. We are there, overview our coverage here.
