Reflections on Sibos 2019

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True to this year’s theme of “Thriving in the hyper-connected world”, Sibos 2019 in London was all about the possibilities, approach and risks involved in the society that is constantly on.

The following points summarise what was on everyone’s minds and high on the conference agenda:

a) People and talent management. Driving a culture of constant learning and skills development accompanied by tools and techniques to deliver incremental value to customers and shareholders. Preparing the organisation to handle the unknowns.

b) Platforms – building thriving ecosystems that transitions a bank from a product manufacturer to that of a distributor and matchmaker through the use of internal and external data. Banks such as SBI Yono, DBS, Starling, Clear bank and many more demonstrated that capability.

c) Is the future of banking a dumb pipe? Maybe. However, there is plenty of opportunities to become a smart dumb pipe. After all, some pipes will be more successful than others and it will be about the developer experience, onboarding and richness of the services they offer.

d) Emerging architectural patterns to event-based, eventually consistent, micro-service mesh running on rapidly scalable platforms such as open shift on cloud platforms. These new patterns are allowing organisations to deliver new customer journeys faster through reuse, but they come with challenges of delivering a service in a tightly regulated environment. Should the control-point be centralised or, distributed?

e) New and emerging technologies such as public and hybrid cloud, application of artificial intelligence and quantum computing on the bank’s operations and the end-customer journeys. What operational and systematic risks and opportunities do these present?

f) Cyber and Resilience. The regulators are mounting the pressure and scrutiny on the ability to run the business even when IT failures happen. And, that the attack vector is increasing, and it is getting harder to differentiate between the good and bad actors. Furthermore, the interdependencies between systems, microservices, APIs and applications are increasing the complexity and the chain will be as strong as the weakest link. The industry is calling for more collaboration and sharing of data and information in this space.

g) And finally, the event wouldn’t have been complete without debating, discussing and understanding trends in payments including the widespread adoption of ISO20022, modernisation of the UK RTGS, the establishment of Pay.UK and consolidation of payment schemes and introduction of potential new and cool services such as ‘confirmation of payee’, ‘pay later’ and ‘request to pay’.

I had the opportunity to speak with Simon Taylor from 11:FS at Sibos and record a short podcast on these topics. You can listen to the replay here.