Insights from SIBOS in Frankfurt 2025
The SIBOS Banking Conference took place at the sprawling Messe Conference Centre in Frankfurt between September 29th – October 2nd.
The level of innovation and pace of change seemed to have stepped up a gear from the event in Toronto just two years ago. It was a superb gathering of 12,500 Financial services leaders from around the world and awesome opportunity to meet existing and new potential customers.
Some of the key insights and takeaways from the event were.
Geopolitics – This was a major theme and underlying message during the four days of the conference. For the first time ever, I heard the term ‘geopolitics is coming to the payments world’.
Several people opined on how President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff changes kickstarted a tumultuous period for global trade. Many participants in the global supply chain have been shocked and surprised by how wide ranging and high the tariff application has been.
US tariffs have increased from a long-term historical average of ~2.5% to between 20-50% for the exporting country, dependent on current trade balances and manufactured product sector.
This has forced many countries including China to look for alternative end customers and new supply chain routes. Interestingly China’s exports to the US have dropped 20% but their overall global export volumes have not reduced.
A big question remaining is can a market such as Europe take the excess inventory that was being sent to the USA and what impact does this have on domestic economies and supply chains?
Digital Assets – There was more momentum and progress in Digital Assets and tokenised forms of money at this year’s SIBOS event.
Assets such as gold and bonds are starting to be tokenised and regulators including Hong Kong, Singapore and UAE are pushing their financial institutions hard to develop new digital asset capabilities.
The big challenge still appears to be interoperability of these new forms of Digital Money as currently Bank A cannot easily transact its tokenised deposit with Bank B.
Stablecoins were also discussed in some sessions but appeared to be a more selective use case that are used in emerging markets with high inflation as a form of value protection.
AI – This was another big theme during the conference with discussions more progressed and amplified on the topic than two years ago.
Many companies still appear to be struggling to find the killer use case outside of AI for fraud detection and operational service efficiency.
It was an excellent opportunity to validate the progress we have made with www.transformsales.ai and confirm in many scenarios the client does not actually want the AI but the outcome it delivers. In this case moving from ineffective sales to organisational wide sales effectiveness.
We are pleased to have such a strong use case, strong customer interest and a proven workflow that delivers real ROI.
These three themes mentioned, geopolitics, digital assets and AI were the key themes McKinsey raised as the three forces currently shaping payments and banking.
With a $2.5 Trillion revenue pool forecast to grow at 4% annually, the businesses that can navigate these three key trends to create opportunities for growth will be the winners.
