Sibos 2025: Capital Markets in the Spotlight

Over nearly 50 years, the Sibos conference organised by the bank-owned Swift messaging consortium, has grown into a major fixture on the calendars of senior banking and financial technology professionals. However, for the past 20 or so years, the conference has been dominated by discussions centred on the modernisation of the international payments network and its migration to harmonised international real-time operation. Other than the advent of the EU Target2 Securities settlement platforms, capital markets issues took a back seat.

This year, the shift was visible on the main stage: Swift chose the event to announce its creation of a blockchain-based shared ledger, a structural move framed as being a neutral enabler of interoperability across tokenised deposits, stablecoins and CBDCs.
At the same time, the agenda was peppered with panels on T+1 settlement, the role of ISO 20022 messages in securities and the risks posed by quantum computing as well as technical session on topics like the opportunities of agentic AI. Add in a continued emphasis on ESG investing and DEI targets in the session programming, and Sibos 2025 looked more relevant to a capital-markets audience than it has in a long time.

Next week, GreySpark will unpack those Frankfurt conversations in five instalments covering:

1. The integration of digital assets and tokenisation to existing regulated workflows
2. The challenges of regulatory fragmentation and the role of standards
3. The impact of the US T+1 settlement on other financial regions and the operational challenges for workflows
4. The mitigation of risks arising from the emergence of quantum computing and AI – and the opportunities they (might) present in the not-too-distant future
5. ESG, DEI and the politics of financial markets infrastructures.