Sibos 2025: Payments are shifting
By Will Marwick, CEO, IFX Payments
While attending Sibos in Frankfurt this year, I got the sense that we’ve reached a tipping point. Real-time cross border speed, operational resilience and end-to-end visibility are the foundation rather than the future.
With the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation now in full force as of October 2025, real-time payments are now table stakes. Banks and PSPs under the regulation must be able to send instant payments, a shift that pushes the industry to treat real-time processing, verification of payee, and instant settlement as standard, not innovation.
Perhaps the most headline-grabbing development was SWIFT’s move toward a blockchain-based shared ledger, signalling that transparency and traceability are becoming part of the infrastructure itself. Combined with universal confirmations and pre-validation, the industry is starting to address the age-old pain points of ambiguity, delay, and cost in cross-border payments. Stablecoins are increasingly being seen as a way of solving these challenges.
AI was another major theme, though the focus was pragmatic rather than speculative, using automation to enhance sanctions screening, fraud prevention and customer support.
Are instant, borderless payments achievable?
Across the event, banks and PSPs showcased how they’re adapting to a faster, more intelligent payment environment. Vendor led routing engines now dynamically select the most efficient rail based on speed, cost, or reliability, with automatic fallback mechanisms. Meanwhile, richer ISO 20022 data and upstream validation are reducing repairs and false positives, improving predictability and compliance.
And as per the implementation of AI above, anomaly detection is being embedded directly into payment orchestration layers, not bolted on at the end. It’s a subtle but meaningful shift, moving from reactive to preventative control.
The real-world challenges behind innovation
Of course, there was plenty of discussion about common operational challenges in the industry. That’s things like handling richer data sets, managing screening quality faster and reconciling downstream errors at scale. The reality is you can’t just accept ISO 20022 data; you have to make it usable, reconcilable and compliant in real time.
As interesting as the prospect of integrating shared ledger and tokenisation capabilities into established systems is, it does raise further questions about interoperability and auditability, that need to be answered if this is going to see widespread adoption.
Balancing innovation and compliance
The prospect of genuine innovation in payments is exciting but there has to be a balance in the pursuit of speed.
The clear message for C-suites: Speed only wins if you have control, uptime and transparency. Governance needs to treat resilience, fraud, and data integrity as a single objective, supported by investment in orchestration, confirmations and pre-validation.
The vision here is about simplifying and accelerating global payments. The direction set at Sibos, which included shared ledgers, smarter routing, and universal confirmations, supports that. It’s encouraging to see industry infrastructure evolving in ways that strengthen both compliance and customer experience.
The year ahead
Looking forward, four areas of focus stand out to me:
- EU instant payments compliance: Ensuring readiness for full sending obligations and real-time fraud, sanctions, and liquidity management.
- Multi-rail intelligent routing: Expanding our already broad network to optimise each payment for speed, cost, and reliability.
- Shared-ledger integrations: Exploring traceability and asset workflow benefits where they deliver real customer value.
- AI governance: Embedding AI responsibly across fraud, ops, and engagement while maintaining transparency and control.
Sibos 2025 felt like a moment of alignment. Regulators, banks and tech providers all moving toward a payments ecosystem that’s instant, transparent and resilient by design. That’s not a future to adapt to; it’s the one we’ve been building toward.