Sibos 2020 was unlike any other, with people attending virtually from their offices and home desks from all over the world. Find out the big talking points of this year’s event
Since starting out as a banking operations seminar in 1978, Sibos has grown into the premier business forum for the global financial community. The annual conference is organised by SWIFT and encourages debate and collaboration in areas such as payments, securities, cash managementand trade.
Sibos takes place in many fantastic different locations each year around the world including London, Toronto, Sydney and Singapore. However, this year was like no other, with people attending from their offices or from their homes globally.
Indeed, the disruption of the ongoing pandemic meant that this year’s event took place digitally with the aim of reaching a broader audience.
This year’s theme was ‘Driving the evolution of smart finance’. Each day looked into the interconnected sub-themes including delivering digital value, responsible innovation, banking for humanity, and the future of finance.
During the welcoming and opening keynote remarks, Yawar Shah, chair of the board at SWIFT, discussed the last 12 months, the industry challenges ahead, and SWIFT’s role in addressing them.
Shah noted that as well as the human impact, COVID-19 is also having a toll on the economies around the world.
Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, suggested that banks did great and they were able to work from home and serve their clients.
Dimon commented: “April through to July marked some of the most active months we’ve had in terms of the biggest bond issue, biggest investment banking months and things like that. In terms of the additional vulnerabilities created from working from home, that would probably be control or surveillance but it was an amazing lesson. It was already heading that way with digitisation but the pandemic has speeded it up.”
During the opening welcome and keynote remarks, panellists were asked about their thoughts on the cloud. Dimon said: “We need to move everything to cloud because it allows you to be a lot more agile. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are even more superior to the cloud, it can do marketing management and it already does so much more. AI allows you figure out stuff that human beings will never be able to figure out.”
He explained that blockchain has been around for 10 to 12 years but it hasn’t actually done much, describing it as a “complicated technology” that has to be rolled out by use case.
Fintech competitors such as PayPal, was also a topic for discussion, panellists discussed what banks have to do to compete with such companies.
Dimon noted that fintechs are great for looking at pain points and figuring out problems. He said: “Fintechs are not cheaper, safer or better per se but they do get rid of those pain points and banks are always good at creating paypoints.”
Collaboration
The conversation on collaboration between fintechs and banks continued into the panel discussions. One panel suggested that there is a lack of collaboration and lots of different actors but if as an industry, some standards could be agreed on at points in the supply chain then competition could focus on where it adds value, such as innovation and scale.
Hannah Elson, head of global custody, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at J.P. Morgan, explained that competition is not just about price but it is also about choice and “there is no shortage of choice”.
Experts believe that a good balance can be struck in the collaboration between fintechs and banks as each has different strengths and weaknesses that are complementary to one another. Rather than being rivals, the partnerships can be seen as the winning combination that will “deliver a superior end customer experience”.
“Banks have large customer bases, expertise, capital and scale. But they have been product-focused and product-centric and now the focus needs to shift more onto customers,” said Michael King, Lansdowne chair in finance, Gustavson School of Business at University of Victoria.
“Fintechs are better at focusing on customers; they use technology to fix pain points. Fintechs are customer-centric and not product-centric, if we bring these two together [banks and fintechs] will provide a better experience and the customer will benefit,” King added.
There was a time, however, when the industry was quite sceptical towards fintechs. R. Jesse McWaters, global head of digital policy, Mastercard, explained this was because they couldn’t acquire the necessary scale they needed, and prior to 2008 they were unsure they could meet the complexity around regulation.
“We have seen that regulators are surprisingly keen to engage with fintechs to bring them in as a new source of innovation. This provided the seeds for individuals to invest more trust in these institutions,” McWaters said.
COVID-19
A dominating topic in any industry or situation right now is COVID-19. Speakers were keen to discuss how the industry behaved during lockdown with many agreeing that the financial services industry coped“remarkably well”.
One particular panel shared their views on how the industry coped with major workforce disruption during the pandemic, and how leader behaviours changed.
Greg Keeley, executive vice president, chief information officer, TD Bank Group, highlighted that speed and agility were “paramount” duringthe pandemic.
During the lockdown, Keeley explained that TD Bank Group had “a team-based approach which was very focused on protecting colleagues and supporting customers and the community in which they operate.”
“Focus and clarity of mission allowed us to do some amazing things during this period”.
Addressing the disruption caused by COVID-19, Keeley noted that the impact was significant. He said: “We had business continuity plans and then we had to change those. The business continuity plan was to work from one environment and have a backup in case of a certain type of incident but that was thrown out the window with the realisation of the need togo virtual.”
“We rapidly focused on building capacity for over 90,000 employees to work from home. We created a clear environment and protected infrastructure and made sure we tripled the capacity from a digital environment. It was about serving large volumes online. A real shift happened in the early days of the pandemic,” Keeley explained.
Also on the panel, Claire Calmejane, group chief innovation officer, Societe Generale, highlighted than one of the main priorities was to ensure colleague safety and to ensure everyone is protected in the pandemic.
Calmejane also highlighted the shift that took place overnight, where around 50,000 colleagues moved to a work-from-home setup.
“It was not the first time that the finance industry was going through so much disruption and resilience was needed,” she added.
