Sibos 2026 took the payments industry to Miami, and our team spent the week talking with banks, partners and peers. AI dominated the official programme. But many of our most useful discussions were about something more immediate: whether today’s infrastructure can handle what the industry is now asking of it.
That question came up in different forms all week. We heard it in sessions, but most often in conversations on our stand. Three themes stood out, and they’re the ones our team is still talking about now we’re home.
1. Reconciliation still runs on spreadsheets
This was the topic we heard most on our stand. Bank after bank told us reconciliation still depends on Excel matching, hand-keyed FX rates and Alteryx workflows built to plug gaps the core system never covered. These were not small institutions short on IT resource. Many of these banks have strong IT teams. Reconciliation just hasn’t made it to the top of their list.
Those workarounds hold until volumes or payment types change. Take a cross-border instant payment. It becomes a currency conversion, a correspondent settlement, a local payment and a ledger posting. Each leg creates its own record on its own timetable. Reconciliation shifts from a daily statement to a continuous stream of events. Returns and timeouts also need linking back to the original payment. Handled manually, exceptions grow with every new corridor, and banks add people instead of capacity.
2. The G20 roadmap is a year from its deadline
The G20’s 2027 targets for faster, cheaper and more transparent cross-border payments are now close, and progress remains uneven. Costs and settlement times have improved in some regions. Elsewhere, legacy infrastructure, differing national priorities and overlapping regulation are slowing things down.
Settlement hours were one of the more practical threads at Sibos. Limited RTGS operating windows still cause delay, and discussion focused on moving towards 24/7 settlement without making liquidity difficult to manage. The Swift Payments Scheme raises the bar further, committing participating banks to upfront fee disclosure, full-value delivery and end-to-end tracking. Banks with automated processing and full visibility of payment flows are well placed to meet these standards. Those relying on translation tools and manual checks will find the gap widening.
3. The appetite for tokenisation is there; the plumbing may not be
Sessions framed tokenisation as moving from concept to critical infrastructure. But there was an important qualification. New rails won’t replace existing ones any time soon. The two will run side by side, which makes interoperability the real test.
Interest is clear, but readiness is less certain. Our own research found only 13% of banking IT leaders report full automation across core payment functions, and 65% spend more time repairing payment data than producing it. A tokenised payment still has to reach Swift, Bacs and core systems built for slower settlement. If its structured data is stripped out along the way, the speed gained on the digital rail is lost to manual repair.
Looking ahead
Instant corridors, G20 targets and tokenised deposits all put pressure on the same point: whether a bank can trace a payment across every system it touches and resolve exceptions without rekeying data. We expect that to shape banks’ priorities over the coming year. It is also the gap Aquila is built to close, sitting alongside existing core systems to bring messaging, payments and reconciliation into one view.
Thank you to everyone who visited us at Sibos. If any of these conversations sound familiar, get in touch. We are always happy to compare notes.
