Sibos Gets a Social Conscience

The first year I attended Sibos was 2015, when it was Singapore’s turn to host. That year, Indonesia’s farmers were carrying out their policy of slash-and-burn agriculture, and the resulting acrid pall of smoke wafted over the straits and island chains to Malaysia and Singapore.

Due to the poor air quality, the Sibos afterparty had to be moved from an outdoor venue to an indoor one, which happened to be the SEA Aquarium (which was lovely, incidentally).

This year, Sibos was held in London, where the worst the elements could throw at us was some nasty rain on Tuesday morning that was gone by lunchtime. 

Nonetheless, images of the world’s burning forests seemed to be seeping into the uneasy minds of the fintech elite and on to the Sibos agenda. In my peregrinations around the vast reaches of the Excel Exhibition Center, a space with the general dimensions and approximate charm of an international airport, a surprising proportion of my conversations seemed to involve Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old environmental activist. Attendees who came with stands told me they had eschewed corporate giveaways this year and were looking for ways to recycle their infrastructure. Sibos itself provided us with rather nice, flat water bottles (which reminded me cheeringly of hip flasks) so that 11,000-plus people wouldn’t go through several plastic cups a day each.

The agenda, too, reflected the anxieties of the uncertain times we live in and what the response of financial firms should be—whether to capitalize on uncertainty or to make decisions that were socially responsible. Environmental and ethical concerns showed up, with panels on banking and environmental management; managing the risk of bias in AI, and responsible, explainable AI; and protecting user data privacy.

More conventionally, cloud computing was a major theme at Sibos this year. I think we have now reached the point where financial firms have realized they have to put aside their regulation- and security-based hesitations and migrate even critical functions to the cloud. The conversation is less, “Do we do this,” and more, “How do we modernize our systems and sort out our data so that we get the most out of this technology?”

That’s not to say firms are rushing in willy-nilly: cybersecurity was a major theme this year.

Brexit, while perhaps not front and center on the panel discussions, certainly loomed in the background like an extremely large elephant in the room; speakers mainly expressed worries that business will move out of the UK.  

I was surprised, given how many banks, vendors and others we WatersTechnology journalists talk to in the course of our reporting about their blockchain projects, how little blockchain was discussed. That Sibos in Singapore—2015 was the peak of the technology’s hype cycle—every blockchain session was standing room only; this year, the blockchain sessions were often empty while it was the panels on APIs that I am told were packed out. Sibos, of course, is a Swift conference, and Swift has been working on standards for APIs around payments and open banking. But the capital markets, too, are now thinking about the benefits of modular technology that enables connection to data held in siloes.

While the blockchain hype seems to be leveling out, it’s not like the technology has gone away. Rather, as we heard from banks involved in DLT proofs of concept, projects have run up against the usual barriers to innovation: regulatory uncertainty and a lack of standardization. No one wants to stick their heads above the parapet with a new project that is only half-realized, so many projects on the go are being kept quiet. As these mature, I expect we will see blockchain becoming, if not a hot topic again, still a relevant one.

These are all topics that will become more and more concrete and urgent in 2020 and beyond, not least within the pages of this magazine.

Hamad Ali contributed reporting to this article.