This is more than a moment. It is the place where vision finds form, where ideas catch fire and real momentum starts to build. In a world moving at an unprecedented pace, velocity is the new standard. Ideas are supercharged by autonomous intelligence, expectations are transformed, and value isn't just moving, it's being redefined. We're at a new frontier of trust, speed, and transformation. In a landscape of change and possibility, we come together with a shared sense of purpose to focus on the opportunities that define our future. Driven by the pulse of innovation and a spirit of human ambition. To turn collaboration into impact and overcome challenges too big to solve alone. Together we power the change. From analog to digital, from digital to intelligent, and from intelligent to limitless. We're not waiting for the future. We're here to shape it.
Welcome to Sibos. Welcome to Miami. Please welcome Chair of the Board of Swift, Graham Monroe.
Well, good morning, Sibos. What a pleasure to be here. It's wonderful to see so many of you here in person and a very warm welcome to all of those that are joining online as well. This is the first time we've hosted Sibos in Miami and I'm delighted to say that delegate numbers are amazing — the largest ever Sibos in North America. But we have to remember how close we are to the beach. And I've got to tell you that the team here is going to be working very hard to try and keep us all engaged in here as we get this conference done. But joking aside, Miami is so much more than a beautiful setting. It's a truly international city, a gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, and an increasingly important financial and innovation hub. Miami's story is one of connection between regions, industries, and ideas. And that spirit of connection feels especially relevant as we work together to build a future for finance that is trusted, inclusive, and ready for the next era of AI-driven economies.
There's certainly no shortage of topics as we explore this week — from new technologies to the increasing digitization of assets, ISO 20022, and the future of cross-border payments. The pace of change across the global financial system continues to accelerate and in this increasingly complex operating environment, maintaining the highest standards of security and resilience and reliability and availability remains essential and we don't take the trust of the industry for granted.
Continuous improvement is imperative. We're continuing to strengthen our resilience, reinforce our risk and control culture, and preparing proactively for both opportunities and the risks related to new technologies such as AI and quantum. Swift's strategy is about delivery on two objectives simultaneously: maximizing the potential of the trusted infrastructure which the world and all of us rely on today, while helping the community build what comes next. And that means continuing to accelerate today's cross-border payment capabilities so that the industry can benefit from tokenization and always-on finance. Initiatives such as Swift's digital ledger are important steps so that different forms of value can move across networks with choice, interoperability, and trust. Rich data will be an important enabler for the next generation of financial services. And we are now at an important stage in the industry's ISO 20022 journey. We now need to ensure that rich structured data flows from end users through banks and intermediaries and into clearing systems and back again. And when it comes to implementing those data changes through the end-to-end payment life cycle, the Swift board has acknowledged some of the challenges that the industry has experienced with our original timelines. So we're adapting to make sure that the ecosystem does not face any disruption. While the timeline has shifted, the direction of travel has not. Keep preparing, keep progressing. Because the value of ISO 20022 will come from our collective ability to put richer data to work across our ecosystem.
This year also marks a significant moment in the governance of Swift. Since I took over the role of chair three years ago, I've focused the board on evolving a new model that incorporates industry best practices while meeting new regulatory requirements. This has been an intensive period with very significant changes to our bylaws. And I'm deeply grateful for the constructive involvement of our shareholders and communities globally. And I'd also like to acknowledge the dedication and commitment of my fellow board members, several of whom are here today, in supporting this important transition while continuing to provide the strong, robust governance that our cooperative relies on. I am fully committed to leading the cooperative through the next stage of our journey. Next week, I'll be chairing the inaugural meeting of our new supervisory board, which is meeting at Swift's global headquarters in Belgium. And then at the end of the month, at the end of October, meeting with our new voice of the community, the Swift Council, as it begins its journey. Following the selection processes that we ran earlier in the year, I believe we have convened an extremely strong bench for the supervisory board — one that blends deep industry expertise from across all global regions to help Swift define and accelerate its business strategy and to perform key fiduciary responsibilities. I'm also pleased to say that we'll be starting with a full cohort of council members thanks to the continuing engagement of the current board and the addition of some excellent new shareholder representatives from the community. Both bodies will strengthen best-in-class governance for the cooperative and I'm convinced that this new model will propel Swift as it accelerates its strategy in this highly dynamic business environment, charting the course for decades to come.
And as I close, I want to thank all of you for being here, for the continued engagement, and for the trust that you place in Swift. I hope you all have a fabulous week in this incredible location. But I have a last tip for you: don't forget your sunscreen. Now to get the week going, I would like to introduce Dan Katz, First Managing Director of the IMF. Dan leads the fund's work on multilateral surveillance and in areas including monetary policy, financial markets, and international economic integration. Dan, welcome to Sibos.
Well, thank you very much Graham for the kind introduction and thank you to Swift for the invitation as well. The theme of this year's conference is digital finance for AI-driven economies. This is a very important topic for the IMF because an efficient and secure payment system is critical to economic growth and stability. Clearly, as the theme suggests, the financial system and payments in particular will need to evolve. If AI is used as widely as proponents expect, a great deal of economic activity will be undertaken by AI agents rather than by people. The current payment system was not built for autonomous agents operating continuously and at scale. But at the same time, AI has extraordinary potential to transform the payment system that we already have even before we get to the more difficult questions about how the financial system itself may need to evolve. Today, I want to explore three points. First, how can AI improve the existing payment system? Second, whether and how the financial system needs to be re-engineered to support an AI-intensive world. And then third, how policymakers should respond to certain risks that are unique to AI.
So let me first start with topic number one: how AI can improve the payments landscape. Well, one way is by reducing information frictions and switching costs. AI agents can assess fees, services, exchange rates, and execution quality continuously, routing each transaction to the most efficient provider. That lowers barriers to entry, increases competition, and puts pressure on incumbents to improve their prices and services. This applies not just to financial services, but to all forms of commerce. One might even wonder whether a sustained reduction in information frictions and switching costs could have macroeconomically significant consequences for inflation. Second, agents can automate complex transactions that today require extensive human involvement. They can manage the mechanics of paying, coordinating machine-to-machine payments, and optimizing the timing based on liquidity costs and contractual obligations. Some of this is possible today through programmability, but programmability only takes you so far. It requires explicit instructions for each task and operates within predefined parameters. By contrast, agentic systems can interpret context and operate without requiring a new set of instructions for each transaction. That would open up more commerce to automation, increasing the volume and speeds of transactions. The third way is that agentic AI could substantially lower the cost of regulatory reporting and compliance by automating the collection, reconciliation, and reporting of data across institutions and jurisdictions. Agents could continuously monitor transactions and positions against regulatory requirements, identify gaps in real time, and produce compliance documentation. These benefits would be even more powerful in the context of cross-border payments which bridge different legal currencies and regulatory requirements. Agents could automate activities such as customer due diligence and sanction screening, improving the speed and consistency of compliance. And the benefits from agent-driven price comparison are probably even larger in the cross-border context than in the domestic context given the incremental frictions faced by retail consumers making cross-border payments.
I would not underestimate the scale of the benefits from applying AI to the existing payment system architecture. Payments are about much more than just the public infrastructure that supports them. A full payments product requires regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, and customer support. Those functions are needed regardless of whether payments run on blockchain rails or other infrastructures. In my view, many of the benefits promised by a reimagined financial system can instead be delivered by upgrading the core payment systems that we already have. This is where AI can help and this is where in the short run we are likely to see more tangible benefits. The scale alone makes the case for investment. IMF staff estimate that cross-border payments move nearly one quadrillion dollars a year. For those of you like me who had to actually look this up, one quadrillion is actually 1,000 trillion. It's a lot. And so at that scale, even improvements measured in basis points can translate into huge gains.
Second topic: how the financial system needs to evolve. Obviously, as AI agents become a significant part of economic activity, the financial system will need to change. It needs to become more digital, more interoperable, and more programmable. A range of payment technologies could supply the infrastructure needed for autonomous agents to transact across financial networks. Tokenization may be especially promising since tokenized assets are natively programmable and can settle almost instantly at any hour. We're already seeing progress. Graham mentioned some of the excellent initiatives that Swift is undertaking in his opening. CHIPS, for example, is leading a multi-bank initiative to create a shared tokenized deposit settlement platform. The challenge for policymakers, of course, is to support this innovation without compromising stability. And that begins with legal and regulatory frameworks that permit different payment technologies to compete on their merits. The law needs to clearly establish the legal nature of tokens, including the rights and claims of reported owners and parties with varying degrees of contractual privity. It must also define the relationship between tokenized assets and their real-world equivalents. Authorities should avoid erecting unnecessary obstacles to interoperability across networks and liquidity frameworks will need to keep pace because while atomic settlement reduces counterparty risk, it also raises intraday liquidity needs by requiring pre-funding.
If banks continue to embrace tokenization, it naturally raises the question of how central banks should respond, as the existing bank-based payments architecture rests on a foundation of central bank money that is currently not tokenized. Stablecoins too raise questions on the form of liabilities issued by government. To maintain a stable value and function as a payment instrument, they need to be backed by safe and liquid assets like short-term government obligations, central bank deposits, or insured commercial bank deposits that are ultimately supported by central bank money. At the Fed's Jackson Hole conference this year, which we just had a couple weeks ago, we had some very interesting discussions about whether central banks should offer new forms of central bank money, such as tokenized reserves, and whether they should extend access to central bank money to new parties. Finance ministries too might consider whether they should issue government obligations in tokenized forms. We are seeing a wave of experimentation across these domains. For example, the ECB's recently launched project Pontes is designed to enable wholesale transactions on distributed ledger platforms to settle in central bank money. The Bank of England is requiring certain issuers of stablecoins to hold central bank deposits. The diversity of these approaches reflects varying country circumstances and underscores why policymakers should keep their options open, observe how developments unfold, and consider tailored solutions as the market matures.
This is an area where the IMF supports central banks in evaluating the alternative pathways through technical assistance. It is certainly appropriate for central banks to provide new public infrastructure that supports competition, such as tokenized reserves, but these services should be constructed in a way that does not lock out new technologies and business models that might emerge from market-based competition. The objective should be to create an enabling environment while ensuring the integrity and stability of the payment system. And preserving this space for competition is not just about increasing efficiency and innovation. It's also a financial stability issue. And I think this is a topic that is really not emphasized enough. When policymakers encourage overly narrow solutions, they often discourage heterogeneity in business models that can be a source of resilience. When the inevitable shock comes, similar institutions tend to fail in the same way, which has the potential to create systemic risk.
And lastly, I just want to touch on the development and diffusion of AI technologies and risks associated with them that are relatively unique. Cyber risks are of course at the top of the list. AI is reshaping cyber risk by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation. Tokenized markets depend heavily on shared complex infrastructure and a small number of third-party providers. That means a cyber incident can propagate widely enough to become systemic either with the financial system we have today or with the financial system we're building for tomorrow. Fortunately, we have not yet seen a macro-critical cyber event. Private risk management and the existing supervisory architecture has contained the risks. The approach still applies today. Strong governance, technical controls that limit the blast radius of a breach, and robust incident response and recovery are all essential. We need more coordination among standard setters and supervisory networks and between governance and industry.
And as frontier AI tools are deployed by cyber actors, defenders will need those same tools to respond. And that gets to the broader debate about whether increasingly powerful AI systems could pose such severe risk to society as a whole that new regulation is needed to slow the pace of development. These concerns do deserve to be taken seriously. The IMF contributes to this vital debate by bringing a macro-financial lens to questions of regulation and risk. We focus on where market failures may arise, where risk can become systemic or macro-critical, and where private incentives may diverge from the public interest. And in AI, that could include major externalities from defective products, information gaps between developers, users, and regulators, or operational dependencies on a small number of providers. It could also include the loss of competitiveness and concentration of market power that may result from the imposition of a poorly designed regulatory framework that discourages competition by creating barriers to entry. The starting point in assessing these risks should be to identify demonstrable market failures and evaluate whether existing regulatory frameworks are sufficient to address them. To the extent that new interventions are needed, they should be proportionate, targeted, and internationally coordinated while taking great care not to discourage competition and innovation. AI can be transformative for the payment system. Handled well, it can help build a payment system that is more efficient, more competitive, and better suited to the economy of the future. For policymakers, the challenge is to enable this transformation while safeguarding against the risks. The IMF supports our membership by helping them assess these spillovers and vulnerabilities from this transformation. And more broadly, the fund also facilitates the international dialogue needed for the payment system to remain open and stable, consistent with our 80-year mandate to ensure the stability of the international monetary and financial system. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Great music. Thank you, Dan, for being with us here today. And to all of you, welcome to Sibos. It's so good to be here. And wow, what a location. You know, many of you have heard me say before that I've always thought of Sibos as the World Cup of Finance. So Miami having been one of the main cities of the recent soccer World Cup feels like a natural place for us. Of course, being Spanish, I've got great memories from this summer, but seeing all the nations here today, I better leave it there.
So every year at Sibos we talk about collaboration, and we talk about collaboration because we also talk about change and how navigating it together makes us stronger. So this week will be no exception. But what does feel different this year is the sheer velocity of change that is not just impacting individual departments or firms but is also redefining the entire ecosystem. So on the tech side, well, we just heard it from Dan, AI and agentic can be hugely powerful tools for the future of our industry. And he's laid out the massive opportunities ahead, but as well the questions and some of the questions about how to use it responsibly. And the race doesn't stop there. Quantum computing continues to advance and bringing of course new opportunities but also the challenge of securing a post-quantum world that is getting ever closer. So that's on the tech side, but on the business side you could argue that blockchain took a bit of time to get going as well. We were talking about it here in Sibos a decade ago, but over the past 12 months, tokenized value has truly become embedded across payments and securities. Again, Dan illustrated that with the many initiatives that have been going on over the past 12 months and progressing faster. And this goes hand in hand with the shift to T+1 in securities and with the move to 24/7 and always-on liquidity in international payments.
So I'm really looking forward to exploring all of this with our next speaker, Jane Fraser, because few leaders have a better vantage point on where our industry is heading. But before she joins me on stage, let me share a few thoughts about the progress that our community is already making. This time last year, when I stood on the Sibos stage in Frankfurt, I said that Swift would deliver a blockchain-based ledger. And I know it caught some people by surprise. Swift and blockchain, TradFi and DeFi — could they really go together? Can Swift really pull it off? Well, 12 months later, the Swift ledger is live and in use by some of the world's largest financial institutions. And by the end of the year, at least 19 banks will be using it across five major currencies to power 24/7 payments using tokenized deposits. And the potential goes much further because it is a flexible and interoperable platform that will be open to many forms of tokenized value, supporting a wide range of use cases across DVP and PVP. So the ledger is a significant new capability, but it is just the latest step in an ongoing transformation.
Together we've massively upgraded existing rails and we can be proud because we can now truly banish old stereotypes to the history books. You know, today, in fact, half of payments on Swift reach the beneficiary bank in less than 40 seconds. So essentially, it goes around the world faster than you brush your teeth. And with the payment scheme that we introduced last year, we're taking this yet to the next level by creating a new normal in international consumer payments. And the initial results speak for themselves. Australia to India in 37 seconds, China to Australia in 32 seconds, Turkey to the US in 15 seconds. And that's account to account and it can be account to wallet. Essentially, it's end to end with full value transfer and full predictability — just what consumers expect.
And we're not stopping there because the payment scheme is now helping banks bring their front-end experience in innovative systems like Pix in Brazil, AP+ in Australia, Bizum in Spain, or UPI in India across borders. And that gets us even closer to making international payments be as seamless as domestic ones. So the question is not anymore about TradFi or DeFi. It's not either or. The Swift platform will allow you to move any form of regulated value, whether it's fiat or tokenized, at global scale over more than 200 countries and 40,000 corridors. That's what it's all about.
And we're moving forward responsibly, with bold ambition but with our feet firmly on the ground because the more autonomous and intelligent finance becomes, the more trust matters. Cyber security, rigorous controls, operational excellence — these are not separate from transformation. They are what make transformation possible. So as Graham said, we are reinforcing our foundations at Swift. We are expanding digital operational resilience in line with new requirements. We're preparing early for post-quantum security. And we are also doubling down on operational excellence and the cyber defenses for the era of frontier AI. These investments are all vital to our business strategy. So I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the current board for driving that focus, which of course will continue to evolve with the new supervisory board and with the new Swift Council and our new regulatory framework. And maybe let me add that we realize that the industry has a lot on its plate right now. You know, with standard releases, with security and resilience upgrades, with the innovation agenda, the roadmap is very ambitious. So we'll continue to push momentum forward but we will also listen to your feedback and we'll track closely what's happening on the ground, so that at the end of the day we all come out stronger.
So as we begin a week of conversations about what comes next for our industry, it's worth remembering the words of the great American baseball manager Yogi Berra that I recently read: prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Actually, I agree with Yogi here because the future will keep on surprising us. Just like the World Cup, no one can predict every outcome. But what we do know is that there is opportunity ahead for our industry. There's business to be done and growth to be captured. And what's really energizing is to be part of that journey with all of you. Thank you.
So it's now my pleasure to introduce our final guest this morning. So Jane Fraser. Jane is one of the most influential leaders in our industry and over the past five years, she's led Citi through a major transformation, simplifying the firm and investing in the capabilities shaping the future of finance. Citi, of course, is a truly global bank and a leading player in the cross-border space. This year Jane was made a Dame in the UK and Fortune named her the most powerful woman in business. So, please join me in welcoming to the stage the Chair and CEO of Citi, Jane Fraser.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jane, for coming down particularly because I know you have a lot on your plate right now. And actually...
There's nothing going on in the world at the moment.
Absolutely nothing. Boring.
Completely. You have nothing else to do than being here, right?
And actually we were saying that earlier on, by the way, we could be doing this in Spanish for the Latin American crowd, but we're just doing — Jane's totally fluent. Anyway, we'll stick to English. But we were saying that it's great to have you here in person because last time that you were at Sibos, it was virtual. It was during the pandemic.
That feels like a lifetime ago, thank goodness. So hopefully that's one of the things we never go back to. But I know all of us at Citi, led by Shamir and our wonderful team, we're thrilled to be here. It's lovely to see so many friends and clients and to have decent weather.
Completely. So anyway, let's get going and let's start with the macro view. So global businesses have navigated many shocks in the recent years — the pandemic being one of them, but of course there's been many more since. But yet actually global commerce has proven to be very resilient. So has there been a shift in how companies decide where to invest and build supply chains, manage risk?
You know, one's often asked: is globalization dead with all the fragmentation that's going on? And I think what we see in trade is a more accurate view of what's happening in the world — that trade is not in retreat, it's just being rerouted around the world. And we're seeing that. Say, the North America auto flows into China and vice versa are dramatically down. At the same time, you're seeing the growth between particularly China and Africa, Latin America, Middle East really exploding. So you're seeing new corridors opening up. You're seeing a lot of change going on. And we've seen it — our trade flows just in the first half of the year were up in double digits. So there's an awful lot of activity going on. And I think as you rightly say, it's a lot of resiliency that's being built up. And I do find it remarkable and how impressive it is how much companies have adapted because you think of COVID, we think of the Ukraine war, we think of most recently, the Middle East crisis which has become a global issue, not a regional one. That's put an enormous amount of challenge into everybody. And one of the problems of companies is that they've had to not only look at how do they build resiliency, they've also had to fund it at the same time. So it's been a little bit of: you have to have your cake and eat it without putting on calories. If anyone finds the answer to that one, please do tell me. And so this buildup of resiliency is more physical in nature as well as financial in nature. I know we've been putting a lot of time into how do we help our clients release trapped liquidity around the world at the moment. It's over 70% of the pain points that we're hearing from clients is coming from that releasing of liquidity. And there's a lot of different solutions that we're putting in to do that. But resiliency is absolutely fundamental and we shouldn't just think of it as being a cost because if you are resilient, that enables you to take risk, right? That enables you to be on the front foot and when bad things happen, you can actually go on offense rather than just be defense. And I think that's the mindset we've got at Citi. How do we be a source of resilience for the system and for our clients, both financially as well as operationally? And I know, Javier, many of the same conversations we've been having with Swift.
Totally. I mean, it's front and center for us. As we said, we cannot think about the future... Yeah, we don't have this.
Well, and I have to say that what you're saying on shifting trading patterns, we see it as well on our network, because despite these changes, traffic continues to be pretty strong. So globalization is indeed reshifting. So given that landscape, what are — from your perspective, now of course seeing so many customers — what are they looking for from banks like Citi as they prepare for the future, and what do you see as the biggest competitive threats?
Look, I think that's really the most important question because there are a lot of shiny objects that are being built around in this space at the moment and there's a lot of hammers in search of a nail. And I think our industry's responsibility is to understand: what is it our clients need? And that's, I think, certainly from Citi's point of view, we're not in the business of shiny objects. We're like: what are the clients' issues and how do we solve them? And many of the things that Dan was talking about, you've talked about — clients want always-on. So 365, none of this 9-to-5, alas, anymore. Then they also want it to be instant, as you've talked about. Safe. It's got to be trusted and it's got to be something that is incredibly efficient on the balance sheets. And I'm sure we'll get into interoperable in a moment or two, but building up all of those different capabilities is vital and it's also merging the traditional rails with the new digital and the new digital assets and the AI worlds and how do we all get it to work together? Our clients want this to be as uncomplicated for them as possible. They don't want a world where they're worried about how the plumbing is working. They want to make sure it's as seamless, as easy as possible. It's one of the reasons I love tokenization because with tokenization we're taking the existing client accounts, moving money on the blockchain in digital deposits, and now we've linked it into our Citi Token Services. And tokenization is such a wonderful capability because of the programmability that comes with it. So you start solving these different pain points for clients, creating new capabilities that weren't there before. And that's a lot of what we're trying to do. We've just added the UAE and Japan to Citi Token Services. And that's both in dollar and euro in those markets. And that's added two more markets to five existing major centers in which we're able to move money instantaneously, always-on, on the blockchain. So with all the benefits of programmability and then linked into our 24/7 clearing. So we're still waiting for the central banks to make sure that they can also operate 24/7 so that we can move money around the world in line with the payment system. I'm sure that's coming — Swift is certainly nagging them to do so quickly. But you can see where the world is headed and for clients, efficiency, security being absolutely critical, always-on, instant, interoperable — that's where we're moving.
Yeah. No. And well, clearly, I mean, give you credit as well because you've been doing a lot of impressive work on the...
I wish I could take the credit. It's a wonderful team. They've been working on it for many years now. And it's also good because we're starting to see the client appetite build. Your point on blockchain — I remember giving a presentation and being part of one 15 years ago on blockchain to our board, and the client adoption's been very slow. And it feels like we're beginning to hit this inflection point, which is exciting for the industry.
Totally. And it's part — and we're seeing this direction, and you mentioned the central banks. We're going to see, as Dan mentioned, a lot of talk about it because there's a lot of progress there as well.
Yes. All talk, no trails, as I like to see the action.
