I recently attended SIBOS 2024, this year hosted in Beijing, where global financial leaders gathered under the theme "Connecting the Future of Finance." This year's event showcased the industry's rapid evolution driven by innovation, regulation, and changing customer priorities.
Below are the five key insights I took away from the conference, highlighting the opportunities and challenges shaping the sector.
1. Interconnectivity and interoperability: enabling seamless operations
Advancing the connectivity among banks, firms, regulators, and regions emerged as a critical enabler of financial innovation. The adoption of standards like ISO 20022 is accelerating, offering consistent, efficient global operations that benefit customers. However, achieving true interoperability requires ongoing collaboration —a clear mandate from this year’s discussions.
2. Real-time banking: driving customer expectations
The march of ‘real-time’ is on-going and pervasive across all banking services. The ‘real-time’ discussion was particularly salient for this year’s SIBOS in Beijing – as in many ways, China’s real time progress and implementation is much advanced, both at the retail level but also importantly within their corporate and institutional banking services. As with most things, real-time implementations come with both good (e.g. less friction, improved experience, higher volume) and bad (e.g. fraud and regulatory compliance risk). Striking a balance remains a priority as real-time services become the norm.
3. AI adoption: from vision to reality
The difference in discussions about Artificial intelligence from just a year ago is stark. AI discussions have moved beyond theoretical debates and are now focusing on practical implementation. The conversation now is centred more firmly around the questions of execution – ‘where to apply AI’, ‘how to implement AI’, ‘risks to manage’, and biggest of all ‘how to effectively operationalise AI to realise the promised benefits’. This is a welcome and constructive evolution of the discussion around AI. As AI continues to mature, its integration will shape the industry's trajectory, providing transformative benefits.
4. Simplifying complexity for customers
Navigating growing regulatory, technological, and geopolitical challenges requires balancing back-end complexity with customer-facing simplicity. Building the right enterprise foundation for execution will be important. Institutions need robust, scalable systems to deliver intuitive, personalised services—a critical success factor for sustained growth and loyalty.
5. Tokenisation and AI: a reimagined opportunity
Whilst in previous years blockchain discussions at SIBOS have generated a lot of excitement, there is perhaps a palpable sense of disillusionment in recent times. While the underlying technology is robust and the concept strong, to date blockchain hasn’t had the transformational impact that many anticipated. However, integrating tokenised assets with AI capabilities promises new efficiencies and innovative models for the financial services industry.
In essence, Bank’s purpose has five customer focused imperatives:
1. Coverage: expanding access to diverse regions, markets, and assets.
2. Financial strength: ensuring asset security and managing counterparty risks.
3. Operational efficiency: delivering comprehensive, value-driven services.
4. Forward-thinking innovation: anticipating future demands.
5. Collaborative partnerships: building customer-centric, enduring relationships.
To meet these imperatives banks must evolve by replacing legacy batch processing with real-time systems, by integrating AI for dynamic customer interactions, and by building highly resilient and responsive operations to service increasing volumes.
By reducing operational friction through the correct application of technology, these shifts will lower unit costs while increasing customer satisfaction – leading to sustainable returns for the bank.
A call for industry-wide collaboration
The conversations at SIBOS 2024 underscored the importance of customer-centricity enabled through connectivity, standardisation, and technology. As the industry integrates and operationalises the gains of technology and achieves greater interoperability – the future value and utility of finance is in the seamless connection across jurisdictions and markets for the customer.
Let’s shape the future of finance —one innovative step at a time.
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About this author
Davinder Oberoi
Director Consulting Services, Banking and Financial Services Australia
Davinder joined CGI in 2006 and leads CGI’s Banking and Financial Services business in Australia across Trade Finance, Payments, Credit and Collections, Risk, and Wealth Management domains.
