The payments podcast from Bottomline.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the payments podcast. I'm your host. Bottomline managing editor, Owen McDonald. Sibos, among the industry's most anticipated annual events, is fast approaching. As we would expect, given this time of change, organizers at Swift chose a profound theme this year: "The Next Frontiers of Global Finance". It's ambitious. It's forward looking. 

Talk will turn to maximizing the ISO 20022 opportunity, to drivers for achieving the G20 cross-border payment targets for 2027, the endless quest to mitigate fraud, and of course, real-time payments.  Fortunately, here at The Payments Podcast, we've got a guy! It's our pleasure to welcome back Vitus Rotzer, head of financial messaging at Bottomline. He'll be sharing his insights on some panel discussions at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt. We're lucky enough to have him give us a special preview of what will be trending at that event. 

Vitus Rotzer, welcome back to The Payments Podcast.

Vitus Rotzer:
Thank you, Owen.

Owen McDonald:
Let's begin. One could say the main backdrop of Sibos 2025 is the ISO 20022 cutover in November. That gives us a new global standard for financial messaging. 

But how are banks and financial institutions balancing innovation with compliance? There's tension, there's regulatory mandates, there's the issue of global adoption. And Vitus, you told me the deadline is just the beginning of the beginning! So what's your assessment of this situation?

Vitus Rotzer:
Yes, you're right. So the ISO 20022 cutover for November for Swift payment messages is a landmark moment, clearly. We have gone through three years of cohabitation period, and we now need to switch. 
Nevertheless, it's only the beginning, because if you look at it from a technical point of view, it's good, but there is much more to be done if you want to exploit the data end-to-end and get the benefit of this new format. 

So, if you take payment reconciliation, for instance, a corporate receiving a cross-border payment today might struggle to match it to an invoice due to limited remittance data. With ISO 20022, richer structured data travels with the payment. This will enable straight-through-processing and reduce manual intervention. 
But you have to exploit that. You have to integrate it. It's not a given. It needs to work with all your different systems. It's not just about compliance, it's also about efficiency, cost saving and better customer experience. Richer structured data also enables improved sanction screening and fraud detection, for instance, provided you integrate the newest format seamlessly in your ecosystem, of course. 

So yes, the deadline is the "beginning of the beginning". The institutions that treat ISO 20022 as the foundation for the transformation across the end-to-end business flow, not just as a technical format checkbox, will be the ones shaping the future of payment and financial messaging.

Owen McDonald:
Ok. Now, moving on, the G20 has set ambitious goals for improving cross-border payments, chiefly speed, cost, access and transparency. That will be on the Sibos agenda this year. Vitus, where do you see the industry making the most progress with G20 goals, and where do the biggest gaps remain?

Vitus Rotzer:
The G20's growth for speed, cost, access, and transparency will reshape the cross-border payment landscape. 

I will say we have seen real progress in speed and transparency, especially with initiatives like Swift GPI and now also Swift Case Management, as well as regional instant payment schemes connecting across borders. Payments that used to take days now settle much quicker, and tracking tools give both banks and corporates visibility that they never had before. 

To illustrate this, Swift says that 90% of international payments now reach the beneficiary bank in under one hour, which is great. 

But to the downside, cost and access remain the biggest gap. Many corridors are still expensive (especially for SMEs and emerging markets), and access to modern payment rails is uneven. For example, if you take a multi-national in Switzerland, they might enjoy seamless Euro-Dollar transactions, while a supplier in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, still faces high fees and limited infrastructure. 

So, closing the gap will require more collaboration between central banks, regulators, and private players, and a willingness to rethink the business model. The technology is there, no doubt. Now it's about scaling and inclusivity.

Owen McDonald:
"Rethink the model". Sounds important. Here's another model. Pre-verification of payment details it's gaining traction as a way to reduce errors and fraud. 

What are the key benefits and challenges of implementing pre-verification at scale, Vitus? What are Sibos attendees going there to find out about pre-verification? And quite frankly, are they looking to partner to get there faster?

Vitus Rotzer:
Clearly, and this will certainly be a big topic. This will address, or is addressing, two persistent pain points: error and fraud. Validating account information before a payment is initiated can significantly reduce failed transactions, costly investigations and reputational risks. 

The benefits are very clear: fewer returns, faster settlement and greater trust in the payment process. Take a corporate sending high volume payroll payments they can pre-verify all beneficiaries to avoid any delays and ensure employees are paid on time. That's operational efficiency and employee satisfaction in one move. 

The challenge is scale. So, we have CoP (Confirmation of Payee) in the UK. We're soon going to have VOP (Verification of Payee) in Europe, and many different country initiatives. All this doesn't currently work with the same format, you have different jurisdictions, different standards, different technologies, different private regulation rules. So, it's very hard to implement a universal solution. That's why, at Sibos 2025, I believe a lot of visitors will go and search for a global solution covering everything, but it will be difficult to interoperate with all the schemes. 

I will just finish by saying it's not just about technology, because the technology is there, but it will be about trust, coverage, and also collaboration at the end. 

Owen McDonald:
Another big topic for Sibos this year, Vitus, is real-time payments. How are real-time payments reshaping the expectations of global banking customers, and what challenges do banks face in meeting those expectations? 

I'm asking primarily about infrastructure, customer experience, and the pressure to modernize legacy systems. How do you see this playing out near term?

Vitus Rotzer:
So real-time payments fundamentally shift the customer expectation. It's true. However, we see low adoption rate across the board, from consumers, from corporates and from an infrastructure deployment perspective.

If you think about Swift stating that 90% of all the transactions are performed now in less than one hour, I think it raises the bar. So for 2026, the expectation is not just about speed, but it's about full end-to-end certainty and enriched data. 

The challenge for banks is the infrastructure. Clearly, many are still operating with legacy systems that were not built to 24/7. You need to check fraud in real-time. You need to check the position and the liquidity of an account in real-time. And you need to process the payment in less than 10 seconds. All this and informing your online banking tool that the customer sees the money coming. 

So, this is a huge challenge that necessitates a lot of transformation within the bank. 

It's definitely an expectation - especially for corporates - to better manage liquidity, to better manage their supply chain, their FX exposure and everything. But it's a slow adoption. Modernization is no longer optional. It will come. Everybody says it will come. 

Banks need to invest in cloud-native platforms, API connectivity, a smarter orchestration layer outside of the current core banking solution. 

At Sibos 2025 the conversation will certainly be about how to scale these upgrades sustainably, and how to partner, whether with fintechs, PSPs or infrastructure payment connectivity providers, to meet this expectation without compromising security and compliance.

Owen McDonald:
I see. So it's definitely a collaborative effort, in the truest sense. 

I could talk to you for an hour, but this is my last question: Operational resilience is now a regulatory and strategic priority. It's a major topic for Sibos attendees. Vitus, what does resilience look like in the context of business payments, financial messaging, payments infrastructure, and banking connectivity?

Vitus Rotzer:
This last one is certainly at the heart of a lot of concerns today, and I think operational resilience is no longer just a regulatory checkbox, it's a strategic imperative. 

In the context of payment infrastructure and financial messaging, the resilience means ensuring continuity, security and adaptability across every layer of your connectivity. So it's about being able to absorb shocks, whether cyberattacks (which we speak a lot about today) or system outages. We think of power outages and things like that, geopolitical disruption… we have enough bad examples today in the world without compromising services and trust. 

A top use case will be a failover between messaging channels. So a bank, for instance, that implements dual routing across Swift or another network — if one channel experiences latency or downtime, the payment can be rerouted, ensuring uninterrupted services. That's resilience in action. 

At Sibos, attendees are focused on how to build this kind of robustness. Robustness through cloud migration, smart orchestration and strategic partnerships. Outsourcing to a trusted solution provider is increasingly seen as a key enabler. It will allow the institution to accelerate resilience, reduce operational risk and focus their internal resource on strategic growth rather than technical firefighting. 

Moreover, it will help banks and corporates to respond faster to market infrastructure and regulatory changes - we talked about a few of them before - while significantly lowering certification and audit costs, leveraging economies of scale. 

And institutions can stay ahead of regulatory demand and customer expectation without having to build everything in house. 

I will just conclude by saying resilience is not just about "surviving disruption". It's about being ready to operate, adapt and innovate through it.

Owen McDonald: Well said! 

For some, Sibos 2025 will always be remembered in a "Where were you when?" kind of way, falling as it does so close to the milestone ISO 20022 deadline. It marks the dawn of a new era of better financial messaging to power B2B payments and experiences securely. It's momentous. 

Thanks again to a fantastic guest, Vitus Rotzer, head of financial messaging at Bottomline, to our audience - the smartest people in B2B payments - thanks for listening. Hit subscribe, catch us again on your favourite podcast platforms including Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio and YouTube. 

Bye for now.