Sibos 2026 Asks Whether Payments Modernization is Delivering

The Sibos 2026 annual conference opens September 28 at a decisive moment for the payments industry. Fraud pressure is intensifying. Banks must prove the return on years of ISO 20022 investment. AI has to move from pilots into production. Cross-border payments face higher expectations for speed, cost and transparency. Corporate customers expect real-time visibility, smarter validation, and practical access to emerging technologies.

That makes this year’s Swift conference more than deadlines. The bigger question is whether financial institutions can turn modernization into measurable gains in fraud prevention, operational resilience, customer experience, and payment economics.

Edward Ireland, Bottomline Product Director, Financial Messaging, and Head of Financial Messaging Product Strategy and Innovation Natasha Lapierre agreed in a recent interview that the shift from implementation to execution will shape the most important conversations at Sibos 2026. Ireland sees fraud prevention, ISO 20022 value, cross-border payment performance and ROI moving higher on the executive agenda. Lapierre expects AI, operational resilience, and the ability to adapt continuously to become important measures of progress for Sibos attendees.

Together, their outlook points to an industry entering a new phase. The foundations have been laid. Now banks have to show what they can build on top of them.

 

Fraud Dominates the Payments Agenda

Ireland expects fraud to be one of the most urgent themes in Sibos conversations this year, driven by both customer protection priorities and regulatory pressure. “What we’re seeing with our customers is an increasing focus on how they can reduce fraud and prevent fraud in the payment space,” he said.

Of course, fraud is no longer simply a back-office risk problem. Reimbursement requirements, APP fraud concerns, and growing customer expectations are pulling prevention closer to the core of payment strategy.

Institutions are also working through the practical consequences of a few years’ worth of ISO 20022 changes, particularly structured addresses and richer payment data. The difference now is that the conversation is moving beyond migration to the outcomes.

ISO 20022’s value is increasingly being measured in stronger fraud controls, more efficient processing, better customer experiences and improved economic returns.

 

ISO 20022 Enters its Value Phase

The next stage of modernization will demand a different mindset from the deadline-driven sprints of recent years. Banks that treated ISO 20022 as just a compliance exercise may now be discovering that tactical shortcuts created more to do downstream.

“Anybody who takes the minimum approach to [ISO 20022 upgrades] ends up doing twice as much work,” Ireland said.

That fact is resonating strongly now with Swift offering solutions like Case Management and the automation of exceptions and investigations (E&I). Why do it now? Because waiting until requirements become unavoidable narrows the chance to capture value.

The better approach is to anticipate the direction of travel and connect regulatory work to ROI, customer experience, and the G20 goals for cross-border payments around speed, cost, access, and transparency.

“Embrace some of those regulatory requirements and take the benefit from them earlier,” Ireland said.

Lapierre sees the issue through the lens of future-proofing technology architecture.

“Change is a constant,” she said, channeling ancient Greek philosophy for her Sibos 2026 outlook. “It’s about embracing the fact that there is continuous change, and that means adopting technologies that are built for continuous change.”

 

AI Needs to Get Out of Pilot Mode

AI will be impossible to avoid at Sibos 2026, but Lapierre is less interested in how often it appears at the conferences than in whether banks are converting AI pilots into production use cases.

She’s a believer who notes that AI can process huge amounts of data, identify patterns, learn over time, and surface anomalies. In payments, that creates possibilities across fraud detection, sanctions screening, analytics, and monitoring. But enthusiasm is not deployment, she said. There are known issues to contend with.

“Many pilots involving AI get stuck in pilot mode before they can reach production,” Lapierre said, voicing the frustrations of senior management in H2 2026.

The obstacle is often data, she added. AI requires rich, trusted information, yet payments data remains fragmented within organizations. If data quality is weak, the output becomes hard to trust. That’s why the strongest near-term opportunities are those that augment human abilities rather than removing them from the process.

“The use cases that present the strongest near-term potential to get productized are those that have a human in the loop with embedded explainability,” Lapierre said.

In that kind of model, AI does the heavy computational work and surfaces intelligence to people who remain responsible for prioritization, judgment and action.

 

Operational Resilience Moves from Backup to Optionality

Traditional resilience planning focused on catastrophic failure: a system goes down, a backup takes over, and operations recover. Those capabilities remain essential, but they are now table stakes in business continuity.

And some ‘fixes’ come with issues of their own. Lapierre argues that multiplying infrastructures without considering how they work together creates a new problem. Fragmented systems may reduce concentration risk yet ironically make it harder to recover fast when a rail, platform or service blanks out.

“Real independence is about having optionality and business continuity rather than fragmentation,” she said.

That reframes resilience around agility. Banks need to be able to switch configurations, reroute activity, and continue operating through disruption. More systems do not automatically create greater resilience. Architecture, interoperability, and the capacity to respond fast matter just as much.

 

Corporate Customers Move Closer to the Payment

Experts say the Sibos agenda will also be shaped by a more engaged corporate customer.

Corporate payment processes were once closer to “fire and forget”: create the payment file, send it to the bank and confirm later that funds moved successfully. That model is changing as corporates become more involved in sanctions screening, payment validation, instant payments, and transaction tracking.

“What corporates are demanding from banks now is getting closer to the payment process than they were before,” Ireland said.

Treasurers can see the value of instant payments in practical terms, including moving money into deposit faster and improved FX. They also want greater payment visibility without having to call their bank to find out where a transaction stands.

Corporates also perceive banks and PSPs as guides to emerging technologies.

“They’re looking towards their banks to provide them with options in this area where they can try out and see what works best for them,” Ireland said, pointing to areas like AI and tokenized deposits. He said the relationship also runs both ways. Banks increasingly need corporates to provide richer, more structured data to support ISO 20022, sanctions screening, pre-validation and payment visibility.

Ireland expects that exchange to become increasingly important as corporates ask their banking and business payment partners to help innovate while banks ask customers to participate more actively in modernization.

 

Cross-border Payments Face a Higher Bar

Another important measure of progress at Sibos 2026 will be how the industry is performing against the G20 priorities for cross-border payments.

Speed has improved markedly, even if perceptions haven’t always kept up. Ireland pointed to Swift GPI data showing that the old assumption of cross-border payments routinely taking several days no longer reflects the reality of much of the market.

Cost has also become more competitive as digital challengers and disintermediation put pressure on traditional models. Transparency, however, remains an area where Ireland and Lapierre believe there is considerably more work to do (and benefit from).

That will put greater focus on capabilities such as GPI payment tracking, Confirmation of Payee, Verification of Payee, and other forms of payment pre-validation. Corporate customers increasingly expect to know where payments are, whether beneficiary information is correct, and whether transactions have completed successfully.

Payment visibility is becoming part of the CX, rather than a separate operational capability.

 

From Talking to Doing at Sibos 2026

That may ultimately be the best test of Sibos 2026 itself.

AI, digital assets, ISO 20022 advances, and payments modernization are no longer new topics. The more revealing question is whether the industry can point to deployment, collaboration, and measurable progress. It looms over the entire sector.

“The big difference is those who move [projects] from talking to doing,” Lapierre said.

She will be looking for institutions that are co-designing solutions, forming partnerships, and running real experiments, including proofs of concept and MVPs.

“I’m very curious to see those that are running actual experiments,” she said.

That is also where Ireland’s focus on ROI becomes especially relevant. After years of spending on regulatory and infrastructure change, banks need modernization to produce tangible operational and commercial returns.

“A lot of money has gone into payments,” Ireland said. “As your costs go up in your operation, you’ve got to start to find a return on that investment.”

Sibos 2026 arrives at an important point in the payments cycle. Banks have spent years responding to regulatory mandates, bettering infrastructures and preparing for new standards. Now comes the hard(er) part.

The industry must demonstrate that modernization can viably reduce fraud, improve resilience, create better CX, accelerate cross-border payments, and turn technologies such as AI into practical business value, he said.

Conversation at Sibos will be less ‘what’s next’ and more ‘what can you prove now?’