Four days, more than 500 speakers and the largest Sibos ever held in North America. I spent the week on the floor and in front of the camera for The Fintech Times. This is what I think Miami actually decided about tokenised money, AI agents and the customer who does not care about any of it.
Sibos has never been to Miami before and, on the organiser’s count, it has never been bigger anywhere in North America. Four days at the Miami Beach Convention Center, more than 500 speakers, six streams and a theme, digital finance for AI-driven economies, that could have been written by a committee and very nearly was. I spent all four days there for The Fintech Times, in the plenaries, on the exhibition floor and in the press lounge with a camera crew and 14 interviewees. Having now sat with the recordings, this is the week as I saw it, and what I think it settled.
My short version is that the industry spent Miami agreeing on something it has been circling for three years. The technology for tokenised money and for AI agents is no longer the argument. The argument is who carries the trust when it goes wrong, and nobody I spoke to wanted to build anything until that was answered.
The word of the week
On Monday afternoon, a few hours after Jane Fraser had told the opening plenary that Citi‘s “mandate has to move fast whilst retaining trust”, I asked Tom Durkin, who runs Bank of America’s CashPro platform, what he thought the next four days would sound like. “I think the word trust will probably be one of the most commonly used words across the exhibit hall the next four days,” he said. VIDEO: Tom Durkin, Bank of America He was right, and not in the comfortable way the word is usually used at conferences.
What struck me is that every version of the conversation ended at the same place. Fraser used it about the macro. Waller, the Federal Reserve Governor, used it about who is on the hook when an agent buys the wrong thing. Mastercard‘s Johan Gerber used it about whether there is a real consumer behind the agent. And Ann Magnusson, Head of Investor Services at SEB, put it in a way I have kept coming back to since: the industry used to trust organisations, structures and people, and “in the new world, we will also need to trust technology in a different shape and form”, which is a conversation with regulators as much as with engineers. VIDEO: Ann Magnusson, SEB
That is the lens for everything that follows.
The rails are live, so the question becomes operational
Swift came to Miami needing to show that the ledger it announced in Frankfurt was real, and I think it did. I sat in the opening plenary as Javier Pérez-Tasso said it is live with some of the largest institutions in the world, with at least 19 banks across five currencies expected by year end. During the week Citi became the first bank to run multi-market instant payments on the Swift payments scheme, Mashreq completed a live tokenised deposit transaction with Citi over the ledger, and the supplier layer arrived around it: Oracle, Cosmos, Taurus and Chainlink all announced ways of connecting a bank’s existing estate to it.
The more interesting question to me, and the one I heard answered most consistently, is what a bank does with a new rail once it has it. The old reflex was to stand up a new team. Phil Bruno, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at ACI Worldwide, who had come to our camera straight from the plenary, said that reflex is over. “The traditional way of doing things when you got new payment instruments at a bank was to create a new division and somebody who’s going to lead payment type X. I think that’s over with the kind of complexity that we have.” Interoperability, he argued, only creates value when a bank can orchestrate across it, with fraud and liquidity managed from one place rather than several. VIDEO: Phil Bruno, ACI Worldwide
His colleague Bridget Hall, who leads account-to-account payments for the Americas at ACI, was blunter about the cost of getting that wrong. Treat tokenised deposits or stablecoins as “this separate new experiment off to the side” and you have built another silo, with its own team and its own fraud controls, and fraudsters “love to try to find new angles to come in”. Her prescription is shared services across every rail, with rail-specific pieces only where a rail is genuinely different. VIDEO: Bridget Hall, ACI Worldwide Fraser’s railway gauge analogy from Monday morning, that scale comes from common standards rather than competing systems, was the plenary version of the same point.
Four kinds of money and one job for the bank
If one idea from the week travels, I suspect it will be Mick Fennell’s. The Business Line Director for Payments at Temenos used the exhibitor stage on Monday, and our interview on Wednesday, to sort the tokenised money that everyone was talking about into four types, and to give each a musketeer. Central bank digital currency is Athos, “proud, very straightforward, the moral compass”. Stablecoins are Porthos, “flamboyant, it’s out there, it’s really pushing things, it’s great fun to be with, but it’s a bit over the top”. Crypto is D’Artagnan, “a bit crazy, the backing’s not there, absolute buyer beware”. And tokenised deposits are Aramis, who “still likes the rules” but wants to improve them, which is why Fennell thinks that is “where the rubber hits the road for the banks because this is about bank money”. VIDEO: Mick Fennell, Temenos
The point of the analogy is not to pick a hero. “Maybe it’s not one for all and all for one,” he told me. Each bank has to decide which team to assemble, what the legal risk on each asset is, what services to put around them and whether a customer can redeem at par under stress. “The bank is the gatekeeper. It always goes back to what the bank’s primary role is, is that gatekeeper of trust.”
Across the week I found almost nobody who disagreed with the ranking, and the people actually running money agreed with it most. Melissa Tuozzolo, who runs the global service organisation for HSBC‘s payments business, said tokenised deposits are the thing she is most excited about because, for cross-border, “it’s just a better operational payments model than what we’ve had in the past”. It runs 24/7, which forces liquidity to run 24/7 too, and it removes the failure mode that has defined correspondent banking: “it goes or it doesn’t”, rather than getting stuck three banks down the chain. The balance sheet does not change, she pointed out; only the mechanism for moving the money does. VIDEO: Melissa Tuozzolo, HSBC
AJ McCray, Head of Global Payments at Bank of America, made the same choice from the product side. The bank’s cross-border real-time solutions lean on existing instant rails today, while sweeping money across a large corporate’s global treasury structure “would be a great use case for a tokenised deposit”. He sees the two as complementary, and expects “a long period of time” in which fiat real-time rails and tokenised solutions run side by side. VIDEO: AJ McCray, Bank of America
Even the stablecoin natives agreed. Ali Erhat Nalbant, co-founder of Arf, a Swiss-regulated liquidity provider that moves more than a billion dollars of mostly stablecoin liquidity a month, told me stablecoins have “proved that they are the top option if you are willing to move money around the world”, particularly for the weekend liquidity crunch when banks are shut. But a stablecoin is a third party and “it’s not a bank at the end of the day”, so for bank-to-bank settlement he expects “more and more deposit tokens replacing, at least intrabank or between banks, the settlements instead of stablecoins”. VIDEO: Ali Erhat Nalbant, Arf
Two caveats came up often enough to be worth recording. Fennell’s was liquidity: a correspondent bank already holds pools in many currencies, and if it now has to hold them in hundreds of stablecoins too, “you’re fragmenting your liquidity, and some of this is going off your balance sheet”. That, he said, is a bank funding problem, not a technology one. Wayne Hughes, who leads the central digital assets team in BNP Paribas Securities Services, supplied the other: the market will not sustain hundreds of blockchains and will probably end with about a dozen, so his team’s job is to be connected to the ones clients actually use, with central bank money, tokenised deposits and stablecoins all likely to have a place depending on region and use case. VIDEO: Wayne Hughes, BNP Paribas
And central bank digital currency, the subject that filled Sibos three years ago, barely surfaced except when I raised it. Nalbant’s answer was the frankest: it will exist as a concept and as a project for central banks to talk to each other, but “I don’t see the use case today”, and “AI took over the conversation and the spotlight from it”. Fennell’s digital euro, with pilots next summer and a 2029 go-live, is the exception that proves it.
Agents: inside the bank first
Tuesday belonged to the banks describing AI agents already in production. I sat through BNY, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Citi describing theirs at Google Cloud’s roundtable and the pattern was identical: agents do the work, deterministic guardrails do the vetting, and people keep the judgement. Charles Holive at BNP Paribas gave the week its best line on it, that he is not waiting for more models but for “better harness, better governance, better control”.
Tuozzolo’s account of HSBC’s journey was the most practical I heard all week. The bank started 18 months ago with basic efficiency tools and a rule that it would not be “the wild, wild west”. The first push alone gave a 10 to 15 per cent productivity gain. Then it asked which roles should no longer be done by a person at all, and started with triage: “We now have an AI agent that does that. We don’t have anybody doing this role anywhere in the world anymore.” The principle underneath it is one every bank should pin to a wall: “You don’t AI a bad process. Your first step is you fix the process, you fix the data set, and then you put AI off the top of it.” VIDEO: Melissa Tuozzolo, HSBC
That is also why she thinks the industry has the agentic conversation in the wrong order. The first step is not agentic payments but agentic flow of information, bank-to-bank agents resolving the three to five per cent of payments that end up in an investigation, with Swift providing the pipes and the standardisation. Only once the industry is comfortable with that should it move to “true agentic money movement”, because “there you get into a much higher risk base”.
Tom Elliott, Chief Operating Officer of HSBC’s Global Trade Solutions, made the same case from trade, where around four billion documents move goods every day and only one to two per cent are digital. The bank’s new Smart Checking solution is deliberately modular and “an exceptions-based workflow”, with human experts brought in for edge cases, higher-value transactions and anything the system is not confident about. VIDEO: Tom Elliott, HSBC
When my conversations did turn to agents paying, the vocabulary was remarkably consistent. The word I heard on every stage was intent. Hall added two more: “accountability and governance. What was the human’s intent when they set up an agentic payment? What is the governance that the agent can work within? And the accountability to look back and say this was the instruction, this was the governance and the guardrails, this was the intent, and these are the actions that were taken.” VIDEO: Bridget Hall, ACI Worldwide Fennell reached for an older mechanism to explain how a bank would do it: mandates. If an agent is going to make a stream of payments, the bank needs to know it is an agent so it can monitor the agreed service level, how many payments in a period and up to what threshold, which is “the kind of things that we already securely manage for our customers in the direct debit and collection process”, only faster and at higher volume. “It’s the same products, only better.” VIDEO: Mick Fennell, Temenos
Waller, speaking on Tuesday, framed the liability question the way I would expect a central banker to. Gerber, on Wednesday, framed the inevitability the way a card network would: banks will not get to decide whether they take part in agentic commerce, because it is the customer who hands credentials to the agent. Between the two of them sits the question every bank in the hall was really asking, which is how much of that risk it is prepared to carry.
The customer who does not care
For all the plumbing, the most useful conversation I had in Miami was about the person at the end of it. Temenos used the week to launch The Banking Expectation Gap, research produced with Celent across 2,515 consumers and 216 banks, and Will Moroney, its Chief Revenue Officer, sat down with me on Wednesday to talk through it. The finding that surprised him most was that three quarters of respondents were only moderately satisfied with their bank, a group Temenos calls the switchable middle. “Being moderately happy is normally not good enough for a bank to retain, definitely not to retain all the services of the customer anyway,” he said. VIDEO: Will Moroney, Temenos
His distinction between retention and loyalty is the one I would want every board to hear. “Retention is a big measure within a bank, and you can be a little bit misled by retention numbers.” The switchable middle is being “slowly disseminated out of the standard banking ecosystem” by fintechs offering a payment service here or a micro-lending product there, while the retention line on the dashboard still looks fine. And payments is where the gap opens, for a reason that is obvious once said. A customer may take out two mortgages and six personal loans in a lifetime, but payments are a daily touchpoint, “normally done under stress”, and customers are no longer benchmarking their bank against other banks but against the social media platforms and ride-hailing apps they use between payments. the numbers bear him out: 53 per cent of consumers are dissatisfied with payments, and a quarter have recently considered switching.
Moroney’s second point connects the customer back to the core. Instant payments and digital channels have been “putting slowly stress on the back office systems”, because a next-generation experience is hard to deliver on a previous-generation platform, and straight-through processing in the channel should mean straight-through processing at the back end. AI, he thinks, is the thing that finally makes modernisation unavoidable, and also the thing that makes it feasible, because for the first time banks can use it “to understand what’s going on in the legacy systems, to understand the business process, to understand the data sets and even to understand the code”. He has seen large banks that put this off for decades start looking at it this year. the finding that 46 per cent of banks plan major core changes in 2027 suggests he is not the only one seeing it.
The customer’s own view of all this was summarised for me three times in almost identical words. Bruno: consumers “don’t even care what instrument it is anymore because now it’s all in the background. They want to check out.” McCray: the bank’s vision is that “from a customer perspective, there is simply one solution”. Nalbant: “I hope the retail and consumer won’t be aware of what they are using underlying. It’s a technology, it’s a means to an end, it’s not the holy grail.” We spent four days arguing about musketeers. The customer wants to know the money arrived, in full, outside banking hours.
What Miami decided
I came away from Miami believing three things.
First, the tokenised deposit has won the argument inside the banks, not because it is the most exciting of Fennell’s four musketeers but because it is the only one that is already bank money on bank rails under bank regulation. Stablecoins will do the work banks cannot or will not do, above all weekend and exotic-corridor liquidity, and the two will coexist for years, which is exactly what McCray and Hughes said.
Second, the agentic conversation has matured by going backwards. A year ago it was about agents paying. This year the people running real operations wanted to talk about agents repairing payments, triaging mail and checking trade documents, with a person on the loop and a mandate underneath. Tuozzolo’s “you don’t AI a bad process” is the sentence I will be quoting.
Third, and this is the one I would put on the first slide of every strategy deck, Moroney’s switchable middle is the real competitive threat and almost no bank’s dashboard shows it. Three quarters of customers are moderately satisfied. Payments is where they feel it. And the fintechs that gave birth to this industry are quietly taking the slices of the relationship that retention numbers do not measure.
Sibos moves to Singapore next September, then Paris and, in 2029, Dubai. Fraser told the plenary that “if we break trust, that is a huge problem for the macro, for the markets, for everywhere”. Miami’s achievement, as I saw it, was to make the whole industry agree with her before anyone wrote the cheque.
Check out the full interviews I recorded in Miami for The Fintech Times on our Fintech TV page
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