Day three in Miami put trust at the centre of the agentic payments debate, from Mastercard and Société Générale on stage to the Big Issue Debate. Lloyds and Visa settled live obligations in a stablecoin, Chainlink and DTCC demonstrated cross-chain repo, and The Fintech Times filmed five interviews, including Temenos, BNP Paribas, SEB and Arf.
If Tuesday in Miami was about putting AI agents to work inside the bank, Wednesday asked what has to be true before they act for customers and counterparties outside it. Trust ran through the third day of Sibos, from a morning panel on agentic payments to the Big Issue Debate. Away from the stages, settlement kept edging on to new forms of money: Lloyds and Visa settled live payment obligations in a stablecoin, HSBC named its Hong Kong dollar coin, and Chainlink and DTCC put cross-chain repo on stage. The Fintech Times spent the day on camera, with five interviews including two from Temenos.
Trust has to travel with the payment
The sharpest exchange of the morning came on a panel on agentic payments moderated by Swift‘s Vicky Lang. Johan Gerber, Executive Vice President of Network Products and Real-Time Payments at Mastercard, argued that trust has to be transferable through the whole life of a transaction, and that it starts with whether there is a real consumer behind an agent, not just a real agent. Banks and networks, he said, will not get to decide whether they take part in agentic commerce, because it is the end user who chooses to hand payment credentials to an agent. He expects the debate about human oversight to fade within two or three years as transactions move at machine speed, and told of a bank whose call centre took a call from an agent asking to renegotiate a customer’s credit card terms, only to find it had no procedure for it.
Christophe Tummers, Group Chief Data Officer at Société Générale, urged banks to agree common infrastructure and standards quickly, “because if we don’t, somebody will impose it on us”. Greg Williamson, Head of Fraud Product Commercialisation Strategy at Nasdaq, warned that AI-driven attacks will come faster and in greater volume, while noting that agents can behave more predictably than people, which helps detection. Stephany Kirkpatrick, Advisor in Residence at EY, offered a counterweight on human review, pointing out that fatigue naturally sets in when people review information and that humans make mistakes every day.
Trust under pressure
The organiser’s Big Issue Debate took the same question up a level, with Mike Aiello, Scott Depasquale, Clair Mills, Mark Monaco and Simon de Montfort Walker on how the industry manages its dependencies as decentralised finance and AI-driven automation change the way institutions work together. David Crawford, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Pay.UK, who spoke on Wednesday’s Trust Under Attack panel, said in a comment shared with The Fintech Times that fraud and cyber risk are “the fastest-moving and most immediate AI-related shifts”, and that no single organisation has full sight of the landscape, so fraud-proofing payments depends on payment providers, technology companies, government and law enforcement sharing data.
Wednesday’s View from the Top sessions carried the partnership theme. Bank of America‘s Co-President, Dean Athanasia, in conversation with Trade Treasury Payments’ Joy Macknight, said “payments are the lifeblood of any economy”, and argued that no single institution can modernise global commerce alone, so banks have to set competition aside and build what is right for the industry through platforms such as Swift.
New money in the plumbing
Lloyds Banking Group and Visa said on Wednesday they had settled USD 750,000 of live payment obligations in USDC during a seven-day pilot. Lloyds bought the stablecoin through Archax and booked it via its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey, running its own Canton node, while Visa settled on a separate public chain; funds reached Visa in the US in under an hour, including at weekends. Lloyds describes it as the first such trial between Visa and a major UK banking group. Peter Left, its Head of Digital Assets, said the pilot let the bank “move beyond theory and test these capabilities in a real-world setting”.
In Hong Kong, HSBC named its licensed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HSBC RedCoin. It is due in the second half of 2026 through PayMe and the HSBC HK Mobile App, starting with person-to-person and merchant payments. In Miami, the Swift Theatre ran sessions on taking the ledger from vision to implementation and on the Swift payments scheme in action, and DZ Bank told Sibos TV it is one of the first debtor banks in Europe to join the scheme.
Collateral and corporate actions
Post-trade had its own day. In her View from the Top session, Stephanie Eckermann, Executive Board Member at Deutsche Börse Group and Chair of Clearstream, argued that the path forward is hybrid: market infrastructures hold trillions in systemic assets, more than EUR 23 trillion at Clearstream alone, most of it not yet digitised, so the industry has to meet the market where it stands, letting participants hold traditional securities and digital assets in one portfolio and move between established rails and digital registers at their own pace. Chainlink launched Fulcrum, a cross-chain repo flow that separates the venue where a financing agreement is managed from the networks where cash and collateral settle, and demonstrated a cross-chain securities financing transaction with DTCC, whose Collateral AppChain will use the Chainlink Runtime Environment. In the afternoon, the Standards Forum session One Standard, Many Realities, with speakers including DTCC’s Adam Watson and SEB’s Christine Strandberg, turned to the global future of corporate actions, where the case for fixing fragmentation before automating it was a recurring one.
Temenos: from the expectation gap to programmable money
Commercial partner Temenos put two of its senior people in front of our cameras at the press lounge. Will Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer, sat down to talk about The Banking Expectation Gap, the global edition of the research Temenos produced with Celent and launched at Sibos this week. It surveyed 2,515 consumers across Europe, the US, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa, plus 216 banking leaders. Almost three in four consumers (73 per cent) are only moderately satisfied or less with their main bank, a quarter have recently considered switching, and 53 per cent are dissatisfied with payments, while 56 per cent of retail banks say keeping customers has got harder. Our conversation was set to cover what that “switchable middle” of dissatisfied but not yet departed customers means for banks, why payments sit so close to the centre of the frustration, where boards’ view of their customers differs most from the data, and what waiting two or three years to act will cost, with 46 per cent of banks planning major core changes in 2027. Our written feature on the research, Banks face a switchable middle as loyalty drivers shift (https://thefintechtimes.com/banks-face-a-switchable-middle-as-loyalty-drivers-shift/), is already live.
Mick Fennell, Business Line Director for Payments, followed up the case he made on Monday’s exhibitor stage with Kaue Tozzi, that AI and tokenisation are two sides of the same transformation. Our conversation was set to cover what in agentic commerce and programmable money is genuinely live rather than a slide in a deck, what breaks first in a bank’s payments stack when software agents start initiating payments, whether banks need to pick a winner between tokenised deposits, stablecoins and CBDCs or build so that it does not matter, and where trust sits when a machine is transacting, the same question the morning panel wrestled with. Temenos’ own research puts a number on that gap: 68 per cent of consumers would use conversational AI for queries, but fewer than half would let it pay bills or make purchases for them. Both interviews will be released shortly.
The Fintech Times on day three
The Fintech Times also sat down with BNP Paribas Securities Services, SEB and Arf on Wednesday.
Camille Papillard, Deputy Head of the Financial Intermediaries and Corporates client line at BNP Paribas Securities Services, picked up where her colleague Wayne Hughes left off on Tuesday, but from the post-trade end, building on the Making T+1 a Reality panel she sat on earlier in the week. The US and Canada already settle on T+1, and the EU, the UK and Switzerland move from T+2 next October. “It’s quite a journey,” she said, because Europe is fragmented, with 32 central securities depositories, 15 clearing houses, ten currencies and many cut-off times. Getting there takes industry collaboration on standards, data and aligned testing, and coordination inside each firm, from front to back office, so funding arrives in the right currency at the right time and lending desks recall securities on time. Competition between CSDs has so far been limited, she said, but it is moving: Euronext is pushing into France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Euroclear has cut equity settlement fees, and Clearstream is proposing its investor CSD model. Whether that is enough, she was not sure. Tokenisation, in the short term, is “rather adding to the fragmentation rather than reducing it”, as CSDs build their own projects and new digital CSDs arrive. BNP Paribas has appointed a head of digital assets in Securities Services to move from experimentation to industrialisation and build a single place for clients to hold traditional and digital assets, custodying only regulated assets and moving at the pace of regulation. “We want to do it right,” she said. “We want to do it safely.”
Ann Magnusson, Head of Investor Services at SEB, joined us to talk about the future of CSDs and custodians in a digital asset world, the cost and complexity of running legacy market infrastructure alongside blockchain-based systems, and whether Europe can build globally competitive capital markets, including what the rest of the continent might learn from the Nordic success in moving household savings into investment.
Ali Erhat Nalbant, co-founder and Chief Executive of Arf, a Swiss-regulated liquidity and settlement platform for licensed cross-border payment institutions, came in to talk about cross-border liquidity: why prefunding has become such a burden on the industry, and the shift from prefunded accounts to on-demand settlement liquidity. Arf provides short-term USDC credit lines to payment companies and, with Huma Finance, joined the Circle Payments Network as a credit provider last year.
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