Sibos opens in Miami on Monday with more than 500 speakers across 250 sessions. Jane Fraser opens, Serena Williams closes, and the week’s running argument is how banks put AI, tokenised deposits and Swift’s new ledger into production.
Sibos 2026 opens on Monday at the Miami Beach Convention Center and runs to Thursday 1 October, the first time Swift’s annual gathering has come to Miami. The theme this year is digital finance for AI-driven economies, and the programme runs to more than 500 speakers across 250-plus sessions in six streams: payments, securities and FX, trade, AI and innovation, ESG and digital assets. The organiser expects more than 10,000 delegates from over 160 countries, which would put Miami close to the Frankfurt edition of a year ago.
The Fintech Times is on the ground for all four days. Mark Walker, Editorial Director, will be on site with a film crew, publishing a daily round-up and recording interviews with banks and technology providers throughout the week. If you are in Miami and have something worth saying on camera, the editorial desk is at editor@disruptsmedia.com.
The stage
Jane Fraser, Chair and Chief Executive of Citi, gives the opening plenary at 11:00 on Monday, and Swift’s Chief Executive Javier Pérez-Tasso and Chair Graeme Munro will set out where the co-operative’s own agenda has moved to since Frankfurt. The closing plenary belongs to Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam champion and founder of Serena Ventures, which tells you something about how Sibos now sees itself: less a messaging standards conference, more a place where the largest institutions in finance rehearse their next decade in public.
Around the plenaries the familiar Sibos machinery is all back: the View from the Top interviews, Innotribe’s conference within a conference, the Policy Lab where regulators sit with technologists, the Standards Forum, the Discover stage for younger companies and the Swift Theatre for the co-operative’s own product sessions. Exhibitor stages carry a second layer of programming from the floor.
Theme one: the ledger goes live
The story Swift most wants told this week is its blockchain-based shared ledger. Announced in Frankfurt last year, it was declared ready for use in July with 17 banks across six continents lined up to pioneer tokenised deposit payments on it, including Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, FAB and Wells Fargo. Since then the transactions have started to flow. DBS, OCBC and UOB completed the first live tokenised Singapore dollar payments over the ledger this month, days after cross-border US dollar transactions, and IBM released an adapter last week that lets banks send tokenised deposit instructions using the ISO 20022 messages they already produce.
Swift opens Monday morning in its own theatre with a session on the next evolution of cross-border payments, covering how its scheme and ledger initiatives move from strategy to industry momentum, followed at 13:00 by a walk through the ledger’s implementation. The theme carries into the vendor hall. ACI Worldwide announced last week that its Connetic payments hub will route Swift ledger transactions alongside conventional flows, so that banks can run tokenised deposits through the same operational controls rather than standing up a parallel digital asset operation. That framing, one payments operation or two, is likely to be the sharpest practical question of the week, and ACI’s Phil Bruno, formerly co-lead of McKinsey’s global payments practice, is in Miami to argue it on Wednesday.
Ownera is going one step further on Monday morning with an invitation-only breakfast in Room 231 showing collateral moving across multiple tokenised rails while the cash leg settles through Swift, with global systemically important banks, CSDs and custodians in the room.
Theme two: tokenisation at scale
If the ledger is Swift’s answer, tokenisation is the industry’s wider question. Tuesday’s programme asks whether global trade is ready for tokenisation at scale, with a panel drawing on Deutsche Bank, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Citi Services, HSBC, BNP Paribas and BNY, and Citi’s Brent McIntosh takes on the regulatory side in a session on aligning global rules for digital asset adoption. Wednesday follows with a session on whether the industry ends up with one settlement asset or many.
The Clearing House will have its Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Product Officer and payments leadership in Miami talking about tokenised deposits and the On-Chain Money Initiative in the United States, alongside the growth of instant payments. Standard Chartered’s Rene Michau, Global Head of Digital Assets, will sit down with The Fintech Times during the week, and Banking Circle is bringing its Chief Digital Assets Officer Kirit Bhatia and President Mikkel Grønlykke to stand J054 to talk about bank-issued digital asset infrastructure and where correspondent banking goes next.
Theme three: AI moves from pilot to payment
AI is in the title of the conference, and the interesting sessions are the ones that ask who is accountable when a machine acts. ACI’s Bridget Hall takes the exhibitor stage on Tuesday at 16:00 with a session on building the backbone of an AI-driven economy, with the underlying question of what a bank must check before an agent is allowed to initiate a payment on a customer’s behalf. Temenos is on the same stage on Monday at 13:45, where Mick Fennell, Business Line Director for Payments, will argue that AI and tokenisation are two sides of one transformation under the title Agentic Commerce and Programmable Money.
XDC Network is making the case that agentic payments are already running rather than roadmapped, with a private breakfast on Tuesday at The Bass museum and a demonstration promised on camera. FIS is bringing Jim Johnson, Co-President of Banking, to talk about how agentic commerce and digital currency are reshaping the bank, with Jon Briggs on tokenisation and embedded finance. Icon Solutions‘ Toine van Beusekom is in Miami with a more sober point: the cost of AI in a bank is driven less by the price of a token than by how often a model is called at all, so architecture decisions matter more than the model provider.
Fraud is the other half of the AI conversation. ThetaRay’s Chief Executive Brad Levy is available on the case for Know Your Agent as a new compliance category alongside KYC and KYB, Smartstream arrives with an agentic reconciliations release, and the conference programme includes a session on identity, control and compliance for agentic AI. Further out on the horizon, Accenture‘s Tom Patterson is chairing a Banking on Quantum panel on Thursday afternoon on how banks are already migrating to post-quantum cryptography.
Theme four: ISO 20022, unfinished
The global switch to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments completed last November, but Miami will treat it as unfinished business. The Standards Forum opens on Monday afternoon with a session titled the unfinished journey of ISO 20022, followed by one on AI’s role in extracting value from structured data, and the timing of the structured address requirement is still being settled after Swift deferred the payments changes in its 2026 standards release. ISITC Chair Paul Fullam brings the securities side of the argument to the Standards Forum, making the case for moving securities markets off ISO 15022 rather than running both standards indefinitely.
Bottomline, on stand I067 next to Swift, launched its Global Pay Connect platform ahead of the show to bridge conventional messaging and blockchain-based systems in a single environment, and Finastra and Komgo are at H015 and I038 with a newly announced integration for digital trade finance.
Temenos at Sibos
Temenos is at stand H074 and will use the show to release new research produced with Celent, The Banking Expectation Gap, looking at the distance between what customers now expect of their banks and what banks deliver, including the role payments play in that gap. The findings will be discussed at the stand during the week, and The Fintech Times will be sitting down with Chief Revenue Officer William Moroney and with Mick Fennell in Miami, with both interviews to follow on this site.
Who else is in the room
The banks are here in force. HSBC is fielding Tom Elliott, Chief Operating Officer of Global Trade Solutions, and Melissa Tuozzolo, Global Head of Client Service, from stand D025. Bank of America‘s Tom Durkin, Global Head of CashPro, and AJ McCray, Head of Global Payments Product, will both be on camera with The Fintech Times, McCray on the economics of instant and cross-border payments without letting fraud scale with them. Itaú is bringing a delegation to meet institutional clients, Google Cloud hosts a roundtable on Tuesday morning fresh from its five-year agentic AI partnership with BNP Paribas announced last week, and Red Hat‘s Ramón Villarreal is on site on what account-to-account rails still need in order to compete with cards.
Looking ahead
Miami is the first of three consecutive first-time hosts. Sibos returns to Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands from 20 to 23 September 2027, goes to Paris for the first time in 2028, which is also Swift’s fiftieth anniversary year.
Doors open at 09:00 on Monday. The Fintech Times’ day one round-up will be published on Monday evening Miami time.
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