This week, we’ve been on the ground at Swift’s annual conference Sibos, this year held in Miami, during which we’ve seen the usual flurry of launch and development announcements. Here, we take you through some of our highlights and key takeaways from across the event.
As we’ve walked across the busy showfloor, met with many of you across the industry and seen leaders take to the stage, it’s clear that tokenised deposits are a major point of focus for many of the biggest banks, with tokenisation now firmly embedded across payments. While in the past we’d have met digital asset and payments people from the same banks individually, those meetings are now being jointly held as the technology becomes more central.
By contrast, stablecoins are less of a priority for many banks, although all of them are working out where both stablecoins and tokenisation fit. It is not an either or, more of a finding the right use cases for each.
Away from digital assets, Swift remains the central focus for banks’ cross-border money movement (Sibos is Swift’s conference), although competition from fintechs is raising the bar in terms of what is expected. On the networks side, meanwhile, the focus is increasingly on collections, with a number of players are increasingly targeting banks as a core growth area.
There is also some interest in the securities space from traditionally payments-focused providers, suggesting that we could see a blurring of lines between securities and payments in the future.
Key news and announcements from Sibos 2026
During the event’s opening plenary, Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso revealed that the company’s blockchain-based ledger, which it first announced at last year’s Sibos in Germany, is now live and that, by the end of 2026, “at least 19 banks” will use it across “five major currencies”, powering always-on payments using tokenised deposits. Blockchain-focused Chainlink also announced it is working to enable financial institutions to connect to Swift’s blockchain ledger through the Chainlink platform.
We also saw Citi extend Citi Token Services, which leverages tokenised deposits and blockchain technology to move money internationally, to Japan and the UAE – increasing the number of markets it reaches to seven.
As expected, there were a number of other Swift-related announcements, as banks and financial institutions announced new integrations with its network. Citi has gone live with multiple markets on the Swift Payments Scheme, enabling banks to access numerous cross-border markets to send instant payments and eliminate the need to build local infrastructure and agree new banking relations in each new market. Swift also launched a new industry initiative enabling consumers to send money to friends and family internationally using ‘pay-by-alias’ identifiers such as mobile numbers and email addresses.
Several banks also unveiled a range of other new solutions in Miami. Bank of America was one of the busiest, launching new trade and treasury management offerings, including Payments Insights, a new capability giving clients “actionable intelligence” into their cross-border flows, payment efficiency and working capital performance on their US accounts. It also announced the expansion of its ASK Global Payments Solutions (GPS), its AI-powered solution giving its teams access to institutional knowledge by leveraging the bank’s client, account and relationship data to drive faster decision making.
Elsewhere, New York-headquartered BNY is enabling other banks to leverage wallet payouts through its network, making it possible for them to send cross-border bank-to-wallet payments without needing to build their own infrastructure. HSBC has also launched HSBCnio, a new digital solution giving clients one place to track payments, check balances and set up trade loans and foreign exchange services.
