Sibos 2026 Puts Swift’s Shared Ledger, Tokenised Deposits and AI Payments in Focus

Live payments give Sibos 2026 a practical test

The key question in Miami is whether banks can bring tokenised money and AI into existing payment operations at scale. Swift’s shared ledger has moved from announcement to live transactions, while sessions on agentic commerce are beginning to tackle what controls a bank needs before software can initiate a payment. The debate now turns on operating models: how to connect new capabilities to the infrastructure banks already run, and how to manage the risks and costs that follow.

Sibos opens Monday at the Miami Beach Convention Center and runs through Thursday 1 October. It’s the first time Swift’s annual conference has been held in Miami. More than 500 speakers are scheduled across 250-plus sessions, organised into six streams covering payments, securities and FX, trade, AI and innovation, ESG, and digital assets. The organiser expects more than 10,000 delegates from over 160 countries, a turnout that would bring Miami close to last year’s Frankfurt edition.

Jane Fraser, Citi’s Chair and Chief Executive, opens the plenary programme at 11:00 on Monday. Swift Chief Executive Javier Pérez-Tasso and Chair Graeme Munro will outline the organisation’s priorities since Frankfurt. Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam champion and founder of Serena Ventures, closes the conference. That mix of financial leadership, technology and business figures reflects Sibos’s widening brief: the event now puts the industry’s longer-term operating choices on public display, alongside its established payments and standards discussions.

Other familiar elements include View from the Top interviews, the Innotribe programme, the Policy Lab, the Standards Forum, the Discover stage and Swift Theatre. Exhibitors will add their own sessions across the show floor.

Swift’s ledger moves into operational questions

Swift’s blockchain-based shared ledger is one of the clearest tests of industry execution. 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. The group includes Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, FAB and Wells Fargo.

Live activity has since begun. DBS, OCBC and UOB completed the first tokenised Singapore dollar payments over the ledger this month, following cross-border US dollar transactions. IBM released an adapter last week that allows banks to send tokenised deposit instructions through the ISO 20022 messages they already generate. Together, those developments shift attention toward how institutions can connect the ledger to existing processes.

Swift’s Monday morning theatre session will examine the next phase of cross-border payments and how its scheme and ledger initiatives might build industry momentum. A 13:00 session will focus on implementation. The same operational question appears in the vendor hall: ACI Worldwide says its Connetic payments hub will route ledger transactions alongside conventional payment flows. Its proposition is that banks could manage tokenised deposits through existing controls instead of creating a separate digital asset operation. ACI’s Phil Bruno, formerly co-lead of McKinsey’s global payments practice, is due to discuss the issue on Wednesday.

Ownera is hosting an invitation-only breakfast on Monday morning in Room 231. The planned demonstration will show collateral moving across multiple tokenised rails while the cash leg settles through Swift, with global systemically important banks, central securities depositories and custodians expected in the room.

Tokenisation tests settlement choices

The ledger is one response to a broader industry question: can tokenisation support activity across trade and settlement, and what form should the money take? Tuesday’s programme brings together Deutsche Bank, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Citi Services, HSBC, BNP Paribas and BNY to discuss whether global trade is ready for tokenisation at scale. Citi’s Brent McIntosh will address how global rules might align with digital asset adoption. Wednesday’s agenda turns to whether markets will settle with one asset or several.

The Clearing House is bringing its Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Product Officer and payments leadership to discuss tokenised deposits, the US On-Chain Money Initiative and instant payments. Standard Chartered Global Head of Digital Assets Rene Michau is scheduled to speak with The Fintech Times. Banking Circle President Mikkel Grønlykke and Chief Digital Assets Officer Kirit Bhatia will be at stand J054 to discuss bank-issued digital asset infrastructure and the future of correspondent banking.

These discussions will matter to institutions weighing how tokenised assets interact with settlement arrangements already in use. The week’s sessions point to a market still working through the practical details: connections between networks, the role of different settlement assets and the controls needed to support transactions across them.

AI brings accountability and cost into view

AI is the conference theme, but the most consequential sessions focus on agency and oversight. If a software agent can initiate a payment for a customer, banks need to define what the agent can do, how its actions are checked and who is accountable when something goes wrong. ACI’s Bridget Hall will take up the question on the exhibitor stage Tuesday at 16:00, in a session on the infrastructure for an AI-driven economy.

Temenos Business Line Director for Payments Mick Fennell is scheduled on the same stage Monday at 13:45. His session, “Agentic Commerce and Programmable Money,” will present AI and tokenisation as related parts of change in commerce and payments. XDC Network plans a private breakfast at The Bass museum on Tuesday, with a demonstration of agentic payments. FIS Co-President of Banking Jim Johnson will discuss agentic commerce and digital currency, while Jon Briggs will address tokenisation and embedded finance.

Icon Solutions’ Toine van Beusekom brings a cost-focused perspective. He argues that AI spending in a bank depends less on the price of an individual model token than on how frequently the model is called. That puts system design and usage patterns at the centre of the economics discussion.

Fraud and identity form the other side of the debate. ThetaRay Chief Executive Brad Levy is set to discuss “Know Your Agent” as a proposed compliance category alongside KYC and KYB. Smartstream is arriving with an agentic reconciliations release, and the conference programme includes a session on identity, control and compliance for agentic AI. On Thursday afternoon, Accenture’s Tom Patterson will chair a panel on quantum computing and banks’ current migration to post-quantum cryptography.

Standards work continues after the ISO 20022 switch

The global move to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments finished last November, but implementation questions remain. The Standards Forum opens Monday afternoon with a session on the standard’s unfinished journey, followed by a discussion of how AI might draw value from structured data. Swift has deferred payments changes related to structured addresses in its 2026 standards release, and the timing of that requirement is still being settled.

ISITC Chair Paul Fullam will bring the securities market perspective to the forum, making the case for moving securities markets from ISO 15022 rather than maintaining both standards indefinitely. The issue is a reminder that standards work extends beyond a payment-system migration: firms still need to decide how to handle the data and infrastructure changes that follow.

Products announced ahead of the event also reflect the effort to connect established messaging with newer systems. Bottomline launched Global Pay Connect to bridge conventional messaging and blockchain-based systems in one environment. It will be at stand I067, next to Swift. Finastra and Komgo, at stands H015 and I038, have announced an integration for digital trade finance.

Bank priorities and the next host cities

Temenos will use stand H074 to present research with Celent called The Banking Expectation Gap. It examines the distance between customer expectations and bank delivery, including the role payments play. Temenos Chief Revenue Officer William Moroney and Fennell are also scheduled for interviews during the week.

HSBC’s delegation includes Tom Elliott, Chief Operating Officer of Global Trade Solutions, and Melissa Tuozzolo, Global Head of Client Service, at stand D025. Bank of America’s Tom Durkin, Global Head of CashPro, and AJ McCray, Head of Global Payments Product, will discuss payments, with McCray focusing on the economics of instant and cross-border transactions and the challenge of containing fraud. Itaú is bringing a delegation to meet institutional clients. Google Cloud will host a Tuesday morning roundtable after announcing a five-year agentic AI partnership with BNP Paribas last week. Red Hat’s Ramón Villarreal will address what account-to-account payment rails need to compete with cards.

Miami is the first of three consecutive first-time host cities for Sibos. The conference moves to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 20 to 23 September 2027, then to Paris in 2028, Swift’s fiftieth anniversary year. This week’s discussions will offer a useful measure of where financial institutions stand: the ledger has reached live payments, while AI and standards work are bringing operating controls, costs and integration choices into sharper focus.

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