When the global banking community gathers in Frankfurt for Sibos 2025 at the end of September, the conversations will be shaped as much by today’s macroeconomic realities as by tomorrow’s technology breakthroughs. Higher-for-longer interest rates, shifting tariff regimes and supply chain realignments are redefining balance sheet strategies, while the digitalisation of payments, the push for “on time” rather than just “real time” settlement, and the uncertain trajectory of tokenised money all demand practical, resilient solutions.

Bank of America’s Global Payment Solutions (GPS) leaders – Christian Stolcke, Greg Kavanaugh, Winnie Chen, Phil Carmalt and Terence Tan – highlighted how these dynamics were converging to change the priorities of treasurers, banks, and regulators alike. From the resilience required to handle unprecedented peaks in United States dollar (USD) flows, to the practical limitations of stablecoins, to the fraud challenges embedded in instant payments, their perspectives offered a roadmap of the themes and tensions likely to dominate the discussions in Frankfurt.

Setting the scene: Macro headwinds, tariffs and the rate path

According to the bank’s GPS leaders, clients had anticipated the policies of the new US administration, but they have generally been surprised at the tone and intensity of the changes. However, Christian Stolcke, head of global financial institutions, NBFIs and governments in GPS said, “More impactful for transaction banking was how rates have stayed higher for longer. Many institutions budgeted for a faster (interest rate) easing cycle this year. Instead, spreads have held up for deposit-rich franchises, lifting net interest income for longer than planned.”

Bank of America’s vantage point came from recent Financial Institutions and Government (FIG) client events in Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where the mood had been “cautiously optimistic” as higher-for-longer rates bolstered net interest margins. Stolcke flagged that the firm’s economists still expected cuts in September and again by year-end, underlining how sensitive FIG strategies remained to the glide path of policy rates.

Geopolitics intersected with rates through tariffs and supply chains. “China-plus-one diversification continues,” Stolcke said. “But today’s tariff regime – unpredictable in timing and size and differing by origin – has complicated decisions around capital expenditures, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic supply-chain planning for corporates.” Against that backdrop, the bank’s presence in more than 35 countries had helped clients to re-think manufacturing and supply chain strategies, a secular trend he believed would persist as tariff levels normalise at higher levels.

He also noted a concentration of peak-period USD settlement volumes at fewer institutions, raising the focus on and investment in resilience and capacity. FIG clients, Stolcke said, were explicitly seeking stability, predictability and scale from partners that could absorb “very large swings” while maintaining stringent risk controls – investments that had become table stakes as transaction banking grew ever more platform-intensive.

Asked whether the shift to regional trade would dampen dollar usage, Stolcke stressed there had been no sustained drop in USD flows this year relative to other major trade currencies. "In fact, transaction volumes in the first and second quarter hit all-time records,” he said. Corporate behaviour helped explain it: front-loading of inventories and hedging had supported near-term flows even as firms re-designed value chains.

Alongside Stolcke’s macro-outlook, Greg Kavanaugh, global head of GPS products, pointed out that while clients were concerned about inflation and foreign exchange (FX) volatility, the reality was still a “wait and see” environment. Operational vigilance, he noted, was as important as broader economic narratives.

Winnie Chen, head of GPS for Asia Pacific (APAC), added that while renminbi (RMB) usage had climbed over two decades, Bank of America already clears over 140 currencies for clients and was seeing deeper take-up of its FX solutions among financial institutions (FIs). “The rising cost of keeping infrastructure current, compliant and cross-border has spurred more bank-to-bank and bank-to-fintech collaboration,” she said. “Institutions are increasingly leveraging each other’s strengths rather than building in isolation.”

Chen pointed out another macro nuance: the US consumer remained relatively healthy, which was central to FIG outcomes given banks’ exposure to retail and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By contrast, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) growth had been more sluggish, tempering confidence in parts of the region. Meanwhile, private capital looked vibrant, with significant mandates seeking deployment into mainland China and Southeast Asia – particularly in renewables, energy and sustainable industry themes. Remittance-led fintechs also tracked consumer health in key receivers like India, the Philippines and Mexico, where growth remained robust.

What FI clients want now: Resilience plus advisory at the point of need

The thread running through the discussion was a shift from pure product delivery to embedded advisory. Chen said that the model Bank of America incubated on the corporate side – hiring seasoned treasurers and codifying best practice – will now be extended to FIs. “The idea is to translate our data exhaust into sector-relevant insight and operational recommendations, not just reconcilements and reports,” she explained.

That advisory remit broadened the skillset of the transaction banker. As Stolcke put it, treasury management officers covering the FIG sector now require a more holistic skillset, including, for example, being a “technologist” who understands architecture, real-time payment implications for receivables, and supply-chain and procurement know-how, in addition to the traditional treasury management skills. “It is a more all-round role than a decade ago,” he said, “reflecting how payments and liquidity have become embedded in clients’ operating systems.”

One illustration was transactional FX hedging “at the tip of the treasurer’s fingers.” Through CashPro, treasurers could lock rates without a swap contract or the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) agreement, up to 365 days out. This gave chief financial officers (CFOs) and treasurers certainty around dividend distributions, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) cash flows or limited partner (LP) returns. That consumer-grade convenience – “wake up, see the macro print, hedge on your phone” – was very much the expectation seeping from retail into institutional toolsets.

CashPro itself was being “powered up” with artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver more self-service, proactive information delivery and predictive insights: where a payment sat in the cycle, how monthly cash patterns behaved through volatility, and what that implied for working capital. “It is as much an operational cockpit as a payments initiation screen,” Chen said.

The bank also emphasised discipline amid noise. Kavanaugh cautioned against over-rotating toward emerging tech at the expense of today’s existing rails. “The trade-off is real and must be managed in line with client priorities,” he said. “Our principle is to help clients today and be ready for tomorrow, sequencing investment accordingly.”

Even outside pure payments, macro narratives were filtered for operational relevance. Kavanaugh pointed to watch-lists around inflation and FX while noting the absence of material stress indicators such as widespread line draws or cash hoarding. “The message is not complacency but preparedness – risk frameworks, positions and support calibrated to what is actually moving,” he explained.

Cross-border rails: From “real time” to “on time,” and the unrealised ISO 20022 dividend

“Real time is not always the corporate priority; on time often is,” Stolcke stressed. For many payers, the crucial attribute was certainty of when funds would be received, allowing treasurers to optimise liquidity while still meeting obligations. “Faster is good,” he said, “but predictability plus full transparency over a payment’s journey is often the bigger prize.”

This visibility was increasingly embedded in channels. Bank of America had backed SWIFT global payment innovation (GPI) from pilot stages and integrated GPI tracking into CashPro, exposing status data to users online or via service teams.

ISO 20022 had progressed through wave after wave of scheme transitions and was “going well globally.” Yet most institutions had focused almost entirely on the operational cutover. Stolcke said: “The bigger promise – richer messaging content, supporting smarter analytics, financial crime controls and client-facing insights – largely remains to be productised and fully monetised. Think card-style spend analysis at an institutional level: which industries you pay, seasonality, anomalies, and compliance-ready context as standard.”

The migration was not uniform, nor were the pay-offs immediate. Domestic regulations drove pace and scope, and building true cross-border low-value real-time flows still required choices about where to invest and where to partner. “No bank can build real-time capabilities everywhere,” Stolcke explained. “Our strategy is corridor-led, and includes a mix of in-house and third-party solutions.”

Beneath those choices sat an unforgiving resilience agenda. Peak cycles compressed volumes into spikes, and settlement plumbing had to flex without compromising controls. That was why the bank kept emphasising resilience, capacity, and cyber protection as strategic priorities, not “nice-to-haves” parked in risk functions.

Finally, the “consumerisation” of treasury tools continued. Clients expected to discover, decide, and execute in the same place, seeing both the micro journey of each payment and the macro patterns across months and markets. “That is what is driving our channel design – AI-powered insights, transaction statuses, liquidity forecasts – into the heart of product roadmaps,” Chen said.

Fragmentation versus interoperability: Picking your rails with discipline

For all the domestic orchestration in markets like India, Brazil, China or Hong Kong, the global picture is still more fragmented. Stolcke pointed to the US alone having several payment rails, including cheques, while alternative schemes proliferated. “For banks, corporates and intermediaries, this complicates long-term decisions on investments in interoperability,” he said.

The practical response has been to triage: invest where client corridors mattered the most and where network and scale effects can be harnessed immediately, wait and observe where (regulatory) standards remain undefined, and partner where others have already built viable solutions. “Sequencing is a competitive advantage,” Kavanaugh said. “You cannot go big into emerging technology if clients still need an improved existing rail.”

He argued that fragmentation in global payments was as much about “disaggregation” as interoperability. He cited an example from the retail industry: “It used to be that clients in this sector sent a single large cheque. Now it’s more likely 10 small instant payments for the same value. That shift creates volume at a much lower ticket size.” For banks, this meant straddling old and new rails simultaneously – SWIFT, wire or the automated clearing house (ACH) in the US on the one hand, and proliferating instant low-value schemes on the other.

“That variability – different service level agreements (SLAs), different rules, different costs – is what clients expect us to manage,” he said. Through CashPro, the bank optimised file inputs so treasurers could route payments efficiently without being burdened by the complexity of every rail. “Orchestration is as important as the pipes themselves,” he noted, stressing that banks needed to invest selectively in corridors while leveraging partners and regulators to converge where possible.

Interoperability was also a service question, not only a standard. By embedding GPI tracking and other multi-rail telemetry into CashPro, the bank reduced the operational drag on clients who simply wanted to know status and exception paths without navigating every rail’s quirks themselves. “That orchestration layer is as important as the pipes beneath it,” Chen explained.

Collaboration was rising because the economics demanded it. “The cost of staying current and compliant keeps increasing,” Chen observed, “nudging banks and fintechs to leverage each other’s infrastructure.” That was visible in cross-currency clearing, but also in how platform models exposed liquidity and settlement services via application programming interfaces (APIs) to partners that owned the last mile.

Kavanaugh also reflected on the rise of new entrants. While fintechs had “great technology,” he argued that most institutional flows still ran through banks because of safety, soundness, and regulatory compliance. “Our role is to enable those flows through our systems while ensuring the regulatory and risk regimes are intact,” he said. That often meant working with fintechs rather than against them. “The trade-off is real – you cannot go big into emerging technology while clients still need improved existing rails.”

At the same time, corridor realities differed. Near-shoring to Mexico and Canada was visible but not yet material in payments volumes, Kavanaugh said, and some changes – for instance in banknotes – reflected travel patterns rather than structural de-dollarisation. “The imperative is to temper headlines with what we are seeing from client flows,” he noted.

Expect Sibos sessions to probe how far harmonisation could go without a supranational rulebook. The bank’s view was pragmatic: use scale to cover more ground but accept that fragmentation would persist and plan accordingly.

Digital assets and tokenised money: Practical innovation, regulatory first

On stablecoins and tokenised deposits, Stolcke was clear: corporate use cases remained limited. By the bank’s read, around $27 trillion to $28 trillion of 2024 stablecoin settlement value was over 90% on- and off-ramp activity tied to crypto, not commercial payments. “That reality shapes investment appetite,” he said. “We monitor, test with peers and regulators, but scale only when there is clarity and genuine client demand.

Where tokenised deposits were piloted, they mostly optimised intra-bank book transfers; utility faded when a third-party payout burned the token back into fiat on traditional rails, losing atomicity and programmability. “Industry discussions in Singapore and Hong Kong are exploring wholesale, cross-bank settlement of tokenised deposits with programmability,” Chen said. “But the domestic layer must work before cross-border becomes credible.”

Regulatory clarity was the gating factor. “In the US, clarity from the supervising regulator will shape the roles, obligations and opportunities for commercial banks,” Stolcke explained.

Terence Tan, chief operating officer of GPS in APAC, characterised the bank’s approach of “practical innovation,” and not innovation for its own sake. That pragmatism mirrored Kavanaugh’s earlier caution about trade-offs between tomorrow’s tokens and today’s rails. Even enthusiasts conceded sequencing mattered. Chen noted the need to solve domestic settlement models before adding cross-border layers.
APAC: Scale, localisation and the risk-management reality

APAC was simultaneously a laboratory for instant payments and a thicket of regulatory variety. Phil Carmalt, head of GPS product in APAC, noted that Bank of America operated in 12 regional markets, each with a different agenda. “We stay close to regulators,” he said, “sharing international learnings – such as on beneficiary name validation – to nudge towards industry approaches without presuming a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)-style convergence.”

That variety shaped corporate priorities. Despite the noise around speed, litmus tests suggested that most corporates wanted “just in time” rather than fastest-possible payments, because working capital optimisation often preferred precision to raw velocity. “We even call it precision payments,” Carmalt explained, “because CFOs would rather hold cash until Tuesday 5pm if that still meets terms.”

Instant payments’ double-edged nature was a recurring theme. Volumes were booming at double-digit rates across many APAC markets, but once funds moved they lacked the card-like consumer protections or wire-like stoppability, increasing the premium on fraud controls at origination. “We shipped five fraud-related enhancements in just the past three months,” Carmalt said. Kavanaugh added: “Education at the front door is as important as back-end controls.”

Regional connectivity schemes have been rising, but fragmentation persists globally, as Stolcke described. The bank’s approach is to influence where possible, interconnect where valuable, and keep a close eye on rulemaking that affected cross-border solutions. In practice, that means constant trade-offs between serving local schemes well and maintaining global orchestration.

Chen’s earlier point about collaboration landed especially hard in APAC, where platform models and embedded finance accelerated. As costs of compliance and modernisation rose, banks and fintechs were increasingly comfortable co-creating, with APIs extending payments and liquidity services to partners that owned distribution or last mile.

The upshot for Sibos attendees from the region: expect insightful conversations about harmonisation that stopped short of uniformity. “Globally consistent, locally relevant is more than a slogan,” Chen said.

Operational risk, fraud and the craft of being “on time”

Across the discussion, operational resilience was never far from view. Peak-period USD volumes, cyber threats and regulatory expectations all converged in an agenda that FIG clients now asked about explicitly. That was why the firm kept prioritising capacity, compliance and protection investments – because modern transaction banking was a software-and-platform business with unforgiving uptime expectations.

Carmalt’s instant-payments caution was practical: the same attributes that delighted users on speed empowered fraudsters on irrevocability. “Hence the sprint-pace release cadence on anti-fraud features and the parallel workstream on client education,” he explained.

Tan’s “just-in-time” lens reframed a lot of treasury pain points. For many corporates, being precisely on time was both a working capital lever and a risk control, aligning with Stolcke’s earlier “on time” formulation. “We are designing tools and processes for that reality rather than chasing speed as an end in itself,” Tan said.

In the APAC discussion, Kavanaugh reinforced Carmalt’s warning that instant payments were a double-edged sword. “Fraud prevention at the front door is as important as detection at the back end – we cannot rely on one or the other,” he said. He also echoed Terence Tan’s framing of corporate needs: “Everybody wants faster until they are a victim of fraud. Precision payments – just in time, traceable and predictable – are what treasurers really value.”

Kavanaugh’s broader risk read remained cautious but calm. He said the team was monitoring classic stress signals – line usage, cash stockpiling, FX turbulence – but was not seeing material deterioration. In APAC specifically, the bank continued regulatory dialogues, sharing comparative insights to help shape safer, more interoperable schemes without insisting on uniformity. That stance recognised the region’s diversity while aiming at portable best practice, particularly on fraud, data and name-checking controls.

For Sibos, that operational focus was likely to manifest in sessions on fraud in instant ecosystems, practical GPI-based transparency, and how ISO data could finally earn its keep in analytics and compliance without adding friction. The bank’s teams would be talking in precisely those terms: measurable risk-reduction paired with user-visible certainty.

Resilience, predictability and advisory as Sibos priorities

As Sibos Frankfurt approaches, Bank of America’s FIG and GPS leaders have positioned resilience, predictability and advisory as the defining priorities for treasurers and financial institutions. The conversations underscored that resilience is not just about handling peak settlement volumes or cyber risks, but about ensuring operational continuity across fragmented rails and volatile macro cycles.

Predictability, meanwhile, is increasingly valued above raw speed. Whether through “on time” rather than “real time” settlement, precision payments that align with working capital strategies, or fraud controls embedded at the point of initiation, clients want certainty they can plan around.

Finally, the shift from product delivery to advisory signals a deeper evolution. Transaction bankers are expected to act as technologists, consultants and partners, turning data into actionable insights and guiding clients through both today’s frictions and tomorrow’s possibilities. For Bank of America, that means sequencing investment between established rails and emerging technologies, working with regulators and fintechs, and keeping client needs at the centre.

The message heading into Sibos is clear: in an era of uncertainty and innovation, the institutions that will matter most are those that can pair scale with insight, and resilience with relevance.