Sibos 2025, hosted in Frankfurt under the theme “The next frontiers of global finance”, arrives at a decisive moment for the global financial industry. Banks and financial institutions must strike a balance between maintaining continuity in established infrastructures and accelerating adoption of emerging digital models. They also face the pressing challenge of safeguarding resilience across increasingly interconnected ecosystems, while engaging with peers, regulators and market infrastructures to define the standards of tomorrow. Sebastien Avot, head of institutional cash and trade finance for Asia Pacific at Deutsche Bank, outlined the bank’s priorities in advance of the event. His views highlighted how Deutsche Bank was approaching payments transformation, operational resilience and the evolving value of Sibos as a platform for industry collaboration. Building bridges between legacy rails and emerging models Avot emphasised that established infrastructures were far from obsolete. “We view legacy infrastructures such as ISO 20022 and SWIFT gpi not as constraints, but as foundational elements of the global payments ecosystem. They provide scale, resilience and regulatory alignment that our clients depend on every day,” he said. Alongside this foundation, Deutsche Bank was investing in new distributed ledger initiatives. “We are actively investing in new models like Partior that harness blockchain, tokenisation, and 24/7 real-time settlement to meet the next generation of client needs,” he explained. The bank’s strategy, he noted, was to run these tracks side by side. “Key is balance: ensuring interoperability so that clients can benefit from innovations without disruption, while continuing to rely on the trust and global reach of established rails. Our strategy is to run these tracks in parallel—helping shape standards, ensuring compatibility and selectively scaling new solutions where they deliver tangible efficiency, liquidity and transparency benefits,” he said. In this way, Deutsche Bank aimed to “safeguard continuity for today while accelerating the transition to tomorrow’s financial architecture.” Resilience and trust in a hyper-connected ecosystem The shift towards tokenisation, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platforms, and application programming interface (API)-driven connectivity introduced new vulnerabilities that banks had to address. Avot identified several areas of concern: “Tokenisation introduces new forms of asset custody and settlement risk. AI brings risks of bias, explainability gaps and adversarial manipulation. And in an API-driven, interconnected ecosystem, dependencies on third-party vendors and hybrid architectures increase the potential for cascading failures, cyber exploitation and concentration risks,” he said. According to Avot, resilience frameworks needed to evolve in parallel with innovation. “To secure against these risks, banks must evolve resilience frameworks on several fronts including AI governance, vendor oversight and data security,” he explained. He added that resilience would become a defining feature of trust in the digital era. “The challenge is not to avoid innovation, but to ensure resilience evolves in parallel with it. A bank’s ability to safeguard API ecosystems, manage vendor interdependencies, and govern AI will increasingly define trust in digital finance,” he observed. The evolving value of Sibos Avot also reflected on how Sibos had changed. “Sibos has always been a milestone event for the financial industry, but its role has clearly evolved,” he said. For Deutsche Bank, the priorities in Frankfurt revolved around three interconnected themes. First, ecosystem building: “The next frontier of payments and liquidity is interconnected. We see Sibos as the ideal platform to engage with clients, peers, fintechs and technology partners to co-create solutions that address real client needs—from instant cross-border payments to digital assets and tokenised deposits.” Second, regulatory engagement. “With the acceleration of 24/7 clearing, ISO 20022 adoption, and new regulatory frameworks emerging across markets, Sibos allows us to have constructive dialogue with regulators and infrastructure providers. Our aim is to help shape standards that ensure resilience, interoperability and trust across the ecosystem.” Third, standard setting and innovation. “The future of global finance will be defined by common standards that enable scale. Sibos is the place where the industry can converge on data, technology and operational frameworks. We are keen to contribute our experience in areas like foreign exchange, high-value clearing and cross-border liquidity to help advance these conversations.” In this context, Avot described Sibos as “less about traditional deal-making and more about thought leadership, ecosystem collaboration, and influencing the regulatory and technological direction of our industry. It’s a moment where the global financial community pauses to collectively set the course for the next decade of innovation, resilience and growth.” Shaping tomorrow’s financial architecture together Deutsche Bank’s outlook ahead of Sibos Frankfurt 2025 underscored the need for balance, resilience and collaboration. By maintaining trust in legacy infrastructures while scaling blockchain-based models, evolving risk frameworks to meet the demands of tokenisation and AI, and using Sibos as a forum for standard setting and regulatory dialogue, the bank was contributing to a collective industry effort. As Avot made clear, the task was not to choose between past and future, but to integrate them. In doing so, Sibos 2025 would serve not simply as a showcase of innovation, but as a venue where the industry forged the shared trust and common standards that define the next frontiers of global finance.
