Katja Lehr, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) payments, industry and advocacy lead, JP Morgan, emphasised that Sibos had “established itself as a great occasion for the financial industry to gather and discuss the key trends and forces at play reshaping the payments ecosystem”. She explained that this year’s edition offered banks and financial institutions (FIs) “an opportunity to explore the next frontiers of finance and delve into key themes such as the evolution of payments, the opportunities presented by technology advancement such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and quantum computing, as well as addressing the challenges the industry faces such as financial crime, cybersecurity and regulatory changes”. Setting the stage: Sibos as a crucible for payments and finance She noted that beyond the formal agenda, the conference had always been a forum where banks connected with their peers, clients and partners, gaining access to “fresh insights and perspectives on the themes discussed at the conference”. Lehr stressed that the most valuable aspect was the mix of “insightful and thought-provoking conversations with a variety of stakeholders from across the industry”. This outlook set the tone for Frankfurt. The city itself, as home to the European Central Bank (ECB) and a hub for euro-denominated payments, lent symbolic weight to discussions on regulation, resilience and innovation. With the growing convergence of traditional and digital finance, the themes Lehr highlighted were not just strategic aspirations but pressing operational issues for banks across EMEA and beyond. Interoperability: unlocking cross-border payments Lehr addressed the critical issue of interoperability between domestic fast payment systems and global networks. She described it as “crucial to unleash the potential of cross-border payments as an enabler of the global economy, as affirmed by the G20 cross-border roadmap, which sets the objective for the industry to make cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more transparent and accessible”. She explained that the industry was pursuing these objectives “at multiple levels”. A key foundational step had been “the migration of an increasing number of domestic systems to ISO 20022,” which ensured that “different systems can speak the same language, and payments are understood the same no matter where they are being sent to or received from”. Lehr elaborated that this standardisation had to be accompanied by interlinking initiatives: “either bilateral or multilateral through central hub designs,” which were essential “to build the technical connections to enable fast and consistent cross-border payments”. At the same time, she argued that “efforts to harmonise regulatory and supervision frameworks can address crucial challenges related to combating fraud and financial crime across borders”. Importantly, she highlighted the role of new infrastructures in complementing these regulatory and operational initiatives. “Players like Kinexys by JP Morgan with its innovative blockchain infrastructure are exploring the opportunities offered by the most advanced technologies to unlock new possibilities for cross-border payments,” Lehr said. This positioned Kinexys not as a replacement but as an extension of traditional networks, able to bridge the limitations of time zones and liquidity mismatches with blockchain-enabled settlement. Bridging traditional and digital finance Expanding on this integration theme, Akshika Gupta, global head of client solutions, Kinexys Digital Payments, Kinexys by JP Morgan, spoke about how Kinexys had worked to bridge the gap between traditional finance and digital assets. She stated that “Kinexys by JP Morgan has been an industry leader in blockchain-based financial infrastructure since 2015, offering clients on-chain deposit accounts through its private blockchain”. As part of JP Morgan Payments and JPMorgan Chase, Kinexys combined “the trust, scale, and resiliency of a global financial institution with the agility and composability of a technology provider”. Gupta remarked that this unique positioning allowed the group “to deliver innovative blockchain solutions with the stability and service of a world-class bank”. Her comments underscored how banks were seeking to balance credibility and regulatory assurance with experimentation and innovation. Kinexys demonstrated that blockchain did not need to be associated with speculative retail markets but could instead power institutional-grade solutions rooted in the credibility of the banking system. Tokenised use cases beyond proof-of-concept Gupta outlined how tokenisation had moved firmly beyond pilot stages. She recalled that for nearly a decade, Kinexys by JP Morgan has been at the forefront of innovation in financial services with the launch of what it claims as the world’s first bank-led blockchain platform. Since its inception, she said, “the platform has exceeded $2 trillion in notional value, processing an average of more than $3 billion daily in transaction volume, and payments transactions have grown by 10 times year-over-year”. She noted that Kinexys worked with “large institutions across different client segments, such as Siemens AG, Brevan Howard Digital, BlackRock and LSEG”, demonstrating the breadth of adoption across corporates, asset managers and market operators. In the last five years, Kinexys had “expanded the initial tokenised offerings through Kinexys Digital Payments to enable programmable payments” where clients could programme automated payments with blockchain’s unique capabilities. Another milestone had been “instant foreign exchange (FX) settlement (where a trade can settle instantly rather than in a day or two as it does in normal infrastructure)”. One example Gupta gave was the offering Kinexys built “for several Middle Eastern banks that need to operate outside of regular United States hours and utilise our always-on 24/7 blockchain rails”. These cases illustrated not just the scale of the infrastructure but the specificity of client problems it addressed—time zones, cut-off times and liquidity requirements that traditional rails could not always satisfy. Tokenised deposits versus stablecoins and CBDCs Gupta also addressed the comparison between tokenised deposits, stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). She defined a deposit token as “a digital representation of a bank deposit that operates on blockchain-based payment rails”. She distinguished these from stablecoins: “Unlike stablecoins, which are typically backed one-to-one by fiat currency or equivalents, deposit tokens are underpinned by the same liquidity frameworks as traditional bank deposits”. While both offered “24/7, near-instant settlement,” Gupta clarified that they had different applications. “Today, stablecoins primarily have retail use cases, including crypto trading, remittances and merchant payments,” she said, noting that these were “all fairly low-value transactions, which might have lighter compliance requirements”. In contrast, deposit tokens were “geared toward institutional use cases, such as cross-border business-to-business (B2B) payments, digital asset settlement and on-chain liquidity management”. Backed by traditional banks, they were “governed by more stringent regulatory requirements”. This distinction reinforced Kinexys’ positioning in the institutional, regulated space, aligning with supervisory frameworks rather than circumventing them. Sibos as a proving ground From Lehr’s emphasis on interoperability and regulatory harmonisation to Gupta’s detailed account of Kinexys’ tokenisation journey, the narrative pointed to Sibos Frankfurt as a proving ground for whether the industry could translate vision into execution. The conversations at Sibos 2025 would not be about speculative promise but about scale, compliance, integration and client value. Banks and FIs could expect robust dialogue about how to make payments faster, more transparent and resilient, while exploring tokenisation not as a buzzword but as a set of working institutional solutions. As Lehr put it, Sibos remained above all “an opportunity for banks and FIs to explore the next frontiers of finance”. Gupta’s perspective added that those frontiers were already being crossed by infrastructures like Kinexys that had moved from pilot to production, and from experimentation to impact.
