Day two of Sibos Frankfurt 2025 continues to focus on how banks are modernising their payment infrastructures to meet corporate demand for speed, data and innovation. BNY, one of the world’s largest custodians and transaction banks, used the event to highlight its Asia Pacific priorities. Fabian Khoshbakht, Head of Treasury Services for Asia Pacific, BNY, explained how the bank is investing in real-time and cross-border payments, digital wallets, data analytics and stablecoin infrastructure, while balancing innovation with operational stability and building new collaborations with fintechs. Enabling faster, data-rich payments in Asia Pacific Khoshbakht said BNY’s Sibos focus this year is “around real-time payments, faster payments” and “how do we enable our clients a lot more, especially as it relates to data and analytics.” He described strong client interest in leadership on payments corridors as flows shift ahead of 2026 and 2027. “There’s a consistent theme from our clients,” he said, “they are looking to us for leadership in payments in general across the board and looking at where and what corridors make the most sense.” Asia Pacific remains a growth engine for BNY. Based in Singapore, Khoshbakht sees “real momentum building up in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, obviously Singapore, Philippines.” Clients there are “starting to think very differently and behave very differently” even compared with 12 months ago in terms of their needs and expectations around payments. Overcoming fragmentation with standards and new rails Cross-border payments are increasingly fragmented with multiple payment rails, routing choices and compliance regimes. Khoshbakht said BNY is live with the ISO 20022 standard and bringing clients that are not yet live onto it soon. Rich structured data will “benefit” clients and support analytics and automation. Looking ahead, he said the “future frontier is…payments directly to digital wallets” alongside faster payments and instant settlement. His priority for Asia Pacific is “what is the right enablement model for those customers” as payments evolve through multiple iterations. Stablecoins are part of that discussion. From BNY’s perspective Fabian shared, “We believe we are the infrastructure provider for stablecoins.” He noted that the bank has contributed to policy discussions such as the “Genius Act,” which he believes will drive innovation globally. Yet he cautioned that the correspondent banking network is “a little bit away from stablecoins really revolutionising what we all know is the correspondent banking business.” Experimenting with distributed ledgers Khoshbakht also addressed unified ledger projects and distributed ledger technology. He sees experimentation as valuable “to solve a specific problem” rather than creating a ledger for its own sake. A key challenge is whether systems are public or private. “I don’t think there’s any bank out there that will move to a public chain. Everyone will have their own private chain. How do we make that interoperable?” he asked. Achieving that interoperability with partners and competitors is “probably the biggest challenge facing every financial institution globally.” Driving internal transformation and AI adoption Beyond external initiatives, Khoshbakht described BNY’s internal transformation. “We’re about 20 months into our journey of transformation and nearly 80% of the BNY workforce is now in the new operating model,” he said. Clients have noticed “the speed with which we are able to innovate, release products, enhance our value proposition and generally deliver services to them at speed.” Artificial intelligence (AI) is central to this. “Innovation is the heart of everything we do,” he said. Over the past two years BNY has trained 98% of its workforce to use and create AI agents internally. One example is “Eliza,” BNY’s AI platform that can help staff prepare for client meetings. AI also accelerates transaction processing, so “our clients are the benefactor of all of the work that we do internally.” Balancing speed with operational stability and partnering with fintechs Khoshbakht emphasised that speed must be balanced with safety. “We need to make sure whatever is built, whatever is deployed, especially if it touches a client that the absolute minimal risk is involved in that,” he said. He also spoke about fintech collaboration. In Asia Pacific, clients increasingly ask BNY to “help to find the right fintech to collaborate with.” The bank already does this extensively in the US and is now “really starting to pick up pace” in the region. Conclusion: enabling the next frontier of payments Khoshbakht’s remarks show how BNY is positioning itself as an enabler of faster, richer and more innovative payment services in Asia Pacific. By combining standards like ISO 20022 with new rails such as digital wallets and stablecoins, investing in internal AI and maintaining operational stability, the bank aims to support clients through the “many iterations” of payments still to come and to act as a bridge between corporates, fintechs and new infrastructures.
