Sibos 2022 is bringing together business leaders and topic experts from across the financial community to discuss the most topical trends in technology, regulation, risks and sustainability. Let’s look back at day two of the conference and insight from some of the sessions we dipped into.
In the morning, ‘The Emergence of Digital Assets Has Accelerated in 2022’ session delivered panellists including Yuval Rooz, co-founder & CEO at Digital Asset, Jens Hachmeister, head of issuer services & new digital market at Clearstream; David Durouchoux, deputy CEO at Societe Generale and Rosie Hampson, digital assets, executive director at Goldman Sachs.
Under discussion was the potential benefits of tokenisation to democratise investments and open new risk and yield strategies through diversification.
Rooz commented: “There are new entrants into the market with technology that say ‘my god, you guys are dinosaurs. What are you doing? This is worthless, everything should just settle in real time’ without really understanding exactly what they are talking about. It’s not that you shouldn’t challenge the status quo as there are a lot of things in the status quo that could make the market more efficient.
“What the creation of smart assets allows you to do is to challenge the status quo and in areas where efficiency could be brought in and is logical to bring in. But don’t just say ‘Oh, Bitcoin settles in real time, so now everything should be settled in real time’ because that to me is kind of nonsensical.”
Talent spot
In the session ‘The Great Return: A Key Moment for Talent and Culture’ we heard debate on the adoption of working from home since the pandemic and how companies should welcome back staff into the office.
Margaret Harwood-Jones from Standard Chartered Bank, said: “Gone are the days where there’s a single process, a single policy that we try and deploy… you know it’s really making sure that you have tools for your leaders to enable the success and the performance of the individual”
While Lisa Wong Bouldin at Wells Fargo commented: “Flexibility is an important way in which you can attract talent. Ultimately, it’s about making the workplace a better place for everybody but also bringing in that really exceptional talent that we want.”
Low-value payments
How are banks meeting the needs of small business and retail customers with low-value payments? To answer that question, we heard insights from Gregory Smith, senior product manager at RBC who said: “Simplicity is key for any segment when it comes to international payments. Whether it’s a small business or a large corporate, we need to make things simple based on their needs.”
‘Is the metaverse a load of bollo##s?’
Dave Birch from 15MB and Paul Clarke from Lateralleap considered the concept of the metaverse and the financial sector’s role in its success at Sibos’s Innovation Tribe stage.
- Clarke: “If we want a decentralised view of the world, there are some basic kind of shared rules of the game that we have to follow. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a whole load of virtual worlds that won’t talk to each other.”
- Birch: “One of the reasons why I get very disappointed with the paucity of vision around the metaverse at the moment, is because it’s being created by people like me and and what we really need is for real artists and visionaries.”
- Birch: “The vision of the metaverse is not to digitise the universe, but to create something new, which is more suited.”
- Clarke: “When people create worlds their first instinct is to create digital replicas of our physical world. And I think that’s a lost opportunity.”
- Clarke: “Digital worlds for a purpose, rather than just digital worlds to hang out”
Tokenised assets
One of the afternoon sessions addressed ways the financial industry could collaborate to overcome fragmentation to support the growth and development of tokenised assets.
We heard from Swift on its recent experiments with SETL, Citi, Clearstream and Northern Trust for achieving future interoperability.
Yannick Goineau, senior functional architect, Clearstream, said: “We need to rely on standardisation, so that when we make a token fungible that the definition is commonly approved by the community. That is super important.
Anthony Culligan, chief engineer at SETL, commented: “Not everyone has the same implementation for a message and that is where it will become really important as more people join this community that we come up with reasonable standards.”
From metaverses to wallets
Bianca Lopes, co-founder of Talle, explored how the current identity and regulatory landscape presents an opportunity to utilise data assets and build an equitable, open future.
She commented: “The metaverse is going to shake banking and an organisation to its core” and “people in the metaverse own their identity, or own a piece of it and have a concept of self sovereignty.”
