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SIBOS 2017 ROUNDUP
Toronto opens up to APIs, data and cybersecurity at Sibos 2017
Laptops in tow, IBS Journal set off for a four-day stint in Toronto to catch the latest goings on from industry leaders and buzzword-beleaguered banks. Would it be another year for blockchain?
IBS Journal Staff S
ibos 2017 rolled into Toronto with the pomp and ceremony befitting the world’s largest event for correspondence banking. The Metro Toronto Convention Centre proved a worthy host for the conference, which filled out no less than two halls and six levels. 8,088 registrants from 148 countries descended upon Canada’s capital, though a fair few ended up in Montreal due to some rather inclement weather on the flights over.
So popular was the opening plenary that IBS Journal, as well as several other reputable titles, was forced into the overflow rooms to watch everything unfold on an array of big screens. In it, guest speaker David McKay, President and CEO of RBC and the guest speaker, was keen to stress that the conversations around data that are occurring in the industry today would be “science fiction” just a few years ago.
After a quintessentially Canadian apology over the weather that had left a dozen flights delayed or re-routed, McKay said that Canucks are proud of their four seasons, but that “it’s very rare to have all four of them in one day”. Turning back to the issue of data, the RBC CEO stated that the battleground for banks in the future would be how they manage their data.
Gottfried Leibbrant, SWIFT CEO, finished things off by rounding up other major challenges facing the industry today. Times have changed since the Sibos events of just a few years ago, he said. Geopolitical events have swept the globe, and financial institutions are having to deal with a world that is suddenly swinging dangerously close to anti-capitalist and anti-globalist. Leibbrandt flashed a less-
than-flattering image of current US president Donald Trump, remarking that we’re living in a climate in which international agreements can be “suddenly written off in just a single tweet”.
The “war” between startups, fintechs and banks was always a phoney one. Discussions on the subject have turned from “us vs them” to “all of us vs the technology companies”. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA – presumably because AAFG didn’t have a good enough ring to it) were the companies on everybody’s lips. The tech giants have, for years, been silently underpinning a lot of the industry’s mechanisms – Amazon’s cloud services, Apple and Alphabet’s payment services and Facebook’s connectivity. It’s a surprisingly small jump from end- user services to full-on banking.
The “regulation will save us” argument has been blown out of the water. Mark Buitenhek, Global Head of Transaction Services at ING Bank, told IBS Journal that he’s always been surprised by that line of thinking. “You think that Google doesn’t have to deal with regulation all the time?” he asks. “These companies deal in vast quantities of user data, just like the banks. Amazon deals with the payment information of hundreds of millions, Apple and Google know just about everything about us. Regulation isn’t something they’re afraid of.”
Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO at SWIFT
The threat to banks from the tech firms is very real, Louise Beaumont, strategic advisor for open banking at Publicis. Sapient told IBS Journal. “If you look at the educational backgrounds of some of the boards in big banks you see law, politics and occasionally economics,” she said. “These people aren’t risk takers. They’ve come up through banking. That was fine
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2017
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