The worst of the financial crisis and the typhoon that threatened Sibos in Hong Kong may have passed, but guest blogger, Andy Schmidt of TowerGroup, says considerable uncertainty surrounding certain aspects of the financial services industry remains.

 

And so we find ourselves at the end of another successful Sibos. One year (and one typhoon!) after the fall of Lehman, despite being humbled, the financial services industry is peering out at the world with an air of cautious optimism. 

Of course, there’s a lot of work still to do to recover. Significant challenges with respect to transparency and liquidity can still wreak havoc in the marketplace. Financial market harmonisation remains more a dream than reality, and regulations like SEPA are still without a final implementation date. Therefore, uncertainty of all kinds will continue to challenge the financial services community for the foreseeable future. 

Therein lays the point. The financial services industry is a community whose members rely on one another for survival and success, now more than ever. We’ve survived — especially in the payments sector — because of our ability to work together. And as a community, we’re looking at ways to work together that we would never have considered before the crisis, considering approaches like collaboration, competition, and joint ventures that were “unnatural acts” a short 12 months ago.

Broader standards adoption will certainly ease the transition toward shared infrastructures, and innovation will uncover new ways to achieve greater efficiencies in serving our clients and partners. 

However, it’s the ability, opportunity, and (dare I say) responsibility of the financial services community to speak to the regulators in simple language that will provide us the greatest opportunity to shape our collective future. Remember, the regulators need our input to better understand where the risks truly are, and engagement with the regulators provides us a voice in the direction our industry heads.

So when we reconvene, I expect we’ll have stories (and perhaps even case studies) to share on how the market has evolved and improved in 12 months’ time, showing how, together, we can create a stronger, better industry. See you in Amsterdam!

Another Sibos is over and the big debate is not the fallout from the GFC (global financial crisis) or whether SWIFT can truly trim EUR 30 million off its bottom line (although if the sliver of a sandwich the journalists were fed in the press room is anything to go by, the McKinsey consultants have certainly been cutting a swathe through SWIFT's balance sheet).

The bigger story, other than the typhoon that wasn't really a typhoon, was whether there really was 5,000 delegates in attendance. At the opening plenary, SWIFT claimed that more than 5,000 people were attending Sibos in Hong kong, yet the exhibition floor looked thin on the ground most days (particularly the one on the third floor which saw less foot traffic than those lucky exhibitiors with first floor stands. 

However, today, suddenly from out of nowhere hundreds (not thousands) of bankers converged on the closing plenary. Where had they been all week? Well with a convention centre so spread out you needed to run a marathon to get from one room to the next, looks may be deceiving. Maybe there really were 5,000 registered delegates (there also seemed to be an awful lot of people employed to wipe drops of water off air conditioning systems with long mops - presumably they were not counted as delegates).

Anyway, jokes aside, keeping with the innovation theme SWIFT introduced at Sibos last year in Vienna, the closing guest speaker was Guy Kawasaki, ex-Apple and now running his own technology venture company. He boasted about how the "egomaniacs" at Apple flew first class (on flights longer than two hours), drank fresh orange juice and had a Bodendorf piano. Those were the days and perhaps there were a few bankers in the audience also lamenting the loss of first class travel and fresh orange juice.

Kawasaki trawled through his 10 ways for companies to be innovative - none of the corporate names he mentioned however were banks. Funny that. Despite all the Innotribe sessions in the world, I doubt there will be many bannks at Sibos next year with all their apps hosted in the cloud or providing financial services linked into social networking sites.

The sheer weight of the legacy infrastructure banks (particularly those large global networked banks) have to live with, makes innovation of the Apple and Guy Kawasaki kind difficult for banks, even if they did have fresh orange juice or Bodendorf pianos in their office.

People spoke about social networking and collaborative technologies but I saw very few real-world examples of banks using these technologies in the B2B space. I cannot see it getting past most boards, although Citi's Banking Evolution platform, announced at Sibos, was an example of one bold move in that direction. But then Citi is a technology start-up more than it is a bank.

Yes it handles transactions and enables customers to send and receive money from around the world, but it differentiates itself in terms of technology, and if it has its way, all the smaller and medium-sized banks will be white labelling its technology.

The Citi view of banking is that you don't need to manufacture the parts in order to be a transaction bank. You can insource them and assemble them and still call yourself a transaction bank, although I do expect that transaction banking in the future will be less about owning the payment or moving money, and more about what you do with the information associated with those payments and the customer making them.