Sibos 2025: Time to Consolidate Your Payments Infrastructure

If you have attended any financial services industry conference over the past decade, chances are that compliance has dominated the discussion – either directly or indirectly – again and again. And again. And again.

But as we approach Sibos 2025, a quick glance at the agenda is telling. With major regulatory initiatives like migration to the ISO 20022 messaging standard now almost complete, the collective focus is finally shifting from ensuring baseline compliance to gaining a competitive edge.

This means that banks can no longer afford to sit back and let change happen. They need to drive it.

Big spend, little readiness.

Yet becoming change-makers presents a new set of challenges for banks. For years, ISO 20022 deadlines have dictated requirements, forced action and secured budgets.

However, that era is now fading into the past and, without the next mandate to follow, the path forward is increasingly unclear.

Sibos 2025 offers an opportunity for some honest reflection. Have regulatory requirements been strategically addressed by building a future-ready payments infrastructure? Or have legacy systems been patched up to try and fight another day?

The ISO 20022 migration is a perfect case in point. Despite years of investment, the unfortunate reality is that many banks are still running the same fragmented systems with ISO 20022 mappers gaffer-taped on to support low volumes. But with these volumes rising, cracks will soon start to show. Worse, regulation can no longer be used as the magic word to secure more budget to pay down the existing technical debt. Real transformation now demands a solid business case.

Consolidate to take control

Breaking free from this cycle of short-term fixes and finally taking control of payments lies in consolidation. By moving towards a unified infrastructure that supports any payment, anytime, anywhere, banks can realise the foundational objectives of transformation: reducing costs, enabling innovation and strengthening resilience.

Crucially, consolidation should not be confused with old-school, big bang migrations to black-box hubs – which almost always failed entirely.

But given the well-documented challenges that have also plagued many in-house builds, today’s smart move is the use of a flexible development framework that enables banks to evolve gradually, stay in control and avoid vendor lock-in.

This all starts with a clear strategy that sets out why transformation is needed, what ‘good looks like’ in terms of the target state, and finally how to get there. Banks can then start to reimagine the payments processing value chain—moving from rigid horizontal flows to agile, vertical, service-aligned ones spanning order management, execution, and clearing and settlement.

The opportunity to lead payments forward is here. The question is: can banks seize it?

Join Icon at Sibos 2025

To explore how consolidation can enable you to lead payments forward, book a meeting with one of our team, or simply find us at stand DISM20 in hall 3.0. We will be discussing how a modern framework-based payment solution can help banks sustainably and progressively move towards a single payment processing infrastructure. 

You can also join our in-person Discover panel session, where industry leaders Angelica Alam (Wells Fargo), Wim Grosemans (BNP Paribas), and Ian Povey (NatWest Banking Group) will explore how financial institutions can transform ISO 20022 compliance into a strategic advantage.