The future happened while you were in a meeting

Sibos is over for another year.

We’re all back home. Some of us are still battling jetlag. Most of us are just about getting on top of our inbox after the time away.

And somewhere in the mountain of emails, there’s always someone who has no idea it was Sibos week and says 'Oh you've been away? How was your holiday?' causing more irritation than is reasonable.

It's always a long, intense week, isn't it?

But it's always worth it. For the concentrated time we get with each other. The focus and intent we all bestow on this event carries its own significance. And that's not nothing.

But it's easy to let that togetherness carry your diary, as well, isn't it?

All the CEOs and the CEO minus ones are there. All the meetings. All the breakfasts. All the strategic partners. All the client dinners.

The days get so long. So busy. There’s so much you don't get round to doing (including eating proper meals, catching the content you wanted, exercising, seeing all the folks you’d promised yourself you’d make time for).

But it is always thus.

There’s a pattern to the event anyway.

We’ve spent a long time, over the years, at these events catching up on important business relationships, top of mind concerns (say ISO 20022 one more time... I dare you) but we’ve also historically made time to think. We’ve always spent a lot of time thinking about the future while at Sibos. What’s coming. Where we may fall short. What needs to happen next.

That doesn't mean we actually do the things we all agreed need doing when we leave Sibos.

BAU usually closes in very quickly.

But at least we talk and think and don't hide from it all. Even if progress is halting at times.

If I told you that there were no conversations, during Sibos week, when someone told me exactly what I’ve been hearing for the last 15 years, I’d be lying to you, and I wouldn't want to do that.

It is always thus.

But increasingly, what’s becoming a staple, are conversations about a person's or organisation's desperate need that the pace of change would slow.

These conversations have always been there. They’ve never been the whole story, but the fatigue is palpable.

Still, there was something different going on this time. It wasn't dominant but it was undeniably there in enough conversations to make a dent. Many organisations are moving slower than anyone would like, as always. But now, in some cases, so are the fintechs.

What isn't moving slowly is the adoption cycle.

This time the technical capabilities we spoke of... capabilities that, let's face it, many big organisations don't have yet... capabilities that many fintechs don't have either... the capabilities that encapsulate the future and may just exist inside an innovation lab... those capabilities this time were noticeably attending the event in their own right, so to speak.

A few years back, in Sydney, I chaired an Innotribe session on quantum computing and you could almost feel the relief in the room: this is scary and interesting but too far away for it to be my problem.

But over the last decade and a half, when we spoke of APIs and CBDCs, cloud computing and DLT, containerisation and machine learning, AI and smart contracts... every time we spoke of any of the things that were once new... every time... we warned the community that adoption cycles inside your organisation don't dictate the pace of adoption cycles outside it.

Did we listen?

Did we understand what that meant?

At another Sibos, in London, I said on stage that, for years, we felt that we could control the pace and direction of technology adoption. We know that isn’t the case now. I said it. And I meant it. And people nodded. But I wonder if they realised what that means in practice.

This year in Toronto, on the Future of Value panel, Sergey Nazarov spoke about a blockchain-based future of finance and fractional value creation that left no doubt as to the call to action. But I made him spell it out just for good measure: invest in the right infrastructure or be left out.

Great.

That's a lot. And that wasn't the only gauntlet thrown.

Less stark, perhaps, but no less poignant were a couple of strategic alliances such as that between Trade Ledger and Microsoft, going past the standard ChatGPT-obsessed AI discourses and demonstrating the art of the possible in our own backyard. Here's something you can do right now, with technology that exists right now, to generate value right now. And it doesn't need the investment Sergey spoke of, just a different way of approaching the economic models at work.

This is here. It’s real. The question is, are you part of it?

And even though it wasn't presented as a gauntlet thrown... I’m sure a lot of the people in the room felt a little... hot under the collar. Because it's a lot. And it's not either or. Both are happening. You should probably be doing both. And they’re not the only things.

And that’s part of the issue. None of it is the only thing.

And meanwhile the economic models are changing. On top of all the tech. And only partly because of it.

Remember how much and how often we talked about platform economics over the past few years? And about whether banks would become the platform?

Only we asked all the wrong questions and, rather than looking for utility, we desperately tried to hold onto value and scale and add things on top. And maybe Wise announcing their platform business doesn't make banks go 'Oh that’s what I was missing? The nexus where what I do well meets the problem that needs solving by what I do well'… although it should have.

What do these things have in common? Platformification.... B2B SaaS... and DLT... and AI?

Nothing, really.

Other than this:

They are real. They are here. They demonstrate the inexorable confluence of technology adoption cycles tightening, economic models shifting and unit costs becoming a linchpin of strategy. Oh and another thing.

They’ve all been talked about at length at Sibos year after year, this year included.

Did you make time to listen?