Sibos 25: real time gets real

The real-time economy is heating up, according to ANZ’s Managing Director of Transaction Banking, Lisa Vasic. And rapidly growing consumer demand is forcing businesses to make the shift.

Speaking on podcast ahead of the 2025 Sibos financial series conference, Vasic said while many companies were taking time to embed real-time payments in their everyday business, consumers have begun to expect it when they make payments.

“We've seen obviously high adoption rates, particularly in consumers, but that change really now is starting to creep into the corporate and commercial space,” she said. “It's occurring because there’s been customer-driven demand around propositions, around experiences. And it's an expectation that things just are natively real time.”

Vasic said this real-time economy was forming on top of three “pillars”: real-time payments, real-time data, and real-time liquidity.

“It's the convergence of those three things that really starts to bring the benefits of the investment many countries have made in their infrastructure, to start to be able to help both consumers, but also wholesale customers… to compete in a world that is increasingly becoming digital.”

Vasic, along with ANZ Head of FIG Intentional, Mark Harding, spoke to On Air with ANZ Institutional on podcast ahead of Sibos. You can listen below.

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Competition

Harding said consumer expectations around seamless payment experiences were leading to increased competition between banks and non-banks, particular in the cross-border sector.

“We've seen a new acceleration of payment companies coming into the space, and they're delivering a customer experience that the banks are looking to catch up on,” he said.

Harding said that competition, as well as advances in technology, were delivering improvements in customer experience. That’s a theme he expects to hear more about at Sibos.

“We would imagine that the banks will be going in there talking about how we can deliver customer payments faster, cheaper, securely and doing that in a way that customers have a very good user experience on,” he said.

“Some of the payment companies are looking to get banking licences, others are looking to become direct participants in the SWIFT network or into different markets, and that means this competition will continue to drive change in the banking behaviour, which is a good thing for the end client and consumer.”

Adoption

Harding said the impact artificial intelligence, or AI, will have on payments will be a key theme of discussion at Sibos.

“It'll be very interesting to see how other banks are adopting that,” he said.

Vasic said application of AI would be interesting in the context of the broader adoption of new and revolutionary technology in payments.

The challenge for business was “understanding how these technologies are changing customer propositions”, she said.

“How are these technologies making the infrastructure safer, more accessible? How are these infrastructures changing the way our end customers are taking capabilities to market, and the continued role that we need to play to make sure we're delivering a competitive financial infrastructure?”

Shane White is Editor at ANZ Institutional Insights