As Sibos arrived in Frankfurt this year, it felt like a coming-of-age story. After years of speculation and pilots, the conversation around headline technologies like AI and stablecoins seemingly shifted from theory to execution – how these technologies are being applied in real, regulated environments to improve efficiency, transparency, and security. AI is now powering transaction monitoring and client service at scale, while stablecoins are being tested for cross-border settlement.
Yet behind the bright lights of these innovations, many practitioners focused on the quieter work that enables progress: improving data quality, aligning standards, strengthening market infrastructures, and ensuring regulatory implementation meets compliance obligations and customer needs. Together, these foundational efforts are what will determine how effectively the industry turns innovation into impact.
The G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments – launched in 2020 to address the enduring challenges of cost, speed, access, and transparency – remained a focal point at Sibos 2025. Yet the headline takeaway was sobering: the ambitious 2027 targets are unlikely to be met. Following the event, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) underscored this reality in its latest progress report, noting that “while significant progress has been achieved, it has yet to translate into tangible improvements for end-users globally.”
But this does not mean a return to the drawing board. The consensus was clear that the industry must double down on initiatives that can deliver measurable progress. With the 2027 deadline fast approaching, the time for planning has passed – and the time for execution has arrived.
One such initiative is the European Payments Council’s One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) Scheme, which offers payment service providers (PSPs) a ready-made, compliant, and scalable way to advance the G20 goals. By leveraging existing SEPA Instant building blocks, OCT Inst enables the instant processing of the euro leg of cross-border transactions – providing a practical route toward faster, cheaper, and more transparent payments. The framework has already been implemented through Iberpay and EBA CLEARING and proven to work efficiently at both national and pan-European levels.
However, its success hinges on achieving critical mass through coordinated adoption and harmonised market practices, as laid out in the Euro Banking Association’s (EBA) recent white paper, Get ready for OCT Inst!. Encouragingly, ten leading multinational banks – Barclays, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JPMorgan, and Société Générale – have joined forces to accelerate reach and adoption. Within two years, these institutions are planning to be connected through EBA CLEARING’s RT1 OCT Inst Service, fully aligned with the EPC scheme.
With limited implementation effort and significant potential benefits, OCT Inst stands out as a rare “ready-to-use” opportunity to make the G20 vision a reality. To capture that opportunity – and deliver tangible results by 2027 – PSPs must act now.
At Sibos 2025, the industry confronted one of the biggest side effects of payments innovation: as instant payments expand across Europe, fraud is growing just as fast. Fraud-related recalls for instant transactions are now close to ten times higher than for standard credit transfers – and the trend shows no sign of slowing.
The issue is not simply one of scale, but of visibility. Fraudsters operate across networks, while most banks can still only see what happens within their own systems. Tackling this blind spot demands better data: not just more of it, but higher quality, richer context, and greater availability. This was the focus of discussion during the Sibos panel, Smart transaction monitoring using AI for payment anomalies.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform fraud detection by analysing billions of payment records to identify anomalies and suspicious patterns. But AI alone is not a replacement for traditional, rules-based approaches either; rather, the two must work together. Rules can flag early warning signs such as sudden spikes in activity or newly created accounts, while machine learning refines these signals to distinguish genuine threats from false positives.
Sharing this data, however, remains difficult. Privacy and bank-secrecy obligations make cross-institution exchange slow and cautious – constraints fraudsters simply do not face. Network-level analytics can help bridge that gap by allowing insights to be generated collectively without disclosing sensitive information. The goal is not one centralised “truth” about what constitutes fraud, but a mosaic of complementary indicators that together give a richer, faster, and more accurate view of risk.
This philosophy underpins EBA CLEARING’s Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection (FPAD), the topic of focus for the EBA CLEARING panel Fighting fraud at network level: success factors, practical insights and next steps. Launched in 2024, FPAD analyses billions of transactions across the STEP2 and RT1 Systems using AI and rule-based models to generate risk indicators that participating banks can integrate into their own defences. Its wide range of risk indicators cover and complement the Verification of Payee (VOP) obligations introduced under the Instant Payments Regulation, providing the broader context required to interpret name-matching results and avoid unnecessary friction.
Participants using FPAD have already reported early tangible benefits – including a 35 per cent reduction in fraud-related costs. But the EBA CLEARING team emphasised that success depends on collaboration: cross-functional fraud-fighting teams, shared taxonomies such as the EBA Fraud Taxonomy, and a feedback loop helping to further tune and develop the FPAD tools.
Financial market infrastructures (FMIs) are like bridges or roads – essential, often invisible, and only noticed when they fail. That was how the Sibos panel – Inside Leadership: FMIs of the future – Adapting to an ever-changing financial landscape – framed their discussion on how FMIs must evolve for the future: maintaining reliability, enabling innovation, and staying connected in an increasingly fragmented world.
The best infrastructures operate silently in the background, processing millions of payments every day, enforcing standards, and ensuring that participants can transact with confidence. Their strength lies not in visibility, but in reliability.
That reliability increasingly depends on coexistence, built on a healthy balance between public and private sectors. The public sector provides broad access, settlement finality, and the anchor of trust, while the private sector adds differentiated service levels, innovation, and flexibility. Together, when operating on shared standards and a level playing field, they provide resilience and choice for the market.
Technology, too, is reshaping how FMIs deliver their mandate. From AI-driven fraud analytics to experiments in central bank digital currencies and tokenised settlement, innovation is enabling new forms of risk management and interoperability. Yet technology implementation should follow clear problem statements, not precede them. Payment infrastructures evolve cumulatively, not disruptively – “getting the boring things right” remains the foundation of progress.
As these developments unfold in an increasingly interconnected environment, FMIs must stay in touch with each other, sharing insights, running joint simulations, and coordinating on standards. Ultimately, the bridges of payments must not only be strong and scalable but connected – built for coexistence and maintained through continuous dialogue across the industry.
One spectre haunting the halls at Sibos was the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) – with VOP obligations for credit institutions in the eurozone and other major IPR requirements arriving just a week after the event. Perhaps due to its proximity, the IPR didn’t feature prominently on the official agenda – yet it was one of the most discussed developments behind closed doors.
So, what happened come D-Day? As expected, the implementation – backed by months of careful planning and volume testing – was relatively smooth, given the significance of the shift. Yet, the corks should stay on the champagne for now, as this is only the beginning.
As reported in Implementing VOP for bulks: ‘The nightmare before Halloween’?, if the lead up to the deadline was represented by an urgent sprint, momentum now turns to fine-tuning solutions and rolling out harmonised approaches. Think of it as trick-or-treating in a neighbourhood that hasn’t quite caught on yet: no pumpkins, no decorations, and improvised costumes – but when you knock, at least someone opens the door and hands out sweets.
The role of regulation was discussed during the Sibos panel Regulation in payments: Catalyst or constraint? Panellists noted that one of Europe’s enduring frictions is that regulation is often designed with consumers in mind – leaving room for interpretation when assessing the impact on corporates. The IPR is a clear example: delivering its benefits will demand significant creativity and collaboration to make it both manageable and genuinely valuable for corporates and their clients. For now, most large enterprises have chosen to wait on the sidelines, watching to see how the landscape evolves.
So, though it may be a while before the corporate community celebrates Halloween in full style, the current situation is not a nightmare either and there is more effort underway to fully unlock the benefits of the IPR for end users. The next leg of the IPR journey will be less of a sprint, and more of a collaborative marathon – likely continuing for many months to come.
If you would like to comment on a blog post, please identify yourself with your first and last name. Your name will appear next to your comment. Email addresses will not be published. Please note that by accessing or contributing to the discussion board you agree to abide by the terms of the EBA CLEARING blogging terms of use, so please read them carefully.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.