Too Rich to Be Good at Sibos

I’m no grizzled Sibos veteran like Chris Skinner, so my overall impressions of the conference are somewhat different than his.

Walking through the conference, I was struck by just how much money Swift spent to present Sibos. Granted there were more than 7,000 attendees, but still Swift must have spent a fortune. Even the door numbers of the session rooms were redesigned with the Sibos graphics. Every session room — and there were many — had a digital sign detailing the session title and speakers, as well as including a running Twitter feed of #sibos. A few of the session rooms didn’t have chairs — they had posh couches, dozens of them.

There were hundreds of Sibos staffers, and each had a SIbos scarf or sweater. When it rained last evening, poof! there were Sibos umbrellas for every attendee to use on their way back to their hotel.

And then there were the exhibit booths of the banks and industry vendors. They were as elaborate as anything I have ever seen. Credit Suisse had a mockup of what looked like the Millennium Bridge in London built into its booth. Even the Bank of Inner Mongolia (Inner Mongolia) had some sort of extravaganza going on.

I point this out to make a particular point: in Sibos, the utterly overwhelming wealth of banking is on display for all to see. Why, for example, should Swift facilitate more flexibility in corporate payments when it is obviously making money hand-over-fist through its existing product set (Swift, it should be noted, is a cooperative of banks and corporations)? What guarantees that banks will not step back into some sort of dog-poo-cum-financial-crisis again when they are back to making massive quantities of money doing the same old same old? Why should banks truly innovate when everything seems to be working out fine right now?

There are reasonable answers to these questions, most notably that a stale bank is a dead bank, but largely these questions of wealth tamping innovation remain. I don’t want to disparage banks, though. The adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is certainly applicable to so many and so much in financial services. My experience at Sibos certainly humbled me. To be advocating for change as Bank Innovation does feels somewhat silly after seeing, for example, a Bank of America booth as long as a commuter train as as lively with business as Cancun bar over spring break. My only solace is this: even Bank of America can be negated through one circumstance or other. That truth remains, despite all the riches of Sibos.