Frankfurt’s Sibos 2025 was billed as a landmark week and it lived up to the hype. From the packed conference halls to the exhibition floor, the mood was unmistakable and conversations matched this. The overall consensus was that payments are moving faster than ever, but confidence and resilience are what will separate the winners from the rest.
At our booth, we asked attendees a set of questions each day to ensure delegates opportunities and challenges could be heard. The questions included topics such as; what really threatens your organisation’s resilience? what customer expectation is hardest to meet? and where innovation is most needed. The answers were revealing and they challenge some of the industry’s received takes.
Operational Resilience in a Demanding Era
One of the dominant undercurrents at Sibos this year was resilience, not just of markets or infrastructures, but of the very operational backbone of institutions.
Our survey of Sibos attendees underscores this: when asked “What is the greatest threat to your organisation’s operational resilience”, 37% of attendees believe limited transparency or control over third-party service providers is the biggest threat. 22% said legacy infrastructure and siloed systems came next as a big challenge, followed by 24% stating slow detection of operational anomalies and 16% citing lack of real-time transaction visibility.
That 37 % figure is significant. It reflects a growing recognition that banks’ control perimeters no longer stop at their own walls and outsourced providers, cloud-native services, interconnected platforms and multiple vendor partners all amplify risk. The implication is clear that institutions must elevate third-party governance and vendor transparency to the same strategic priority as core infrastructure modernisation.
This is no longer a back-office issue, it’s a loyalty issue. Consumers have near-zero tolerance for outages as 80% would switch providers after repeated downtime, according to our European survey underpinning the Hidden Tension in Every Payment report. At Sibos, the consensus was the same: resilience is not simply operational hygiene, it is central to customer trust.
Customer Expectations & Payments Transparency
Payments remain the frontline of the banking business where value is delivered to customers, where trust is earned (or lost), and where costs and risks converge. Yet, our survey shows that, for many banks, one of the hardest expectations to meet is not necessarily instant execution, but transparency on execution and costs.
Why does transparency dominate? In a landscape of rising consumer and corporate expectations, the assumption is shifting as customers, both retail and business, want to know where their funds are, when they’ll settle, what the cost is and who is involved in the route. They want fewer surprises and are demanding clarity.
From a macro-economic perspective, the cost of doing nothing is growing. With margin squeezes, rising regulatory scrutiny and more agile fintech competitors, the business case for transparency is compelling. Banks that can provide visible, trusted payment journeys will capture more flows, reduce complaints and manual interventions, and scale more efficiently.
That role increasingly involves being the trusted orchestrator of payment journeys, rather than simply the back-office processor. The fact that only 13% of respondents picked instant payment execution as the hardest expectation to meet suggests many banks believe they have mastered speed, but still struggle with customer-facing transparency and cost clarity.
Fraud Monitoring and Innovation in a New Threat Era
Fraud is not new but what is new is the velocity, volume and sophistication of attacks. At Sibos, advanced topics such as AI-driven attacks, synthetic identities, deep fakes and bots were front of mind.
Our survey asked delegates which area of fraud monitoring offers the greatest opportunity for improvement and the responses reveal a surprising prioritisation:
Reducing false positives to prevent blocked legitimate payments and reduce follow-up requests to customers: 36%
Capturing and linking fraud signals across different systems for holistic detection: 33%
Adapting to new attack techniques and modus operandi (AI, synthetic IDs, deep fakes, bots…): 27%
Enriching alerts with more contextual data: 2%
What stands out here is that the highest vote is for reducing false positives ahead of adapting to new attacks. In other words, banks are as concerned about blocking legitimate business and creating friction for customers as they are about detecting novel threats.
This mirrors a shift in the industry where cost pressures mean operations teams cannot afford large volumes of manual investigations, customer experience teams cannot sustain the levels of enquiry and delay, and regulators are increasingly sensitive to incorrectly declined transactions.
So the business imperative is clear that fraud monitoring must evolve from pure detection to optimisation of decisioning, balancing risk, customer impact and cost. Thus the triangle emerges: modern architecture → fraud monitoring sophistication → customer-first payments experience. Miss any leg and the model falters.
Innovation in Payments, Where the Frontier Lies
Our survey also asked: “Where do you see the biggest opportunity for innovation in payments?”
- Real-time customer transparency: 32 %
- Smarter fraud prevention: 29 %
- Operational efficiency and automation: 29 %
- Improved resilience and uptime: 7 %
These results reflect the sentiment of Sibos attendees that innovation is no longer solely about raw speed or exotic new rails, but increasingly about how banks can deliver new business-value outcomes from their payments infrastructure.
That the largest vote went to real-time customer transparency is telling, and demonstrates that the next wave of payments innovation is human-centred, and not purely technical.
Smarter fraud prevention and operational efficiency/automation imply that innovation is tightly bound to operations, not just what is visible to customers, but how the bank organises itself to deliver. Resilience and uptime, while important, scored only 7%, indicating that for many banking professionals, those areas are seen either as already addressed or as table-stakes rather than differentiators.
In essence, banks are saying, “we have speed, we have rails, what we need now is transparency, control, intelligence and scalability.”
The Macro Pressure and Response
Sibos 2025 made clear that payments innovation cannot be separated from the wider economic and regulatory climate. Cost pressures are mounting as deposit margins compress and funding costs rise, leaving little tolerance for operational inefficiency. Banks that continue to carry layers of legacy infrastructure and manual processes will struggle; the imperative is to rationalise systems, cut wasted effort and reinvest savings into innovation that reaches the customer.
At the same time, regulators are sharpening their gaze on outsourced service providers and systemic third-party risk. What many once treated as a compliance burden must now be seen as a strategic priority. The industry knows that resilience is only as strong as the weakest vendor connection, and supervisory authorities are demanding evidence of control.
Competition is also reshaping the playing field. Fintechs, Big Tech, and embedded finance platforms are redefining what good looks like for transparency, speed and agility. Our conversations in Frankfurt underscored that customers no longer compare banks only to other banks; they benchmark them against platforms that deliver clarity and control in real time.
So what should financial services do? First, elevate vendor transparency and resilience as a board-level issue, with stress-tests and dashboards that integrate third-party performance. Also treat payment journey transparency as a differentiator, providing visibility to both customers and internal teams. Ensure to focus on reducing friction in fraud controls, not just catching criminals, but cutting false positives that frustrate customers and inflate costs. Align innovation strategy with operations as the true breakthrough lies less in raw speed than in transparency, automation and intelligence. Finally, confront the architectural question head-on. Without modern plumbing of APIs, connectivity and orchestration, the ambition of real-time, resilient, intelligent payments will remain out of reach.
This article was written by Joel Winteregg, CEO of Vyntra.
