AFP and Sibos 2024 in Review: Payments Innovation, Fraud Fighting Top the Talk

It was late autumn in China and America both as members of the banking, payments, and financial services communities headed to Beijing and Nashville, respectively, for the Sibos 2024 and Association for Finance Professionals (AFP) 2024 annual conferences. 

With practically overlapping dates, both events declared record attendance as fraud prevention, generative AI readiness, and digital innovation in banking and payments dominated discussions. This held value for different attendee types with similar issues. 

In addition to the expected hackathon and perfect pitch winners, Sibos 2024 talk, on stage and off, reflected the pressing concerns of 2024-2025, namely faster payments, better fraud prevention, and the role of generative artificial intelligence in banking and payments. 

ISO 20022 and You 

“As the financial services industry inches closer to the end of the co-existence period for ISO 20022 in late 2025, the partnership between Swift and Bottomline is helping to shape the future of cross-border payments,” reported Asian Banker. “At Sibos 2024 in Beijing, Julie Bolan, Head of Payments, APAC, Global Transaction Management (GTM) at Swift, and Vitus Rotzer, Chief Product Officer of Financial Messaging at Bottomline, discussed how their collaboration is evolving and what lies ahead.” 

Noting that only 27% of cross-border messages are ISO 20022 compliant as of now, “…there is optimism that this figure will reach 40% by the end of 2024, with banks intensifying their migration efforts,” Asian Banker reported. 

“ISO 20022 continued to dominate at Sibos, as well as the roll-out of Swift Essentials and Swift Cloud,” said Eli Shoshani, Head of APAC at Bottomline, who was also at the event. 

"Achieving the G20 2027 goals for cross-border payments was also underlined in almost all presentations on stage.  Finally, there were related discussions and debates on how AI can improve payment automation, cybersecurity, data enrichment and friction, without jeopardizing GDPR and similar schemes,” Shoshani said.  

Underlying all of it are payments.  

As Euromoney chief research officer Andrei Charniauski said in his wrap-up: “Payments have taken centre stage at Sibos this year, particularly the developments in cross-border transactions. From interoperability of domestic schemes to emerging alternative solutions, cross-border payments have been highlighted as an area ripe for innovation. We’ve seen thought-provoking discussions on the impact of ISO standards, bank collaborations, tokenization, and the progress in multi-currency settlement.” 

AFP 2024: Focus on Fraud and Faster Payments 

On the other side of the planet, on nearly the same dates as Sibos, toasts were with Tennessee whiskey, not Baijiu, perhaps, but conference programs and attendee concerns had a lot in common. Much of the AFP 2024 conference crowd was eager to learn about fraud-fighting advances, B2B payments innovation, and pulling together a GenAI strategy. 

Talk tracks at AFP this fall included important technical deadlines for the entire industry, and the relatively slow-going real-time business payments sector in the US. 

“Industry-wise, I think some of the biggest topics were around ISO 20022 readiness, and why real-time payments still hasn’t taken off in the US, with ISO readiness ironically being a big part of the reason,” said Jessica Cheney, Bottomline VP, Product Management and Strategic Solutions, who attended the AFP 2024 conference. 

Also heard around AFP this year was the notion that many banks are not keeping up with the pace at which their customers are automating. That’s creating friction in processes and makes another compelling reason for automating back-office functions like Accounts Payable (AP). 

In the panel discussion Fortifying AP Against Ever-Evolving B2B Payment Fraud, for example, BNY Director and Head of B2B Payments Rhea Wagh conveyed a story about a successfully interdicted fraud attempt that involved some serious cooperation. 

Wagh described an actual incident where an employee trusted the authenticity of an email invoice “given it came from the vendor's email address and feeling a little bit of pressure because it's urgent, and processed that payment,” she said. “We detected it was fraud. Our fraud team intervened right away. We called our client, called the vendor, confirmed it was fraud, worked with the receiving bank to then freeze that account and then eventually recover the funds.”  

“The key here is that we've worked really closely with the client after that to enhance their email verification processes and implement stricter controls around any sort of sensitive information,” she said. 

“You have to be relentless, and I think part of it is also just slowing down,” added Dwight Seeley, AVP Finance & Treasury at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “There is no rush in my mind about a vendor or somebody making a change to their instructions. Most legitimate vendors understand it takes two, three, or four days. Anything that's a rush is a red flag to me, and my team knows that I'm not in any hurry to send the payment out.” 

During the panel Strategies for Driving Customer Payment Efficiency with payment executives from Allstate, Direct TV, and Verizon, one question that united panelists was this: who is ultimately responsible for mitigating fraud – the business, or the bank?  

“Both” was the resounding reply as panelists all agreed on a “see something, say something” proactive approach to fighting fraud by banks and their corporate customers.