Countdown to Sibos: Who Holds Value in an AI-Driven Economy?

A webinar ahead of the Sibos conference will examine who holds value in an AI-driven economy and how new payment technologies affect treasury and corporate financial decisions. The online session brings together treasury and payments specialists to discuss changes to processes, governance and liquidity as payment networks move toward faster and more connected flows.

The panel includes Deepa Sinha, SVP and Head of Payments and Financial Crimes at BAFT; Ed Barrie, co-founder and chief product officer at Treasury 4, Inc.; and Suzhen Zheng, senior product manager for global payments solutions at HSBC. Scott Hamilton, a global payments and liquidity expert, will moderate the discussion.

Panelists will focus on real-time payments and their implications for treasury operations. In markets such as the UK and Europe, instant payments have broader use and require updated reconciliation, visibility and governance to account for immediate settlement and richer remittance data. Some US treasury teams continue to limit use of instant payments over concerns about cash control and fraud exposure.

Speakers will address cross-border payments and interoperability between corridors, networks and rails. They will examine technical links and industry initiatives that aim to speed transfers across jurisdictions, and how businesses must assess partner networks, compliance obligations and where to hold liquidity when moving funds across multiple systems.

The session will cover specific technologies changing treasury work. APIs are delivering near real-time balance and transaction data to treasurers. Tokenisation and programmable money create new digital representations of value that can move on existing and emerging infrastructures. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are being applied to forecasting, liquidity planning and anomaly detection, turning large datasets into operational signals.

The panel will also consider operational and governance consequences of these changes. Greater reliance on external providers and faster settlement cycles increase focus on resilience, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Boards are looking at third-party risk, continuity planning and controls needed for oversight when payments and reconciliation occur in real time.

Speakers will discuss how organisations can test new tools in treasury before wider rollout. Pilots for AI-assisted forecasting and automated liquidity allocation can produce measurable changes in processes and surface governance requirements for scaling automation across finance functions.

The webinar will aim to give treasury professionals concrete questions to assess when adopting APIs, tokenisation and AI, and to outline the operational steps required to maintain visibility, control and compliance as payment flows speed up and cross-border links grow.