Tom Bentley, Chief Revenue Officer at 10x Banking, shares key reflections from Sibos 2025 – where real-time data, core transformation, and the future of corporate banking took centre stage. In this blog, he unpacks the trends shaping next-gen banking infrastructure.
Sibos is always a great event for bringing the trajectory of fintech into sharp focus. Coming towards the end of the calendar year, it’s possible to use the event’s core themes as a bellwether to gauge where the industry will go over the next 12 months.
This year, there was one central theme I kept coming back to, panel after panel. Whether the topic was stablecoins, instant payments, or new ISO standardizations, the message was clear: access to real-time data is banking’s 2026 North Star. It’s the foundation to enabling progress across all these fronts.
Photo: Swift
Here’s my three key takeaways from Sibos 2025, and what they reveal for the future of banking innovation.
From cathedrals of code to real-time cores
Today, financial institutions are expected to deliver up-to-the-second balances, enable instant money movement, and support sophisticated risk management, at the kind of scale that’s simply not possible with older generations of core technology. The banks leading the way aren’t doing it with yesterday’s ‘cathedrals of code’, but with modern core banking infrastructure built to process millions of API calls and new product structures seamlessly.
The banks leading the way aren’t doing it with yesterday’s ‘cathedrals of code’, but with modern core banking infrastructure built to process millions of API calls and new product structures seamlessly.
Tom Bentley CRO, 10x BankingAt 10x, we’re seeing clients use this capability to launch innovations like real-time cash management and support next-gen digital assets, using core transformation as the launching pad for banks fit for the digital era.
While Sibos was underway, the news broke that Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, had delivered a keynote speech signalling a much softer stance on stablecoins and their potential role in the financial system. This kind of regulatory shift, happening in real time with industry debate, underscores the need for core platforms that are agile enough to quickly integrate new asset types and respond to evolving rules.
AI hype takes a back seat
Given the ongoing headlines, I arrived prepared for AI to dominate the conversation. Instead, its presence was surprisingly muted. When it came up, AI was usually positioned as background “hygiene” – helping to reduce fraud or improve payments compliance – rather than radically transforming the customer experience.
Until platforms are truly interoperable and have the capacity to process data and transactions in real-time, most institutions will struggle to turn AI from a buzzword into a customer-facing breakthrough.
Tom Bentley CRO, 10x BankingAway from the stages, it was clear that many banks feel the next phase for AI depends on foundational legwork. Until platforms are truly interoperable and have the capacity to process data and transactions in real-time, most institutions will struggle to turn AI from a buzzword into a customer-facing breakthrough. The focus, rightly, returned to building the solid infrastructure needed to make future AI ambitions possible.
Corporate banking poised for a fourth Gen revolution
I always like the refer to the evolution of core banking in terms of the generations or eras we’ve seen so far. Starting in the 1980s, you had singular limited product lines housed within mainframe technology. Then in the 2000s Configurable Arrangement Architecture arrived, able to house multiple products under ‘Bank in a Box’ approaches.
The limitations of this approach – lack of technological maturity and cost of upgrade – were addressed somewhat in the latest, 2020s generation of cores: cloud and SaaS enabled platforms which enable fast and consistent delivery of core banking product sets.
Photo: Swift
This third generation possesses strong native capabilities for virtual deployment but remains constrained by legacy product ledger principles – such as batch-based processing – that lack the ability to innovate. So now we come to the need for a fourth generation of core, which will take the form of banking OS Platforms that enable fast product deployment with extensibility of code within or outside of platform.
Retail banking has already embraced cloud-native cores and real-time innovation, but a notable theme at Sibos was the urgency from corporate banking leaders to follow suit. New payment formats, massive batch disbursements and more complex cash management requirements are challenging legacy systems beyond their limits. It’s now clear that the next leap in digital capability, and competitive differentiation, depends on upgrading to flexible, fourth generation platforms.
Final thoughts
Sibos 2025 left no doubt that while tech trends will always come and go, the winners will be those who invest in data, platforms and real-time capabilities. These are the foundations for everything else, and they are laid in the core. For banks with ambitions for 2026 and beyond, the moment for core modernization is now.
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