Another Sibos, another shift in the conversation – this time towards adoption and the networks needed to make on-chain global markets work at scale. 

Topics on the minds of attendees at Sibos 2026 in Miami included not just faster but atomic, 24/7 cross-border payments, the future of digital money, tokenised markets and, of course, agentic AI. 

The technology for on-chain markets is no longer the main barrier. The harder task is bringing enough institutions, assets and liquidity onto connected networks to make those markets useful. This year, the conversation was less about proving what the technology can do and more about which use cases have a strong enough business case to drive adoption, who needs to participate and what must change operationally to move them into production. 

That conversation is broadening beyond innovation and digital asset teams into markets, treasury, payments, funding and collateral management – the functions that own the economics and manage liquidity, balance sheets, settlement and client activity. Institutions are thinking about where digital assets can work as part of their core workflows, how it will all connect and what it will take to operate safely at scale. Individual deployments matter, but their value grows when institutions can transact with one another across connected platforms, currencies and jurisdictions. 

That puts the focus squarely on whether the right forms of money are available at the right times. The cash needed to settle a digital asset transaction needs to move along with the security; otherwise, we are only modernising one half of the transaction. The industry also needs to be thinking about what happens when a transaction crosses different ledgers, currencies and jurisdictions, especially if one side completes while the other does not. 

As Simone Cortese, Chief Product Officer at Fnality, put it in his Sibos Discover session: “This question has now shifted to, how can we operate these assets, this cash, across different jurisdictions globally?” 

Multi-Form, Multi-Rail 

One of the clearest messages of the week was not that one form of money will win, but that the future will belong to a confluence of different forms of public and private money. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, central bank digital currencies and solutions like Fnality that settle on-chain in central bank money will all coexist; the challenge will be making them interoperate. 

Across conversations at Sibos, the emerging picture was one with central bank money at its core, reflecting the convention wholesale markets have long trusted and relied on for large-value transactions. With central bank money providing the settlement foundation, other forms of money can scale without established relationships having to change: tokenised deposits, representing commercial bank money, and stablecoins can support new types of banking and client activity alongside that foundation. 

Digital markets are also challenging some long-held assumptions about how financial markets operate. Operating hours are extending. Assets and liquidity that have historically been separated by fragmented workflows can increasingly be brought together. And some of the underlying functions of finance that have long been ripe for modernisation are beginning to change with them. 

As Michelle Neal, Group CEO of Fnality, put it on her panel, the key is for traditional finance (TradFi) to demonstrate the importance of trust and resilience while learning some lessons from the frictionless client experiences of decentralised finance (DeFi), and vice versa. 

“Digitisation, tokenisation don’t make liquidity management, legal finality, and resilience disappear,” Neal said. The opportunity, she argued, is to combine the programmability, availability and flexibility of digital money with the certainty and settlement finality required at institutional scale. 

As markets become increasingly 24/7, the challenge will be giving institutions more flexibility over where liquidity sits, when it moves and how all the pieces work together. 

That leads to a more useful measure of progress than speed alone. “It’s not just ‘is it faster’; it’s ‘is it more connected’?” she said. 

Intraday Repo: Connecting the Whole Transaction 

The practical value of connected markets was a focus of the Ownera intraday repo panel, which brought together Myles Wright, CEO of Fnality Services, with Tradeweb, HQLAᵡ and Swift. Intraday repo offers institutions the opportunity to borrow for the period in which liquidity is actually needed, rather than for a full day. 

Realising that benefit means connecting trading, collateral and payments so that assets and money are available at the right time, with settlement certainty. Fnality’s role is to enable payment obligations to settle in central bank money balances, coordinated with collateral movements on other platforms. The wider opportunity is more efficient use of liquidity and collateral across connected markets, without requiring every part of the transaction to sit on the same ledger. 

Always On, Always Connected 

But interoperability will mean more than exchanging messages between platforms. Assets, payments, data and legally final settlement all need to work together across networks, currencies and jurisdictions. 

The industry has spent years proving that financial assets and money can exist on new digital rails. The harder work now is building markets around them. 

That means moving from questions about what can be done to what actions will solve real problems. Can new infrastructure reduce prefunding? Can it make liquidity or collateral more mobile? Can it reduce settlement risk? Can it create a better client proposition? And is the economic benefit meaningful enough to warrant the work? Those are increasingly business questions, not technology ones. 

The winners in the next phase will not necessarily be the systems that move fastest. They will be the ones that allow institutions to connect assets and money, manage liquidity efficiently and settle with the certainty required. 

Sibos therefore felt less like a showcase this year and more like a debate over what is ready to be adopted, how it fits into existing market structure and what has to change inside institutions to make it work at scale. 

If Miami made one thing clear, it was that the next phase depends on adoption: bringing the participants, assets and money together to turn proven technology into functioning markets.