Sibos 23: the future of money is choice

The pace of change in technology is driving a rapid expansion in payment options for consumers and businesses. But Jackie Kallman, ANZ’s Head of Payments Industry, says we shouldn’t see these systems as competing with each other - there’s enough room for it all.

Speaking to ANZ Institutional On Air, Kallman said a diverse payment environment would be the status quo for “the foreseeable future” offering unique “parallel universes of innovation”.

“And that's okay,” she told Lisa Vasic, ANZ’s Managing Director, Transaction Banking on the podcast.

“We are going to have certain interactions and trades that occur in a purely digital environment and others that are more hybrid.

“All Australians will have access to cash as long as any Australian wants access to cash.

“I don't think any of these things contradict each other and I think… there's enough room for it all.”

Vasic and Kallman were speaking ahead of the upcoming 2023 Sibos financial services conference. You can listen to an edited version of the conversation on podcast below.

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The future is digital

Vasic said the pace of technological change had been significant, and noted treasurers had become “more and more familiar with digital transition and what this means for their business”.

“[In 2023] there's a confluence of forces really amplifying what we mean by the future of money, particularly around digitsation for our customers,” she said.

Kallman said digitisation was unlocking myriad benefits for businesses, not least efficiency and connectivity. Tokenisation would play a key role moving forward, she said.

“Tokenisation, digitisation, digital money, digital currency and smart contracts are really opening up a world of opportunity in terms of the way we can orchestrate atomic settlement,” Kallman said. “There's genuine benefits in a tokenised economy, in a digital economy.”

Vasic said ANZ had noted a shift among its customers around the kind of questions they asked about digitisation. While previously the discourse was centred on understanding the concept of digitisation, it has now shifted to exploring its strategic and practical implementation, she said.

“What's top of mind for our customers now is how they continue [to progress], and making sure they're more digitally enabled to ensure that they can compete,” Vasic said.

Resilience

Vasic said banks like ANZ had an important role to play in building resilient systems that help protect payments infrastructure from scams and fraud.

“It’s important for productivity purpose, and it's important from a resiliency and governance stream,” Vasic said.

Kallman agreed.

“The faster we get, the more real time we get…, the faster those financial crime occurrences can happen,” she said. "We need resilient and secure systems.”

In some cases, it’s important for banks to slow down processes to ensure their security, Kallman said.

“We’ve gone from ‘how do we take out all the friction’ to ‘how do we actually introduce friction at the right points, but certainly not across the board’,” she said. “We still want that seamless, integrated customer experience”.

You can listen to the podcast above to find out more.