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- Welcome to the TTP Liquidity Brief at Sibos | Issue 24
Welcome to the TTP Liquidity Brief at Sibos | Issue 24
Curb your Monday blues with our liquidity brief. The only newsletter in liquidity and risk management that you need to subscribe to. For the hustler, the CEO, the intern, the MD. Prepare for your week ahead, with the biggest voices, heavyweight leaders, and the meaningful conversations in trade, treasury, and payments. No spin, no bias, no gatekeeping—just honest, high-value insights.
Deepesh Patel, Eleanor Hill, Carter Hoffman & Joy Macknight
September 29, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
🌟 Editor's note
Editor’s Note | Week of 29 September 2025
It’s that time of year again! Sibos is here, and the TTP team is gearing up for a full-on week at the world’s largest gathering of transaction bankers, fintechs, and policymakers. If you’ll be attending and haven’t yet, make sure you check out our A-Z Sibos survival guide so you are prepared for what’s to come.
In the lead-up to Sibos week, we spent our time exploring one of the most persistent blind spots in trade and payments: identity. The global economy has digitised its flows of data, money, and goods, but not its ability to prove who’s on the other side. Until businesses can verify themselves with the same ease they move money, interoperability will stay more aspiration than reality. We’re willing to bet that you’ll be hearing more about this topic in Frankfurt.
Regulators are feeling the pressure too. With the EU’s Verification of Payee (VoP) deadline hitting just as the post-Sibos Pretzel hangovers are wearing off, this is a key time for banks and payment providers to align their systems.
So while we’re packing our bags for Frankfurt, the theme running through this week has to be trust. Whether it’s knowing who your counterparty is, whether your payment will land where it should, or which voices to listen to at Sibos, the need for reliable signals has never been more prevalent.
Finally, we’ve just dropped our special third magazine edition, aligning with Sibos Frankfurt. The issue explores the theme System Error: not as a sign of collapse, but as a reflection of how trade, treasury, and payments are straining to meet the demands of a 24/7/365 world.
Until next time—stay verified.
— Deepesh, Eleanor, Joy, Carter
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Slow Read
I'm exhausted by the hype: Are Stablecoins and CBDCs revolutionary or systemic cracks?
By Alan Koenigsberg, TTP Editorial Board Member, Founder, Koenigsberg Insights
We’ve all heard the relentless buzz over artificial intelligence (AI) these past few years and how it is poised to change just about everything in our lives. Frankly, I’m exhausted by the hype. That’s why it’s a nice change that the banking and finance world is currently focused on the potential of digital currencies, especially stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The financial services industry has weathered countless technological disruptions, from the advent of electronic banking to the rise of fintech challengers. Yet none may prove as fundamentally transformative - or potentially destabilising - as the emergence of digital currencies. While artificial intelligence dominates headlines with promises of operational efficiency, a quieter revolution is brewing in the realm of money itself: the rapid adoption of stablecoins and the looming arrival of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
According to J.P. Morgan Global Research, “the US dollar-denominated stablecoin market, which makes up around 99% of the global stablecoin market, has grown to $225 billion, accounting for roughly 7% of the broader $3 trillion crypto ecosystem.” The numbers tell a compelling story of unprecedented growth. According to Forbes, Tether (USDT) alone commands a market capitalisation exceeding $140 billion, while USD Coin (USDC) follows at approximately $35 billion. This rapid expansion reflects not merely speculative interest, but genuine utility in cross-border payments, treasury management, and decentralised finance applications.
Yet beneath this impressive growth lies a fundamental question that the industry has been reluctant to address directly: Are these digital currencies genuine solutions to persistent banking challenges, or are they sophisticated instruments that could ultimately undermine the very financial stability they purport to enhance?
Trade digest
The A to Z Sibos survival guide
Sibos, the annual jamboree of the global banking industry, has never been modest in scale.
This year more than ten thousand delegates will descend on Messe Frankfurt for four days of speeches, panels, and endless networking.
The official programme promises more than 250 sessions and 500 speakers. The unofficial programme is harder to measure: upwards of eighty thousand meetings squeezed into coffee queues, corridors, and side rooms; perhaps €30-50 million spent once registration fees, sponsorships and exhibitor costs are tallied. And enough late-night dinners and hospitality suites to keep the city’s taxi fleet in business.
Conferences of this size generate their own economics. Roughly 35,000 branded pens will change hands. Toilets may be flushed close to 100,000 times (fear not, Sibos promises recycled rainwater).
Our unfavourite phrases such as “partners with”, “signs MOU” or “first to launch” will echo through panels and meetings more than 10,000 times.
How, then, to survive such a spectacle without losing your bearings, your voice, or your patience?
Here in the TTP A to Z field guide for Frankfurt: a few hard truths that might just turn the week from a blur into something useful.
Treasury, payment and global banking digest
To VoP or not to VoP
Let’s start VoPping
What the heck are we talking about here? Those readers who pay bills in the UK might be able to guess what this abbreviation relates to. Last year the Pay.UK project on Confirmation of Payee (CoP) was implemented for online payments, enabling the payers to check whether their payment entry matched fully, closely, or not at all with a given beneficiary bank account and name.
VoP is the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payments equivalent of the UK CoP. But instead of copying their English peers outright, the folks on the continent switched the word “Confirmation” with the word “Verification” to create VoP: Verification of Payee.
SEPA VoP is based the EU’s Instant Payment Regulation (IPR). It will start with the Eurozone and SEPA offering banks, but later extend to govern other EU area currencies, countries, and instant payment schemes as well. While the regulation has ‘Instant Payment’ in its name (the IPR), VoP will also cover standard, non-instant, SEPA payments (i.e., credit transfers) that are already almost fully processed and settled within the same day.
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Did You Know? Despite being a $5 trillion market, trade finance is still underutilised by institutional investors—yet its short-tenor, self-liquidating nature and historically low default rates make it one of the most resilient asset classes in international trade.
Till next time,