Based on the G7 commitment, which was reiterated in 2022, significant legislative activity has taken place, leading to the adoption of new laws in France and in the United Kingdom, to legislative amendments in Germany (where additional work is ongoing) and in the United States, and to the preparation of a bill, possibly limited to bills of lading, in Japan.

For two decades, I have built and launched trade finance solutions, both internal systems run by multinationals and platforms connecting many parties. More recently, I have helped shape the ISO 20022 trade finance messaging and legal-entity identities those systems run on. That work taught me what separates the digitisation efforts that take off from the ones that fail to scale.

When a credit requires shipment no later than 10 September, and the bill of lading shows an on-board date of 12 September, there is little reason to involve artificial intelligence in concluding. Once the dates have been identified, a deterministic rule can compare them perfectly well. Much the same applies to calculations and tolerances, as well as to many other requirements for which an objectively correct result can be established.

In the third century BCE, the Temple of Juno Moneta stood on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, honouring her role as protectress of the Roman state. Later, the city’s mint was built nearby, and over the centuries the goddess’s name drifted from temple to workshop to coin. That’s where we get words like money and monetary from – and tradition also ties the name to monere, to warn.

“Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention”. In corporate treasury, that distinction has become a bottleneck. AI can already analyse cash flows and plan transactions in milliseconds, yet B2B payment execution remains bound to legacy infrastructure built for human sign-offs.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, John Lee, introduced a comprehensive set of measures to develop the city’s key economic centres during the unveiling of the First Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) (2026-2030) and his fifth Policy Address on September 16, 2026.

In the late 1950s, banks in Paris began lending out dollar deposits held outside the United States. Nobody realised they were founding anything. But what they’d created was the eurodollar market: dollars beyond the reach of American regulators and American banking hours, which grew from an accounting curiosity into the funding market of global finance.

Warehouse finance is a form of asset-backed lending where physical commodities stored in approved warehouses serve as security for short-term credit facilities.

As TTP proudly media partners the BAFT (Bankers Association for Finance and Trade) Global Councils Forum at Sibos Miami, one session we're watching closely: "Expanding into the US: Building a Diverse Payments Toolkit for Resilience, Reach, and Client Choice."

As Latin American banks grow their US footprint, client expectations for payments are converging on being fast, transparent, cost-effective, and always-on.

But delivering that across ACH, real-time rails, wires, and cross-border options means navigating real operational complexity and knowing how to route each payment on speed, cost, and certainty.

Moderated by Marco Dunn (J.P. Morgan), with panelists Ray Chalub (Banco Inter), Mario Fujii (BB Americas Bank), and Marc Pettican (Mastercard) this session digs into what a genuine multi-rail strategy looks like in practice.

At Sibos 2026, Dean Athanasia, Co-President of Bank of America, joins Joy Macknight, Transaction Banking and Payments Editor at Trade Treasury Payments (TTP), for a View from the Top conversation on the forces reshaping financial services.

From economic trends and payments innovation to AI, digital assets and the future of financial services, the 30-minute session will explore what’s next for global commerce.

🗓️ 30 September 2026
⏰ 09:30 Miami time
📍 Conference Stage 1

Join the conversation at Sibos 2026.

Ant International launches AI overhaul across global financial services

🔸 Ant International, the overseas affiliate of China’s Ant Group, is implementing an AI-driven upgrade across its global financial platforms, including Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst, and Bettr. The initiative introduces AI agents to manage payments, foreign exchange, treasury operations, cash-flow forecasting, currency hedging, billing, tax filing, marketing, and credit access.

Issue 06 of Trade Treasury Payments explores what happens when established financial systems meet the demands of a changing industry. From institutional memory and the transfer of knowledge between generations to stablecoins, cross border payments, artificial intelligence and the move towards electronic trade documents, this edition looks at how finance is adapting while building on the systems that came before.

The issue examines the changing role of technology in finance, including the growing importance of AI, the evolution of payment infrastructure and the race to meet Swift’s ISO 20022 address deadline. It also looks at warehouse financing, letters of credit, trade credit insurance, supply chain finance and local currency financing, alongside developments across markets and regions around the world.

At the heart of Issue 06 is the idea of being rewired rather than rebuilt. As the foreword puts it, the systems that support trade and finance have lasted because they have adapted over time. The challenge now is to modernise them without losing the knowledge, judgement and experience that made them work in the first place.