Innovation has been a much trumpeted theme at the event and as part of its Innotribe session, which debuted at last year's event in Hong Kong, delegates are encouraged to work in teams to produce a new business which could be launched in conjunction with Swift.

The interactive workshop then culminates in a showdown reminiscent of the Dragon's Den television series where six teams pitch their ideas before a jury of both venture capitalists and banking executives in the hope of securing start-up capital.

The most well-received idea was the recycled Swift messages-based concept Moneyscope. The pitch received unanimous support from the venture capitalists and some measured approval from the industry panel, although questions were raised as to how possible it will be to gather all the necessary data to construct a true picture of financial health from Swift messages alone.

Moneyscope faces competition from five rival concepts. Mobile Payments Arena aims to bridge the gap between developers and banks by creating a trusted domain for the development of mobile banking applications. Always On involves a core banking platform that can be launched by non-banking franchises such as Manchester United football club to replace the current affinity card offers that banks provide.

Connexio is a consumer cloud based on Swift services that claims to remove the redundancy of "endlessly repeated processes" such as the regular Swift upgrades undertaken by banks. Smart Answer was described as a Wikipedia for banks which will provide expert advice at a premium price. The final pitch came from Mobilito, a mobile-based single currency which hopes to offer merchants a cheaper payment method than credit cards.

The winning pitch is set to be announced at the closing session of Sibos later today. The successful concept will hope for a more auspicious beginning than last year's winning idea, a digital lockbox called eMe, which was abandoned earlier this year.