“90% of the corporates (surveyed) are happy with bank services, and they are likely to stay.”
"70% (of corporates) are already using third parties (for bank services.)”
- Results from a recent Swift survey of corporates regarding satisfaction with their banking partners
These two stats – curious in what they really mean when considered together - framed what turned out to be a particularly ‘hard-hitting’ session at this year’s SIBOS 2025 conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Among the many innovations and trends that banks,
fintechs, and other attendees were talking about on the many stages around the conference venue, it was refreshing to attend a session where the topic addressed the actual value provided to corporate customers by the banking industry.
The key areas of concern identified by the survey - the factors that help shape corporate treasury teams’ perception of banking relationship value – included bank assistance with fraud prevention, increasingly shared responsibility for transaction controls,
clear (or hidden) pricing and fees, and expanded reporting and connectivity options between the bank and its key business clients. Stablecoins and crypto are not on the map for most treasurers and finance managers yet - in the face of other, more traditional,
and more pressing issues.
The session, entitled ‘Treasury insights: How to create a compelling value proposition for corporates’ included three speakers on its panel as well as moderator Sebastian Rojas from conference host Swift: Kyriba CEO Melissa DiDonato, Eddy Jacqmotte, group
treasury manager for Borealis Group, and Raouf Soussi Lagmich, Madrid-based BBVA bank’s head of international solutions.
Rojas led his corporate and banking industry panelist’s through an initial discussion on how banks might be – or probably should be - serving their corporate treasury clients, with a look at current trends as well as history on how far banking and worldwide
cash management has come to the point where multiple options exist, in most locales, to make a payment to almost anyone, in almost any country. Yet, they agreed, many questions remain for companies doing business around the globe – not just regarding the rail
or speed of delivery and settlement available for payments transacted locally, but how to route them externally to various cross-border regions - each offering several choices including invoice or remittance details offered by each platform.
With Swift and many of its bank partners all around the conference urging banks and their corporate customers to jump onboard the new, expanded, and globally consistent ISO 20022 payments and trade standards before a pending November
deadline, the status of ISO adoption was sure to come up during the discussion. It did, and so did the realities of corporate reporting needs and expectations of their banking providers, among other topics of the session – like account and transaction fees,
fraud concerns, internal vs external security controls, and a growing list of options for efficient connectivity and reporting – the latter for internal as well as regulatory purposes.
Rojas asked his panelists for their responses to what corporate treasurers surveyed said “kept them up at night” and the conversation started with fraud, which is ever more prevalent, as reported by the
FBI. Kyriba’s DiDonato pointed out that one major contributing factor to increased fraud is the demand by consumers and corporate managers for faster transaction processing. With payment volumes also increasing rapidly among the company’s customers, keeping
fraud at bay presents a huge challenge, she said.
“90% of our companies are facing some level of external fraud. Let's put the internal (fraud) to the side for a moment. Why is it becoming ever more relevant today? A couple of things are happening in the market, and this is why we're seeing this seismic
shift when it comes to payments. Number one, everyone's demanding digitisation. Everyone wants payments to happen now, and everyone wants it to be real time."
Data management is critically important to making it all work, she added, but the data involved is being scrutinised more than ever despite all the innovations around its access, exchange, and storage between all the players in the financial ecosystem. Building
trust in that data – ensuring its dependability amid the higher speed of payment execution and increased use of AI by fraudsters (as well as banks themselves) means combatting financial crime is a moving target, she said.
Jacqmotte, of Borealis, agreed, noting that in his organisation, internal fraud is now giving way to external attacks, and that shift is exacerbated by recent payment trends. “Especially with real-time [...] there is really a lot of risk.” He noted that
cybersecurity was one of the few areas where many organisations were still hiring, because of the rapidly rising external fraud threats in the marketplace.
The move to corporate-led security and transaction controls entered the conversation here, as Rojas explained. “Something that we have seen is that, traditionally, corporates are delegating controls to their banks, like, ‘I send my payment, it's up to the
bank to figure out the screening - (that’s) not my problem. It's the bank’s problem,’ but what we see today is that [...] regulators are looking more and more at how corporates initiate payments,” and these companies’ own security procedures, not just those
undertaken by their banks.
BBVA’s Soussi concurred with Rojas’s statement, the banker adding, “That [development] is a good thing - that has forced us to be better,” in that “we will manage things in the beginning,” but emerging regulatory requirements are shifting from sole focus
on bank procedures to scrutiny on the corporate level as well. “So, they have to be more compliant with [regulations around] AML, CFT, tax transparency, ESG, and reporting.” Taking on this responsibility, he asserted, may not be an area of comfort for all
corporates - “something they have in their DNA” - and thus the quality and timeliness of bank reporting has become ever more critical to their financial operations. “They need more and more information and more and more support from the banks.”
Soussi elaborated further on the rise in real-time reporting and enhanced connectivity needs among larger business clients. “It’s not enough to just to generate a report each quarter,” he said, noting that the standard (under that increased regulatory pressure)
is moving to real-time monitoring, real-time alerting, and that this is likely to become more common into the future. “All of this is putting more pressure on the bank,” he explained, and that presents its own dilemmas to financial institutions: “How we can
handle that? How can we improve our regulatory reporting?” Soussi said that his bank has instituted these new procedures, and more. “We have implemented all these. We have embedded regulatory requirements (within) all our transaction flow. We have implemented
real time monitoring analysis,” and essentially, he explained, it amounts to embedding "our bank’s flow inside what the corporates need at the moment they need.” Open APIs have helped accomplish this, he concluded.
Risks and challenges of doing business cross-border were also discussed, with Rojas and Jacqmotte citing rising geopolitical concerns and their impacts on corporate operations, compliance, and currency volatility. Per the Borealis Group treasurer, “Today
we are in 120 countries, so you have a lot of currencies. It means [...] that you need to be compliant,” he added that they need to keep a close eye on fraud, risk, and cash flows.
Balancing all these needs isn’t easy, Jacqmotte said. “Last week,” he explained, “took quite a lot of my time forecasting, different types of forecasting,” pointing out the requirements to do so along multiple timelines, including very short term - around
five days - then 13 weeks out, then one to two years as well, with all of this prognostication requiring sophisticated tools to accomplish. He noted his TMS system was a great support, “but there is more still,” needed to do his job balancing liquidity and
transaction concerns and controls.
Speaking of treasury systems and tools, DiDonato was asked by Swift’s Rojas about what she acknowledged was a ‘hot topic’ at Sibos in treasury and banking operations. She said AI usage, beyond a few limited applications and focus areas, has been sparse among
her company’s customer base.
“AI has not been adopted really successfully beyond agents and insights. This community, this ecosystem of leaders, tends to want to depend upon agents to deliver information about liquidity planning and liquidity forecasting and look to analytics to make
better decisions. They don't look to AI for the answer.”
The Kyriba CEO noted that the examples they have seen at Kyriba thus far are legitimate, but what she called “’baby use cases,’ improving payments and invoice matching and reconciliations, [and] cash positioning and insights that are actionable, insights
that are used much more now than before.” However, she asserted, “we as a community are not willing yet to accept and hand over the responsibility and accountability of actual decision making. We depend on AI for analytics, insights and for agents. So, it's
really an agentic AI approach,” she explained, and said to Rojas that AI could certainly be extended beyond present use cases to “liquidity planning, forex modeling,” and other more advanced applications. However, she concluded, “We're not quite ready to allow
AI to make the decisions for us."
The final topic of the session was a deeper dive into the importance of expanded bank reporting, especially in multi-bank scenarios, which are common for most larger corporations and their treasury teams doing business across borders. As Jacqmotte, DiDonato,
and their co-panelists all agreed that the job of a global treasury manager has become much more complex with new systems, payment methods and rails, increasing regulations, and more, they also agreed that ever higher reporting depth, scope, and flexibility
will be non-negotiable requirements for corporates of their bankers from now and into the future (Regardless of pricing, itself a major topic of the survey that never came up during the session).
“There is a lot going on right now, and we need to make sure that we can control it,” said Jacqmotte of the challenges he faces that more frequent and enhanced reporting helps make more manageable. He also cited ISO adoption as a positive development between
banks and corporates (though as of the conference, the number of banks, not to mention corporates, that converted to the new MX protocols was only around two-thirds of SWIFT members.) “We need to adapt (ISO) as well, because in the end, it will create
more standardisation, and that's what we (industry and bank providers) need.”
Before Rojas wrapped up the session, he returned the audience to its starting point: the seemingly conflicting findings from the recent survey of corporate finance executives. “What happens (to those results) if we don’t do anything?”
DiDonato did not hesitate, “We have no choice,” going on to assert her view that all participants in the financial services ‘chain’ constituted an ecosystem, with common interests, roles, and responsibilities to the other members.
Rojas, Jacqmotte, and Soussi agreed with this description. From Soussi’s point of view, that ecosystem and depending on multiple partners and participants to make everything in corporate banking "flow” are a reality of doing business in the modern global
economy: “I think as a bank, we cannot start defining a product alone. We have to talk to our (client or business) partner like a river, because they are.”