FF News Tattoo Studio: How Allevo Keeps the Payments Plumbing Running

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Ioana Guiman, Co-Founder and CEO of Allevo, recounts her first Sibos in 2008, the year of Lehman’s collapse. With the Allevo ISO 20022 migration program nearing its final wave, Guiman underlined the importance of alignment, clean data, and shared standards.  She’s now attended fifteen editions of Sibos and seen the conference mature: tighter travel budgets raised attendee seniority, and what began as a bank-only gathering opened to vendors and partners. The result, in her view, is a more hands-on, cross-functional community focused on solving real operational problems.

Asked what Allevo does, Guiman keeps it simple: the company provides the essential plumbing that banks run on, ISO 20022 migration, instant payments, and the day-to-day rails. It sounds unglamorous until something fails. Success depends on details like data quality and consistent use of fields across jurisdictions. Without alignment, financial institutions end up in isolated pockets that struggle with interoperability and instant cross-border payments.

On delivery culture, Guiman welcomes leaders “getting their hands dirty.” Rather than mandate tools from the top, she began by asking engineering teams, especially younger developers, what they already use. Allevo now applies a pragmatic, risk-based intake: allow tools that are “safe enough,” evaluate usage in context, and prioritize anything that removes drudgery. AI fits that bill when used with human checkpoints; left to run unattended, it creates risk.

Looking ahead, Guiman points to the final stretch of ISO 20022 cutovers landing within weeks. Some customers are already live; the broader wave represents the “last hundred miles” of a multi-year program. In parallel, clients are joining new payment schemes, keeping teams busy across testing, go-lives, and stabilization.

The throughline is operational excellence over headlines. Guiman’s message: resilient banking depends on shared standards, clean data, and collaborative execution. The tattoo reveal, Allevo’s mark intertwined with family and a tiny car, neatly underscores it: people and technology, side by side, moving forward on the same road.