EXCLUSIVE: “The Ambiguity of Progress” – Innes MacLeod, Swift Innotribe in ‘Discover Sibos 2025’

The Sibos conference is a meeting point for addressing some of the most pressing issues and opportunities in finance today. But if you want to explore tomorrow, head for the Discover section of the show

Where do you find an opera singer whose dress changes colour according to the emotion in her arias, alongside live speakers interacting with AI-generated past and future versions of themselves?

Or a high-tech ‘treasure hunt’ for digital tokens that can be exchanged for prizes ranging from a Meta VR headset to, errmmm, a dachshund plush?

They are all at this year’s Sibos, the annual conference run by Swift, the international money messaging service, held in Frankfurt over four days and attracting up to 12,000 delegates from the global financial industry. Since the very first Sibos, held back in 1978, only five years after Swift’s formation, the conference has prided itself on hosting some of the world’s foremost experts to give their take on the future of finance.

This year’s overall theme is ‘the next frontiers of global finance’. But the coolest kids in fintech will be hanging out at in the Discover space. Described as a conference within a conference, a third of the participants here are fintechs and at its heart is Innotribe, Swift’s blue-sky-thinking lab, which brings together stakeholders from across the financial ecosystem to drive collaborative innovation.

Here, at the intersection of philosophy and tech, presenters and visitors will probe the ‘what if’ questions of tomorrow. Innes Macleod, Innovation Event Manager for Swift Innotribe, says the whole point is to challenge conventional thinking.

Speaking ahead of the conference, Macleod told us: “We have this mantra that if you come to a session with questions and you leave with better questions, then we’ve done what we set out to do.

“It’s a place for learning. It’s a place for being inspired. It’s a place for gaining wisdom, insight, knowledge. We just look at things from a different perspective.”

Hundreds of experts at Sibos are addressing the transformative forces reshaping the financial ecosystem and the drivers needed for greater connectivity, interoperability and resilience to successfully adapt to them. And the pace of those changes is continually accelerating. The show has been witness to that.

“We used to talk about stuff that was really ‘out there’,” says Macleod. The gap between what was being talked about in Innotribe and more mainstream technology that was being talked about in the main conference was quite significant. In the 2000s that gap just started getting smaller and smaller.

“If you come to a session with questions and you leave with better questions, then we’ve done what we set out to do”

“That means people who are now in their 20s or 30s are going to go through multipleradical changes whereas people who are now in their 70s and 80s would maybe have seen just one. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow that could fundamentally change everything. And we’re seeing this happen time and time again in a much shorter space of time than we would have done, 10 to 15 years ago.”

That frantic pace can also spell dangers, such as the rapidly evolving threats from cyber criminals. So far in 2025, several major brands in the UK alone, including Jaguar Land Rover and Harrods, have all suffered disruption after hackers infiltrated their IT systems.

‘White hat’ hacker Jamie Woodruff is among the expert speakers. In a world where hackers have used music editing software to synthesise the voice of a bank’s CEO, allowing them to transfer millions to an offshore account, Woodruff’s overriding advice is that industries must work together to thwart future threats.

Elsewhere in the Discover programme a filmmaker from Africa will be giving her perspective on the power and the jeopardy of AI. While two teams will argue contrarian views on the technology’s ‘right’ to free agency. Meanwhile, you can geek out admiring a real quantum cryostat – an ultra-low temperature fridge for maintaining qubits at temperatures near absolute zero – displayed near the main Innotribe stage.

It’s these experiences and conversations that define the Discover area of the show. As Macleod says: “There are so many reasons just not to be elsewhere!”

QUANTUM LEAP of IMAGINATION

Virtual reality, augmented reality, AI, and quantum. You put those four things together, it’s going to create the possibility of something that none of us could fathom five years ago,” says Innes Macleod.

In fact, we still don’t have the words to adequately talk about some of those concepts and their consequences. And that remains a problem, he believes.

“We haven’t yet developed a language for what quantum is and will be,” he says. “Imagine you’re trying to describe Star Wars to Shakespeare. You basically wouldn’t be able to do it because you’re talking a completely different language.”

But he’s convinced the technology will eventually be a game changer, and on this year’s stage, Andrea Morello, a quantum physicist who is Professor of Quantum Engineering at the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at the University of South Wales, will be leading discussion on the possibilities.

Instead of classical bits (0 or 1), quantum computers use qubits which can represent 0, 1, or both states simultaneously. This allows them to process vastly more information and solve complex problems, such as those in drug discovery, materials science, and optimisation, that are beyond the capacity of the most powerful classical supercomputers. But they are also highly fragile and require significant error correction to become practical — and a lack of standardisation has allowed different quantum programming languages to be developed, which include Python, Qiskit used by IBM and Cirq used by Google.

That absence of universally adopted standards has created a fragmented ecosystem, making it difficult to share code, tools, and knowledge across different platforms.

Nevertheless, says Macleod: “We’re so close to so many major breakthroughs that it will fundamentally revolutionise everything that we do.

FRIENDS or RIVALS?

The rise of neobanks and other fintech startups has revolutionised the global financial ecosystem over the past daecade, which is reflected at Sibos 2025 where a record 92 fintechs are in attendance at Discover.

When I think back to 2016, when we first brought some fintechs into the event, we affectionately referred to the space as the ‘fintech corner’. You’d come along, say hi and walk on,” recalls Macleod. “But it generated so much attention that we introduced more. Then Discover was born in 2018 and it’s just grown ever since.”

How has Macleod seen the relationship develop between fintechs and the incumbent banks?
“At the infancy of fintech, the talk was all about fintechs coming to eat your lunch if you were a bank; usurping the incumbents and taking over. It was all about competition and aggressive moves into different spaces,” he says.

“That moved to cooperation when the realisation of the problem of scaling hit the fintechs. They realised that partnerships were the way to go; everybody could win. My gut feeling is that’s started to fragment a little bit. More players are coming in with a new way of looking at the whole financial industry and saying ‘we are the future’.

“To a degree they’re right, but they’re going to come up against the same brick wall, which is scale: how do you get those end points? Incumbents have that down to a tee but then they’re operating under the weight of legacy.

“How do you put these two pieces of a puzzle — which are actually from different puzzles — together? “I think it’s a really interesting space to be in right now.”

This article was published in Discover Sibos 2025, Page 4-5