Share and Learn: Why Sibos Matters to Pay.UK in the Age of AI

Quick Summary

David Crawford, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Pay.UK, says the organisation goes to Sibos with two aims: to share its experience of running UK national payments infrastructure in the era of AI, and to learn from peers around the world about what is actually working.

What does Pay.UK do, and why does that shape its Sibos agenda?

Pay.UK is a payment system operator. It runs the UK's interbank retail payment systems, including Faster Payments, Bacs and the Current Account Switch Service. Crawford describes a very clear vision and priority: to be the most reliable, trusted and efficient way to move money in the UK, and to keep payments flowing no matter what. That responsibility for national infrastructure is what Pay.UK carries into Miami.

What does Pay.UK want to share?

The first reason to attend is to talk about experience. Crawford points to Pay.UK running what is probably the first real-time person-to-person payments platform in the world, and how it has grown and developed over the years. He is equally keen to discuss what running national infrastructure means in the era of AI, and what that implies for:

• Resilience
• Fraud
• The innovation and user journeys that the infrastructure facilitates

What does Pay.UK hope to learn?

The second reason is to learn. Crawford calls Sibos the preeminent global forum for coming together and collaborating with people from around the world on what they are seeing, what is different and what is emerging. He makes a sharp observation about how the conversation has moved on: a couple of years ago at Sibos, everybody was talking about AI but no one was really doing it. Now, he says, the opportunity is to learn from real experience, finding out what is working, what is not working and what Pay.UK can take from that.

FF NEWS TAKE:

For an organisation whose job is keeping a country's payments running, the shift Crawford describes matters. Sibos has moved from AI talk to AI practice, and an operator of national infrastructure has more to gain from other people's hard lessons than from another round of vision statements. Going to Miami both to share and to listen is the right posture for a system that cannot afford to learn everything the hard way at home.