Sibos 2026: Vyntra Global's Antoine Cuypers on transaction intelligence

Quick Summary

As financial institutions face mounting pressure from increasing transaction volumes and regulatory demands, the focus is shifting from basic system health to comprehensive transaction observability. Antoine Cuypers of Vyntra Global explains at Sibos 2026 how the industry is moving away from siloed IT monitoring toward a model that tracks the entire customer journey. By identifying anomalies in real time, banks can resolve hidden outages before they impact the end user.

Why is traditional IT monitoring failing modern banks?

Cuypers describes the infrastructure of many large institutions as an onion: a legacy mainframe core wrapped in layers of modern middleware. While these banks typically have robust IT monitoring in place, these systems are often siloed. They might report that CPU usage, disk space, and power are all functioning correctly, yet payments may still be stuck in a queue or require manual intervention.

This creates a situation where a bank is essentially flying blind. Cuypers argues that silo-based IT monitoring only confirms if a machine is running, not if the business value: the transaction: is actually flowing. With the introduction of faster payments and the transition to ISO 20022 (MX messages), which has quadrupled data sizes, the margin for error has narrowed significantly.

How does Vyntra Global approach transaction observability?

Instead of monitoring hardware, Vyntra Global focuses on Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The system auto-learns normal behavior for different channels, such as retail or remittances, and accounts for fluctuations like salary days. Key features of this approach include:

• Anomaly Detection: Identifying when a transaction takes longer than the learned norm between two points, which often indicates a hidden outage.
• Know Your Transaction Passport Stamps: Collecting digital stamps as a payment passes through sanctions screening, AML, KYC, and fraud tools to provide a single version of the truth for regulators.
• Integrity Checks: Monitoring for changes in critical business criteria, such as account numbers or beneficiary details, throughout the journey.

What are the real-world consequences of visibility gaps?

Cuypers highlights the disparity in customer service caused by fragmented data. In one case involving a bank merger, a customer query could be answered in 30 seconds if the data resided in a system with full visibility. If it resided in a legacy silo, the same query could take three days and four hours of staff time to resolve.

The stakes are even higher in trade finance. Cuypers shares an example of a container ship held in a harbour because a collateral payment was blocked. Without real-time visibility, the bank only discovers the problem when an angry corporate customer calls. By monitoring the customer journey from A to Z, institutions can resolve abnormal states before they cause reputational damage or financial penalties.

How will AI and automation transform the payment flow?

The future of transaction intelligence lies in making data accessible to internal and external customers through natural language. Using agentic AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), corporate clients could eventually query the status of their own payments via a web portal without needing to call the bank. The AI would pull the single version of truth from the observability platform and present it with graphs and human-language summaries.

Looking further ahead, Cuypers envisions a move toward the auto-repair of flows. In an instant payments world where transactions settle in seconds, there is no time for manual intervention. An intelligence layer that instantaneously detects a failure could trigger an AI agent to automatically divert a payment to a backup rail or system, resolving the issue before the customer is even aware of a delay.

FF NEWS TAKE:

The shift from monitoring servers to monitoring transactions marks a critical evolution in banking operations. As ISO 20022 increases data complexity and instant payments remove the luxury of time, the ability to see a payment's progress through every compliance and legacy gate is no longer a value-add: it is a necessity. Vyntra Global's focus on the customer journey suggests that the next frontier for fintech is not just moving money faster, but ensuring that the visibility of that movement is as instantaneous as the payment itself.