A Banking Circle point of view on tokenised deposits, cross-border interoperability, agentic payments, and operational resilience.

SIBOS 2026 in Miami made one thing clear: the financial services industry has stopped debating what the future of finance looks like. It has started building the infrastructure to run it.

Speakers discussed tokenised deposits, agentic payments, and operational resilience as problems institutions need to solve now, not future concepts. The throughline across every session was the same: speed inside any one system means little without the ability to connect it to everything else.

This piece breaks down what that means in practice, for banks, PSPs and fintechs planning their next move.

01. A quick recap of SIBOS 2026
02. Tokenised deposits: what “integration phase” actually means
03. Cross-border interoperability: the real bottleneck
04. Agentic payments and AI in payments
05. Operational resilience and DORA compliance
06. What this means for banks, PSPs and fintechs

01. A quick recap of SIBOS 2026

SIBOS 2026 showed an industry moving from proof of concept to proof of scale across digital assets, payments, AI, and regulation.

Across four days of sessions, the conversation kept returning to one question: not what the future of finance might look like, but how the industry builds the infrastructure, standards, and regulatory foundations to make it work at scale. That shift showed up in three places:

• Digital assets moving toward institutional adoption.
• Payment rails needing to connect rather than just speed up.
• AI moving from back-office tool to active participant in the transaction itself.

The sections below walk through each, in plain terms, and what they mean for how banks, PSPs and fintechs should think about their own infrastructure.

02.Tokenised deposits: what “integration phase” actually means

Tokenised deposits are moving out of pilot programmes and into the infrastructure institutions are actually planning around.

A tokenised deposit is a digital representation of a bank deposit. It is recorded on a shared or distributed ledger, and depending on their design and underlying infrastructure may enable faster or more continuous settlement, while still sitting inside the regulated banking system. The “How tokenised finance is moving from concept to reality” panel at SIBOS examined the barriers to bringing that capability into existing FX, securities, and payments processes.

John Jackson of the Bank of England described the market as entering an “integration phase,” with institutions looking to identify “cross-ecosystem ways of moving forward.” In practice, banks are no longer asking whether to experiment with tokenisation. They are asking how to plug it into the systems they already run, including core banking, FX, and payments infrastructure, without standing up a parallel stack.

Technology may be ready before rulebooks and operating models are. Digital-asset frameworks are developing at different speeds across jurisdictions, and inconsistent standards, terminology and oversight create uncertainty for institutions operating across borders. The practical bottleneck is not building tokenised capability; it is integrating that capability with existing payment, FX and treasury processes under clear governance and with sufficient liquidity.

Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Assets Officer at Banking Circle, has made the same point in public: “Tokenising assets is now the easy part. The challenge now is to build the liquidity, regulatory and interoperable architecture needed to support institutional-scale activity on-chain. The task is not insignificant, but the change is happening now.” His argument fits the SIBOS discussion: tokenisation matters once value can move beyond a single ledger and back into regulated money.

That momentum extended to the exhibition floor. Speaking to FinTech Futures at SIBOS, Michael Boel, Co-Head of Clearing Technology at Banking Circle, highlighted stablecoins, CBDCs, and other forms of digital money as areas attracting significant attention, alongside a shift in investment priorities toward emerging digital asset technologies and continued development of established fiat infrastructure.

Boel made the same point on stage, joining Pritpal Shokar, Head of Product at Thunes, for a session on where stablecoins are solving real payment challenges today. The two examined where stablecoins create real value now, why adoption looks different by region, and what must happen before they earn a place in mainstream financial infrastructure. That points to a hybrid model, not a winner-takes-all shift. Tokenised deposits, stablecoins and established fiat rails will develop side by side.

The institutions that reach scale will be the ones that connect those forms of money through common controls, liquidity and settlement workflows, rather than asking clients to operate a separate stack for each.

03. Cross-border interoperability: the real bottleneck

Connectivity between payment rails is not the same thing as interoperability between them, and that gap is now the real bottleneck in cross-border payments.

Two payment systems can both be live, fast, and technically “connected,” and still fail to interoperate, because interoperability depends on more than a working link between them. It depends on matching message formats and data fields, aligned liquidity and settlement cycles, and consistent service-level expectations end to end. A domestic instant rail can settle in seconds and still stall the moment a payment needs to cross into another system, another currency, or another set of standards.

During “The payments playbook rewired: scaling interoperability and end-to-end visibility,” Cristina Lobo Roldán of Iberpay summed up the gap directly: “connectivity itself does not guarantee interoperability.” For banks, that reframes the real infrastructure question. It is not “can we connect to this rail,” but “will a payment that enters our systems arrive intact, with the right data, on the other side.”

As payment options, networks, and currencies multiply, that consistency problem compounds. Interoperability decides whether that growing complexity stays manageable for financial institutions, or gets shifted onto them to absorb.

Amith Avtar, Head of Network Banks & Sales at Banking Circle, put the same infrastructure problem in customer terms in an interview with FinTech Futures at SIBOS. Banks want greater global reach without greater operational complexity, more visibility and control over how payments move, and the ability to use the right rail for the right market, customer and use case. The practical answer is not another isolated network; it is one connection that brings local clearing, cross-border capability, accounts and reconciliation together.

Banking Circle processes more than €1.5 trillion in payment volume annually for over 950 regulated businesses, including financial institutions and marketplaces, using a combination of direct participation in certain clearing schemes and correspondent banking relationships depending on currency and market. That scale matters because interoperability has to work under production volumes, not only in a pilot.

Bhatia describes the customer outcome this way: “From our customers’ perspective, the idea is simple: make the integration easier for them, while Banking Circle manage the wiring underneath.” That is a useful definition of interoperability for banks: choice at the point of execution, without having to build and operate every connection themselves.

04. Agentic payments and AI in payments

Agentic payments mean AI agents may initiate or manage aspects of transaction within predefined permissions and controls, potentially without a human approving each step.

The “Agentic payments: defining the blueprint for autonomous payments at scale” panel considered what that looks like in practice. Johan Gerber of Mastercard framed the challenge as building “an entirely new ecosystem which is agent-to-agent,” requiring “a framework for interoperability globally” that supports continuous, multi-party interactions between agents, not just one-off transactions.

For banks, that is the same interoperability problem seen in cross-border payments, one layer up. Agents from different institutions need to recognise, trust, and transact with each other using shared standards, not bespoke integrations negotiated one relationship at a time.

Charlotte Hassing, Head of Product at Banking Circle, brings the issue back to governance: “The industry is over-focused on what agents can decide and under-focused on who authorises, attributes, controls and settles the payment.” Her view is that agentic commerce will not scale on intelligence alone. It needs real-time settlement, clear mandates, strong authentication, regulated payment rails, compliance controls and auditability.

What this won’t fix on its own.
Faster agents do not answer who is accountable when an autonomous agent transacts on a business’s behalf, what permissions it should hold, or how its identity is verified across institutions.

Banks already address many of these questions for human-authorised payments. Agentic payments apply them to a counterparty that never sleeps and can initiate transactions at machine speed. The near-term future is likely to be multi-rail: cards, account-to-account payments and regulated digital-asset settlement will coexist. The real challenge is applying consistent mandates, limits, monitoring and auditability across all of them.

05. Operational resilience and DORA compliance

Operational resilience is increasingly being viewed not only as a regulatory requirement, but also as a strategic capability, and DORA compliance is the clearest expression of that shift for EU-based institutions.

The “From compliance to competitive edge: elevating resilience in a regulated world” session considered how institutions can move beyond treating resilience purely as a regulatory requirement and instead treat it as a capability that supports growth.

For financial entities in scope, DORA (the Digital Operational Resilience Act) requires internal governance and a documented ICT risk-management framework, incident management and reporting, resilience testing, and management of ICT third-party risk. A bank does not outsource those risk obligations when it outsources technology: contracts, dependencies, continuity and exit arrangements all come under scrutiny. Separately, critical ICT third-party providers can be placed under direct oversight by the European Supervisory Authorities.

Bhatia’s public formulation is simpler: “When you move money, trust, security and compliance are the foundations. Being licensed by leading regulators reflects the high standards we are required to meet, and that is essential for the institutions that rely on us.” In an always-on environment, resilience is part of that trust proposition, not a separate compliance exercise.

As financial services become more interconnected and always-on, the ability prevent, respond to and recover from disruption, while maintaining critical services within defined tolerances, is what keeps trust intact.

06. What this means for banks, PSPs and fintechs

Taken together, SIBOS 2026 described an industry moving from experimentation to execution. That changes what banks, PSPs and fintechs should ask of their infrastructure, and of the providers they build on.

• If tokenised deposits are heading toward integration with existing payment and FX processes, prioritise infrastructure that can connect tokenised and fiat workflows under one compliance, liquidity and settlement model.
• If interoperability, not raw speed, is the real constraint on cross-border payments, prioritise providers that combine local clearing access, cross-border capability, FX and reconciliation behind a single integration.
• If agentic payments are coming, demand financial guardrails alongside payment rails: verifiable authority, bounded permissions, real-time controls, monitoring and auditability across every route an agent can use.
• If resilience is becoming a strategic requirement rather than a compliance exercise under DORA, assess the ICT dependencies and control environment around your infrastructure providers as closely as your own.

The next phase of payments will not be defined by one winning rail. It will be defined by how effectively regulated infrastructure connects multiple rails, currencies and forms of money, without passing that complexity on to the client:  for Banking Circle, these considerations are helping shape how we think about and develop our infrastructure for the future.

FAQ

What is agentic payments?
Agentic payments refer to AI agents initiating and managing financial transactions on behalf of a business or individual, without a human approving each individual step. The key open questions are identity, mandate, attribution, control, liability and settlement. For institutions, the adoption test is not whether an agent can initiate a payment, but whether it can do so under bounded authority and auditable controls.

What is DORA compliance?
DORA (the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act) requires in-scope financial entities to maintain ICT governance and risk-management frameworks, manage and report major ICT incidents, test operational resilience, and manage ICT third-party risk. It has applied since 17 January 2025.

Are tokenised deposits replacing correspondent banking?
Not yet. SIBOS 2026 panels framed this as integration rather than replacement: institutions are working to incorporate tokenised assets into existing FX, securities, and payments processes rather than building a separate system.

What were the main takeaways from SIBOS 2026?
SIBOS 2026 showed digital assets, agentic payments and operational resilience moving from proof of concept toward practical, at-scale implementation. The connecting theme was that connectivity alone, between payment rails, forms of money or AI agents, is not the same as interoperability. The next phase will be built on regulated infrastructure that can make different systems work together without passing their complexity on to the client.