The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region continues to play a significant role in the global banking industry. ASEAN is growing into a major economic powerhouse, and rapid industry developments continue to shape global regulation, compliance and technology.</p> Innovation will be a key factor in 2015 for both commercial and institutional organisations. These four trends in banking and payments are set to lead the agenda: technology-led innovation, mobile banking, real-time payments, and the growth of the Renminbi (RMB) as an international payments currency.</p> Technology-led innovation has become a critical investment area for the banking and payments industry. IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific reports that innovation will be the focus for APAC banks in 2015. Many of them now allocate up to 25% of their IT budgets on emerging technologies designed to improve operations and services. These developments specifically focus on omni-channel strategy, new customer touch-points, tactical programmes in big data analytics, next generation payments, software-defined data centres, and risk analytics.</p> Across APAC, there will also be a discernible move towards mass-market acceptance of mobile banking, including mobile payments. With China and India fast becoming the leading smartphone markets in the world, mobile penetration rates in these countries are exceeding access to traditional banking services and prompting a consumer behaviour shift in banking.</p> New services such as Apple Pay are yet to reach critical mass, but Singapore in particular with its highly connected telecoms infrastructure will provide an optimal platform for rapid growth. However, the level of mobile payments innovation and growth will be constrained until banks can harness more integrated and standardised back-end processing and operational systems.</p> In addition to rapidly-growing consumer use of mobile banking and payments, there has also been a clear global shift towards interbank real-time payments. One recently announced example is Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP) Steering Committee’s selection of SWIFT to provide the infrastructure for its domestic payments platform to provide Australian businesses and consumers with a fast, versatile, data-rich payments system for everyday payments.</p> The fourth APAC banking 2015 trend is the continued growth of global RMB payments. In November 2014, the RMB reached a new milestone when it overtook the Canadian and Australian dollar as a global payments currency. The RMB has now entered the top five of world payment currencies, behind only the Japanese Yen, British Pound, Euro and US Dollar. RMB growth looks set to continue as SWIFT Watch data shows consistent three-digit growth over the past two years with an increase in value of payments by +321%.</p> Between these four industry trends and Singapore’s growing role in amalgamating regional and local economies in APAC, it sure is an exciting time for Sibos to return to Asia for the first time since Osaka in 2012.</p> </p>