Sibos 2021 Resident blogger, Leda Glyptis: The world moves faster than you. And it doesn’t

Fintech expert Leda Glyptis, a true Sibos Insider, is a resident blogger for Sibos 2021, offering her unique take on this year’s event. This blog is part of a series released daily throughout Sibos week.

Don’t talk to me. I am sad.

Second Sibos I don’t get to hug my friends. See people’s animated faces as they take in new ideas and wrap their heads around concepts and notions that make them smarter by the minute.Second Sibos affected by the global pandemic, keeping us apart. Throwing challenges and curve balls at us. Making us reflect on everything from work, to interpersonal relationships, skillsets, motivations and the early signs of burnout.Second Sibos where we don’t get together and yet we come together. As always. Because if the industry ever needed to get together to think, plan and rally, it’s now.

We may have been under individual house arrest for the best part of the last two years but the world has been racing on. With our help. Amazing how much speed you can add to things even when you are motionless yourself.Year on year, Sibos is when we stop and take stock. We pause, get off the hamster wheel and, in one sleep-deprived week, look back, look ahead and wonder whether we have been doing enough. And invariably find that we haven’t, so we return to our offices exhausted and energised in equal measure. And determined to do better.

So this year we don’t pause.This year we race. We race into a conversation that is more pertinent than ever.You see, we have been talking about digitisation of banking and cashless transactions for so long and in the past 18 months… it happened. It happened because we had no choice.And some of it was not as scary as we had thought it would be.And some of it was way scarier.Some of it was smooth and speedy and meaningful pieces of work went live with not a glitch. And some of it was extremely hard. Talent shortages. Inadequate tooling for colleagues to do their job without risking their lives and going into the office. Short sighted leadership. Inspired leadership. We had the lot, across our industry.

I don’t know about you, but I have been part of the launch of a major new banking challenger in the UK and a kick ass BaaS platform in Australia, all from my dining room chair. I have hired and managed and negotiated and signed. I have missed people. But I have not missed progress.And the speed at which the world is moving has been all the more poignant because we have been physically static for so long.

Last year we spoke about digital tooling.We spoke about resilience.We spoke about what CBDCs will do to payments.We spoke about data integrity and information security standards when you are working in your pyjamas. And this year?This year we will be coming in, tired and worried about our loved ones but knowing we were more resilient than we thought. And the world even more uncertain than we feared.This year we will talk about programmable money, capabilities and ethics. We will talk about the future, in a way like we always do. And in a way like we’ve never done before. Because the future is here. And some of our long held fears were so over blown. And some of them were so naively underplayed.

And in a world where we stood physically still, in organisations that have long lamented their inertia and slowness and legacy millstones around their proverbial necks, we have achieved so much. In a world that moves faster than our bodies and our businesses, we have found our minds and collective talents more than equal to the task.And that is everything.And with that knowledge and all the fatigue of the last couple of years, I somehow expect this Sibos to be the most subdued and most radical one ever.Because we are all tired. But in a time of crisis, we rallied. And now we know what we are made of. And I hope and trust that the industry will keep its sleeves rolled up and just say, ‘Ok. What next?’.On second thoughts.Talk to me about that. It makes me a lot less sad and a lot more hopeful.