Time is a vacuum at Sibos. It’s a great time to catch up with old friends and meet new colleagues.  The exhibition floor is overwhelming, even now after banks have scaled back their presence at events like these.  There is a plethora of panels on a broad range of topics to choose from.

It’s a little bit like being at a casino – lots of activity and no clocks.

So, what have I seen so far?  The biggest idea so far has been a demo of a real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring module. You read that correctly: real time, transaction risk-scoring.  This gets to a fundamental problem for banks – what types of activities are my customers up to? Who are they transacting with and what are the implications of those activities for the bank?

Yantra, the name of this tool, provides a real time view of all customer transactions. It also has the ability to interrogate virtually every aspect of that payment.  What other payments has the customer made recently? What concerns (value, velocity, location) does this particular transaction at a gas station in Anytown raise? Is there a connection to other payments that my customers are making?

Imagine being able to tell your regulator that you have a risk score and real time analytics data on all your payment traffic. While Yantra is still in beta testing, it’s sure to be an attractive product.  Even more notable is that it was developed by Yantra Financial Technologies, an affiliate of CBW Bank, the community bank cum bankers’ bank, to address the bank’s own needs.

Also different this year is the crypto-currency focus of a number of panels and its central role in the innovation track called Innotribe. I do think it’s quite significant to cross-pollinate ideas between the world of the big banks and crypto-currencies – especially here at the conference run by the SWIFT network. If the worlds do bridge, it will take time. While we do have a handful of banks adopting the Ripple protocol (Germany’s Fidor and, yes, CBW, the same CBW Bank that’s produced Yantra) we are nowhere near defining areas where the two camps are comfortable collaborating.

It’s certainly bold, and commendable, of SWIFT to feature its potential disruptors on its own turf.

This post was written by Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry.