The Folly of Sibos

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The Sibos Conference lands in Toronto next week. Sibos is sponsored by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication aka SWIFT. SWIFT operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions. They provide the ISO 9362 bank identifier codes (BICs). The little number prefixes are popularly known as "SWIFT codes." Banks use them for smooth, continuous operations.

Sibos is a technical industry conference for vendors to hawk products. It’s to inform banking functionaries of new offerings and methods. Sibos makes a genuine contribution to the operational abilities and productivity of worldwide banking operations.

Unfortunately, Sibos also claims to examine the “changing landscape, new expectations,  global and local perspectives of the financial industry.” This is where Sibos falls down badly.

These type of conferences have been going on for decades. Guess what? The global financial systems, banking and economies are a total mess. They suck. Nothing has changed. The never deliver fresh perspective or change. The global financial systems operate smoothly and productively -- like an efficient parasite devouring its host.  

The so-called 'thought leaders' Sibos attracts for ‘fresh perspective’ are badly detached from reality. Take most of their loopy theories, lofty concepts and kooky, futurist ideas to the average Fortune 500 boardroom or to government apparatchiks and you will be promptly shown the exit.

In addition, the Sibos thought leaders  suffer from a form of malignant solipsism. They are extremely brittle. They reject any close examination of their principles in the arc light of actual businesses, markets and economies. Meanwhile, even the SLIGHTEST critique, necessary for adoption of new economic concepts, is met with anger and fury. It’s akin to proposing fundamental changes to the rigid finance establishments at a telecom conference. It’s a non-starter.

Just being at a big telecommunications conference for banking identifier codes makes new economy thinkers feel important and valued. It’s the wrong venue. It’s a mistake. Sibos is engineered for stability and continuity, not adaptation, change or economic evolution.

Remember, a conference for “interbank financial telecommunications” is specifically created to strengthen and perpetuate the status quo. It is to sustain the bureaucracy, high security and reliability of legacy systems. It assures smooth, continuous operations of current systems and models. That’s the irony. It’s why Sibos continuously fails to meet expectations to furnish fresh, impactful economic perspectives. It intentionally hinders and stops the mutation, natural selection and genetic drift of global economic DNA. 

Sibos and all the delegates know this fact. However, hearing fancy new ideas gives delegates a warm feeling. Then it is back to the same-old-way with a deliberate vengeance.

The global finance tradition of ‘going along to get along’ has put the world’s financial systems in a tailspin. Ignoring the elephant in the room for decades has created the global financial crisis.

Sorry to say, as we have seen over the last 20 years, all this happy talk doesn’t amount to a hill of beans; it’s lipstick on a pig.

Sorry, Virginia, but economic innovation does not inhabit institutional banking telecom conferences. The emperor just has no clothes. We, the great unwashed, The Third Estate, are "just hopelessly stupid.”

Meanwhile, we all pay a very heavy price for dysfunctional banking operations conferences pretending to furnish new expectations or fresh perspectives for the global economic mess.

 

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