Live from Copenhagen, welcome to FinanceAsia.com's daily coverage of Sibos 2005, the annual conference hosted by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, better known around the world as SWIFT.
The conference this year will attract almost 6,000 delegates from around the world, eager to hear all the latest trends in the payments, treasury, trade and securities markets.
The theme of this year's conference is transformation and in many ways builds on the transformation that has engulfed SWIFT itself in the last few years. The migration of SWIFT members to the SWIFTNet internet platform is complete and the systems are now in place to allow SWIFT members to transform their businesses.
A large proportion of the conference will be spent engaging SWIFT members and allowing them to see how they can take full advantage of the superior resilience, applicability and security of the SWIFT network.
Transformation requires strong leadership and this year, conference delegates will hear from acknowledged global financial leaders such as Jacob Wallenberg, Vice Chairman of SEB and Sir George Mathewson, Chairman of RBS, who will provide the speeches at the opening and closing plenary session respectively. Both speeches will focus heavily on the experiences both leaders have had in transforming their businesses and institutions.
Delegates will also be keen to attend the exhibition, which accompanies the conference. In the huge exhibition space at the Bella Conference Centre, all the major global banks will have stands as will over 200 application and middle ware vendors, integrators, consultants and central clearing systems. Exhibitors will no doubt be trying to outdo each other on the quality of the gifts they are giving out, the lavish style of their stands and the expense of the prize gifts they will be raffling.
The FinanceAsia.com staff on the ground will bring you a daily mix of news stories from the event as well as wide ranging feature piece on themes that are coming out of the conference. We will also try to provide our readers with some colour on the lighter side of Sibos.
We are also pleased to be carrying the words of our sponsors, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered Bank and Citigroup who will provide our readers with their insights into the latest thinking in transactional banking and securities services. We hope you enjoy this week's newsletters.
