The most credible AI at Sibos 2026 was the kind nobody could see.
The banking conference opened Monday at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Swift, the cross-border payments giant, hosts the event.
Global Finance Magazine editor Paul Curcio reported from Day 1. His account points to a clear divide between AI as spectacle and AI as plumbing.
A Show Floor Built to Impress
The exhibition hall looked less like a trade show than a temporary financial city.
Booths came with leather couches, media studios, espresso machines and video-game challenges. Swift had the largest and most elaborate space.
One booth featured Ami, an AI-powered robotic head on a pedestal. She was not allowed to talk during a nearby presentation.
Curcio called her silence an apt symbol for the day.
Banks sounded wary of hype. Citi CEO Jane Fraser set that tone in the opening plenary.
“There are a lot of shiny objects being built in this space at the moment, and a lot of hammers in search of a nail,” she said.
A Decade in the Making
Bank of America’s Tom Durkin, global head of CashPro, described AI as a decade-long progression, not a sudden breakthrough.
It began with the bank’s consumer assistant, Erica. It then moved into specialized corporate uses.
CashPro products use AI to give corporate clients better insight into cash positions and bond orders. CashPro Chat applies generative AI to client service.
About half of all questions are handled by AI instead of being passed along for manual resolution, Durkin said.
A Bradesco pilot on the bank’s cross-border real-time payments platform was announced alongside those examples. Curcio saw it as change arriving through familiar infrastructure.
Going Beyond the PDF
The harder questions arrive where errors cost more. Trade finance is one example.
Merlin Dowse is a director of product management at CGI. He said legal frameworks, data standards and confidence in the source decide whether digitized trade can scale.
The industry has become good at extracting data from paper documents. The next step, he said, is to go “beyond the PDF.”
AI can help with document examination and due diligence. It cannot simply be dropped into a regulated process and trusted blindly.
“You have to keep the human in the loop,” Dowse said.
The Glass Box
Financial crime is the other pressure point. ThetaRay CEO Brad Levy and Garima Chaudhary, its VP of financial crime and compliance AI, attended.
Levy offered an alternative to the AI “black box.” He called it a “glass box,” where results are “predictable, explainable, and fully auditable.”
Chaudhary said regulators want proof that a system catches criminals.
Bad actors use the same tools as banks. That includes generative AI, deepfakes and synthetic identities.
Andy Schmidt, banking lead at CGI, warned about both extremes. Overreliance erodes critical thinking, he said, while underuse forfeits efficiency.
“What I’m seeing a lot of banks do is just sprinkle a little AI” on top of a process, he added.
The Miami Fintech Bench
Sibos put Miami Beach at the center of global payments this week. Local startups are building the same plumbing.
In MAIN’s Q3 2026 funding tally, Miami-area rounds included Cordant’s $8 million seed and Cyclops’s $20 million Series A.
Cordant builds financial infrastructure oversight for banks and fintechs. Cyclops builds stablecoin settlement rails behind a single API.
Cordant’s oversight work speaks directly to the audit concerns Sibos debated all day.
Banks at Sibos said the AI worth buying is the kind that survives an auditor’s questions.