Last week, BAFT (the Banker’s Association on Finance and Trade) held its 2026 Europe Forum in London, and the smartTrade team joined the several hundred participants from banks all over Europe for three days of learning, thought leadership, and networking. On the second day, our Director of Payments, Chris Gibson, shared the stage with Ana Esteban from BBVA in a speed round offering hot takes on ten bold questions posed by host, Moritz Lerner, from LBBW.
Industry Hot Takes: Digitisation, AI, and Real-Time Payments
In the speed round, Moritz posed ten questions on current issues in Trade Finance, Payments, and FX which addressed digitisation, global supply chains, real-time payments, AI, ISO 20022, smart contracts, and the choice overload of trade finance tech solutions. Much like the broader conference agenda, several themes kept emerging:
- Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
- Digital Assets
- Interoperability
These themes are inextricably linked: digital assets live on digital ledgers and the ability to derive value from these assets is dependent entirely on the ability to access and interact with the DLT platforms that host them. The three sides of this issue surfaced in multiple conversations and presentations last week.
Core Themes from the Forum
In transaction banking, DLT has moved rapidly from concept to implementation with shared ledgers and blockchains from multiple banks in production today and foundational projects underway by Swift, BIS and others to deliver solutions for settlement, cross-border payments, tokenization, messaging, and liquidity. The enormous implications for cross border payments and trade finance of this “re-wiring” of legacy systems by DLT surfaced in several forum presentations.
The growing list of digital assets residing on these DLT platforms include financial instruments, real assets, deposits, CBDCs, and stablecoins. The question for participants is no longer whether but how to engage with digital assets. Jason Pijnaker of FS Engine, hosted by Deepa Sinha of BAFT, offered answers in an engaging Stablecoin Workshop exploring the uses, benefits, risks, and alternatives of stablecoins and other digital assets. One takeaway: banks should begin their analysis with clients’ pain points and those will vary by jurisdiction.
This variety of platforms and assets spread across hundreds of jurisdictions is requiring hastened efforts at fostering interoperability between platforms, jurisdictions, and standards. The urgency, nature and pace of this effort attracted much discussion in London. The issue spans the technology, legal/regulatory, and messaging domains and the sober consensus is that the pace of progress in implementing and reaping the benefits of DLT and digital assets will depend heavily upon progress in linking and harmonizing systems, standards, and laws.
smartTrade Perspective
At smartTrade, we have particular experience with the “last mile” of the DLT and digital asset lifecycle. This last mile is the integration of DLT, blockchain, FX, payment rails, crypto, AI and other digital assets into the infrastructure and workflows of our clients and it is part of the work of creating interoperability. Done properly, this work will deliver the enormous benefits of these new technologies (and others) to end users and provide a platform for future growth and innovation.