Outstanding edition of the Sibos Frankfurt 2025 for Crédit Agricole CIB

We were proud to attend this year’s Sibos conference from September 29th to October 2nd, the dominant, annual event for the global financial services community covering securities, cash management and trade finance. The conference continues to be the leading forum for industry players to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping our businesses, from digital transformation, sustainable finance, regulatory changes, innovation and fostering meaningful collaboration across the sector.

Our presence at Sibos 2025 held in Frankfurt, Germany, was attended by more than 12,000 visitors, was both active and engaging.  The Crédit Agricole CIB booth, shared with our sister company, CACEIS, specialized in asset servicing for institutional and corporate clients, created strong impression at the conference.  Sibos allowed us to reinforce our extensive business contacts and to enhance our visibility within the financial community, through our participation on industry panels about trade finance, instant payments and innovation.

Throughout the event, our teams held a large number of productive meetings with clients, partners, and industry stakeholders. These discussions provided us with valuable insights into evolving client needs, as well as deals’ perspectives. 

In Cash Clearing Services, we are an increasingly influential player.  As confirmed by the latest 2025 Euromoney survey which ranks our Group sixth globally, Crédit Agricole CIB's remarkable performance in Euro payments clearing is well established. This is also highlighted by the FIMetrix 2025 study where we now belong to the second Tier of top-performing banks among major Euro service providers, obtaining 8th place in the overall ranking. This evolution marks spectacular progress, with market share nearly doubling from 13% in 2023 to 23% in 2025.

Within the Financial Institutions business, Trade Finance also plays a pivotal role by providing risk mitigation tools and financing solutions that enable international trade flows. Through instruments such as letters of credit, bank guarantees and working capital finance solutions, banks build trust across borders. Crédit Agricole CIB’s trade finance franchise was ranked first in 2025, both by GTR and Euromoney, as the best Trade Finance Bank in Western Europe. 

Additionally, in the secondary market of Trade Finance, we have had opportunities for meetings and valuable contacts. These interactions are crucial as they strengthen our presence and credibility within the financial community allowing us to build relationships. 

Finally, we held valuable meetings on products’ development in cross-border payments and global supply chain financing, where innovation and regulation are key stakes to instantaneous processing and interoperability. 

In addition to exhibition and business meetings, we also had the opportunity to contribute directly to the program’s content:

•    "Enabling seamless customer experience in trade: Transparency, efficiency and digitisation" (30/09) – Ludivine Assayag, Head of Trade Finance Products & Structuring at Crédit Agricole CIB, alongside major American and Japanese banking names, SWIFT * and a Trade software provider, shared perspectives on how the trade landscape is changing—with a focus on customer experience coming to the fore, in financial ecosystems undergoing rapid digital transformations. SWIFT is enabling transparency, efficiency and digitization by working with banks, corporates and Fintechs to ease frictions in global commerce. "We are talking about digitisation, transparency, but the question raised is about interoperability, […] and new standards’ definition to facilitate the connection and integration of new platforms", Ludivine said.
 

•    "From pilot to go live: Scaling API-driven trade" (30/09) - Dominique Honoré, our Global Head of Global Trade & Commodities, alongside another European Bank, SWIFT and a Trade Fintech. APIs are reshaping trade finance; however, turning pilot success into live, scalable operations is the real challenge. In this session, early adopters shared their experiences in piloting SWIFT’s APIs for guarantees. This panel unpacked what it takes to move from a proof of concept to production-ready trade finance powered by APIs. "Bank must be an open architecture to be able to connect all these tools, we cannot impose a single tool, we must be open and flexible […] I think we need to streamline and standardize how all those systems are working", commented Dominique.

•    Stéphanie Ekindjian Delliste, our Global Head of Cash Management, was interviewed on Sibos TV (01/10) about "How can instant payments and instant liquidity become a reality?". The video addresses the challenges and opportunities of instantaneity as far as SEPA and cross-border payments are concerned, and the increasing expectations of treasurers for real-time management of their liquidity, hence facilitating the emergence of new solutions that challenge traditional financial systems. To overcome these challenges, Stéphanie emphasized the importance of pursuing the initiatives aiming at interconnecting the instant payment schemes of each currency (for example between Europe and Australia), but also the necessity for financial institutions to consider building new standards leveraging on open, multi-banks and currency-agnostic blockchain technologies, while continuing to invest in the existing infrastructures to make them faster, interoperable and more secure. The replay is on YouTube here Will open in a new tab .

•    Last but not least, Guénolé de Cadoudal, our Head of Digital Assets was runner-up at the Sibos Hackathon 2025 (02/10), whose business case was “Business Challenge: Unlocking speed, cost and transparency with digital payments”. With the so|cash protocol, we have demonstrated multi-chain and multi-banking interoperability in an instant and cross-border FX transaction. Facing the challenges of real-time processing in corporate treasury, we combined innovation, security, SWIFT intermediation, and traditional correspondent banking in a realistic prototype. The transaction consists of a USD/EUR cross-border payment based on: Standard identifiers (BIC for banks, IBAN for accounts, LEI for owners); Correspondent banking chains for each currency; A secure direct debit system via blockchain; Orchestration by SWIFT, which supervises the complete execution between different monetary zones.

These sessions allowed us not only to showcase our expertise, but also to engage in meaningful debate on the issues shaping the future of our banking industry.

A heartfelt thank you goes to our teams for their dedication, to our clients and partners for their trust, and to the conference organizers for creating such a valuable forum. We look forward to building on the momentum from this year and to seeing you all again at Sibos 2026!
 

* SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a global cooperative that provides secure financial messaging services. Established in 1973 in Belgium, it connects over 11,000 financial institutions across 200+ countries. SWIFT doesn't transfer funds directly but enables standardized communication for international transactions between banks. The organization maintains the secure network infrastructure and messaging standards that form the backbone of global financial communications, facilitating cross-border payments, securities transactions, and treasury operations worldwide. They organise the Sibos conference every year.