Authored by Ian Stirling, CEO, Streets Consulting
As digital assets and shared ledgers transition from isolated experiments into production infrastructure, banking faces a fundamental question: how do we establish trust in a tokenized world? Having spent my career in traditional banking and emerging financial technology, Sibos 2026 is a fascinating place to watch these worlds converge, rather than collide.
One discussion in Miami put the central question particularly well: as assets, money, and financial processes become tokenized, where exactly does trust sit?
My takeaway was clear: trust is not disappearing as financial services shift toward tokenized assets and shared ledgers; it is being redistributed. Some of it sits in technology, some in law, some in regulated institutions, and – when something inevitably goes wrong – quite a lot still sits with a human being. The emerging model is less about replacing institutional trust and more about creating a hybrid architecture combining technology, legal certainty, robust governance, and client accountability.
Historically, financial trust did not originate from technology, but from regulated institutions, long-standing relationships, and legal frameworks. Anyone who has worked inside a bank knows just how much machinery sits behind moving money from A to B: controls, approvals, reconciliations, counterparties, and people checking other people.
Moving toward tokenized networks and shared ledgers does not eliminate the need for these traditional pillars. Smart contracts can compress an extraordinary amount of that machinery into code. But saying “the code says so” is unlikely to satisfy a client, regulator, or judge when £100 million moves in the wrong direction.
The attraction of a shared ledger is surprisingly simple: fewer institutions maintaining slightly different versions of the same truth. In financial markets, where vast resources are spent reconciling who owns what, that is no small prize. Shared ledgers create common visibility while preserving the controls financial markets require. Technology can automate trust mechanisms; it does not eliminate human accountability.
Strip away the blockchain terminology and the core questions remain familiar: who owns the asset, who is accountable when something breaks, and what is the money actually worth? To establish institutional trust on-chain, three foundational layers must come together:
As the industry moves from pilot phases toward production implementations like SWIFT Ledger and the ECB’s Pontes project, bridging technology and law remains complex. One statistic from Sibos neatly summed up the challenge: mapping settlement finality across jurisdictions in Project Agorá produced 340 pages of legal analysis from eight legal teams, versus 80 pages of technical specifications. Writing code may well be the easy part.
To connect disparate market infrastructures, institutions strongly favour trusted bridge models managed by accountable operators over trustless smart-contract bridges, which have historically been vulnerable to security exploits. That may disappoint the purists, but it reflects a reality I see repeatedly: institutions are happy to adopt new technology, but they will not adopt unbounded liability. Shared ledger architecture must balance synchronized market visibility with strict privacy controls, ensuring regulators and counterparties see only the transaction data they are authorized to view.
Financial infrastructure has spent decades eliminating friction. But an uncomfortable lesson from instant payments is that not all friction was useless. While straight-through processing (STP) optimizes back-office efficiency, institutions recognize the necessity of “intentional friction” on the client side – such as digital cash vaults and delays for adding new payees – to combat push-payment scams. Having worked in an industry obsessed with straight-through processing, there is something slightly counterintuitive about deliberately putting a speed bump back into the system. But sometimes five seconds of thought is considerably more valuable than five milliseconds of settlement.
Tokenized infrastructure allows us to overhaul legacy compliance frameworks. Rather than forcing customers to repeatedly prove who they are across fragmented silos, digital identity and shared ledgers streamline KYC, reduce fraud, and simplify cross-border verification. Achieving this requires close public-private collaboration, with the financial sector providing regulatory safeguards and central bank anchors while the private sector drives commercial innovation.
We spend a lot of time debating whether the future belongs to TradFi, DeFi, tokenization, or a new architecture altogether. In reality, the most compelling work is happening right between them.
The technology will improve, and the underlying plumbing will gradually disappear from view. But trust must still come from somewhere. Code can provide certainty of execution, institutions can provide accountability, regulation can establish the rules, and central banks can anchor the money. The winners will be those who stop arguing about which world should prevail and start making them work together.
