Why travel to Sibos? Just look out of the window

The enormity of global trade is on display this year in Osaka, and it is more evident than ever that payments and trade finance are critical banking services supporting global economic growth.

Each day participants navigate from hotels across the massive Kansai economic region of Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe-Nara to the INTEX conference center. On they way, we witness the awesome scale of the industry and commerce here in the middle of the world's seventh largest population center, where the economy rivals those of the entire countries of The Netherlands or Australia.

Traveling through the city, we see the residential areas give way to miles of manufacturing plants, corporate headquarters, and of course the enormous seaport. It's a fantastic daily reminder of the magnitude of commerce, and of the importance of the payments systems we're discussing at Sibos to the world economy.

We are seeing firsthand how the continued expansion of international trade fuels the velocity of payments, and it is not surprising that liquidity management is one of the major buzzwords here at Sibos. In the context of this environment, it's clear why proactively monitoring the cash flows and risks associated with international trade and foreign exchange payments can be heard in so many conversations around the conference.

That focus will continue to grow, as we hear about Asian markets opening up to more foreign exchange activity, and see examples such as regulatory change in China begin to open the flow of the renminbi and drive incredible growth in those transactions.

Our economy is global, and liquidity management is no longer limited to the Fortune 500.

Every day businesses of all sizes finance the activities of global trade. Our opportunity in the financial industry is to meet the challenge to enable the safe and efficient flow of capital to support the ever accelerating pace of the global economy.

Online banking, messaging and payments play an important role in liquidity and efficiently managing and moving the money.

Multiple currencies, foreign exchange transactions, interest rate hedging and trade finance are no longer exotic transactions, they are the core building blocks of our tools to enable efficient funds movement and sophisticated liquidity management going forward.