MIAMI — Running a bank's own payment infrastructure around the clock is not the same as making an entire payment journey available 24 hours a day. The distinction becomes more important as banks add tokenised money, digital wallets and new ledgers to systems that still depend on domestic clearing and other institutions for completion.

Fabian Khoshbakht, BNY's Head of Global Payments and Trade for Asia Pacific, said the bank has already launched 24/7 capability for traditional fiat within the bank. The remaining constraint is what happens after money leaves that environment.

“There's the part of moving funds, and then there's the last mile,” he said.

That makes the next phase less a contest between traditional and digital infrastructure than a question of how the two can work together. Khoshbakht said the industry should not frame digital assets and traditional rails as a winner-and-loser choice.

“It's less about whether one or another way, or whether it's digital assets or traditional, that's going to be the winner or the loser, but more about how do we make sure that the two platforms, if you will, coexist,” he said.

The last mile limits what 24/7 means today

Khoshbakht said BNY launched its 24/7 traditional-fiat capability about three months before Sibos. Clients can move money continuously within BNY's infrastructure, but completing the subsequent leg can depend on whether the relevant local infrastructure is operating.

“We have that capability today; it's there,” he said, while questioning how much activity currently needs to take place continuously across the full payment chain.

BNY can move funds around the clock within its own environment and pass the information onwards, Khoshbakht said. “But it's really that last mile that now needs to evolve and develop over time.”

The distinction sets a practical boundary around always-on banking. A bank can extend the operating hours of its own systems, but end-to-end availability depends on the other rails, institutions and domestic systems through which a transaction ultimately passes.

Digital money could change when liquidity is deployed

Khoshbakht saw a broader change emerging as digital forms of money develop. For financial institutions and corporate treasurers, the significance is not only faster payment execution but the ability to move and deploy liquidity outside conventional operating windows.

“From a liquidity management standpoint, whether you're an FI or corporate treasurer, that is going to be a huge change to the way that liquidity is managed,” he said.

He gave the example of excess liquidity potentially being moved into stablecoins or tokenised deposits and earning a yield, with that activity eventually taking place around the clock.

Khoshbakht described the transition as gradual rather than immediate. “I think that's where we're going to see a little bit of a slow shift that happens,” he said.

He saw BNY's role as providing infrastructure for that transition, whether through its own capabilities or alongside developments such as the Swift Digital Ledger.

Pay-to-wallet extends the same problem to the retail last mile

BNY also launched a pay-to-wallet capability at Sibos after almost 12 months of development by Khoshbakht's team. The service is intended to let BNY clients make cross-border payments from a bank account directly to a retail digital wallet.

Khoshbakht said the rollout would begin in Asia Pacific, where wallet and QR-code usage is already common, with two banks from South Korea and Taiwan included in the initial announcement. He also pointed to growing wallet use in the Middle East and Europe and said BNY was looking closely at Latin America.

BNY's proposition is to move a cross-border payment into a wallet within about five or six minutes, according to Khoshbakht. “We think it's the new way that retail money will move cross-border,” he said.

The launch gives the last-mile issue another form. Instead of ending at a bank account, the payment has to reach the digital wallet that the recipient actually uses.

Trade shows why digitisation will move at different speeds

The same coexistence of old and new infrastructure is visible in trade. Khoshbakht said BNY had not seen a large impact on its clients' overall trade flows from geopolitical developments, although it had seen more trade activity among clients in Southeast Asia as manufacturing moved into countries including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Trade processing itself remains heavily paper-based. Khoshbakht said there was “a move starting to happen” towards new technology and digital ledgers that could enable faster trade, while BNY was working on faster and more efficient processing of trade documents.

He described trade as potentially “the last bastion of banking” to move from paper-driven processes towards greater digitisation.

That reinforces the broader constraint on always-on finance: different parts of the financial and commercial infrastructure will digitise at different speeds.

Coexistence, rather than replacement, defines the next phase

Khoshbakht expected BNY's pay-to-wallet launch, its 24/7 capability, artificial intelligence and digital assets and stablecoins to dominate client discussions during Sibos.

Taken together, his examples do not point to one new rail replacing the existing system. BNY can make its own fiat infrastructure continuously available, connect bank accounts to wallets and prepare for tokenised forms of money, but the usefulness of those capabilities still depends on how other parts of the payment and trade chain develop.

For BNY, making always-on finance work beyond the bank therefore means connecting infrastructure that is already available with local systems, wallets and emerging digital-money rails as clients decide where continuous liquidity and payments create enough value to change how they operate.