Companies are reconfiguring supply chains as geopolitical tensions, tariffs and trade barriers make resilience a more important consideration alongside cost. For transaction banks, those changes are moving beyond trade finance: shifts in suppliers and production locations can also alter financing arrangements, liquidity needs and payment flows across markets. Shivkumar Seerapu, Head of Transaction Services for Asia Pacific at ING, said clients are increasingly prioritising resilience over pure efficiency and asking banks to help them move facilities and programmes as suppliers and production locations change. For ING, the business question is whether its international network can turn that flexibility into a deeper transaction banking relationship spanning trade, liquidity, payments and, increasingly, digital forms of money. Resilience is changing what clients ask banks to solve Seerapu said geopolitical disruption has moved supply chain resilience to the top of clients' agendas. Instead of choosing locations primarily on cost, companies are changing supplier and factory locations to reduce concentration and respond to tariffs, barriers and geopolitical tensions. That creates an immediate requirement for banks. When a company shifts sourcing from one country to another, its financing arrangements and transaction banking infrastructure have to follow. Seerapu said banks with networks across multiple countries can respond more quickly by moving facilities and programmes between locations. The same reconfiguration is increasing the importance of liquidity visibility. Multinational companies can have surplus cash in some entities and shortages in others, while regulatory, tax and tariff changes affect how freely that cash can be moved. Seerapu said treasurers increasingly want a single view of global liquidity and the ability to reuse internal cash before borrowing externally. He pointed to ING's liquidity and payments capabilities as part of that response. The underlying shift, he said, is not digital transformation for efficiency alone, but investment in resilience, reliability and certainty. That distinction matters: transaction banking is being asked to help companies preserve operating flexibility as trade routes and production footprints become less predictable. AI is moving into controls rather than remaining a laboratory exercise Artificial intelligence (AI) is also moving from experimentation into operational transaction-banking processes. Seerapu identified transaction monitoring, payment pattern recognition and screening, know-your-customer onboarding, and fraud detection in trade finance, including duplicate invoice financing, as areas where banks and clients are already deploying AI. He described payment screening, client onboarding and trade finance fraud detection as among the most prevalent real-world applications in transaction services. The emphasis is notable because these are control-intensive functions rather than customer-facing demonstrations. For ING, the immediate value of AI therefore appears to lie in applying pattern recognition and automation to processes where transaction volumes, data and control requirements are already high. Digital money is becoming an investment priority before the business case is settled At Sibos, Seerapu said tokenisation, stablecoins and digital assets have dominated payments discussions. Banks have already conducted pilots, but the industry is still debating where sustained commercial use will emerge. His conclusion was nevertheless that banks can no longer remain outside the development of this infrastructure. ING is pursuing more than one route. Seerapu said the bank is investing in tokenised deposit capability while also participating in Qivalis, the European banking consortium developing a regulated euro denominated stablecoin. He said ING is a founding member and that the consortium is expected to be issued by the end of 2026. He described the timing as part of the consortium's development rather than a settled industry endpoint. Interoperability remains the unresolved issue The harder question is how these new forms of money connect with each other and with existing payment and settlement infrastructure. Seerapu said ING is speaking with banks and industry participants about how digital asset transactions can become interoperable, but he characterised the solution as still open rather than settled. That qualification is important. ING can develop tokenised deposits, participate in a common euro stablecoin and extend 24/7 payment capabilities, but corporate usefulness will depend on whether those instruments can move value across networks without recreating the fragmentation that transaction banking is meant to remove. For Asia Pacific, Seerapu also linked the investment to the bank's Europe-Asia corridors. He said ING is using Sibos to discuss partnerships and memoranda of understanding around Asia-to-Europe gateways, alongside its real-time payments, liquidity and digital money initiatives. That puts the digital asset work inside a broader transaction banking proposition rather than treating it as a standalone technology programme. From resilience to connected liquidity The common thread across Seerapu's comments is not a single product. Supply chain reconfiguration requires financing programmes to move with clients; fragmented operations increase the value of global liquidity visibility; AI is being applied to transaction controls; and new digital forms of money promise faster settlement but introduce another interoperability problem. For ING, the opportunity is to connect those requirements. The bank's international network becomes more relevant if it can help clients shift activity between markets without rebuilding their banking arrangements each time, while its investment in digital settlement becomes more useful if it can connect rather than fragment liquidity. The next stage is therefore less about demonstrating individual technologies than about whether ING can connect trade and liquidity needs with emerging settlement options as clients redesign where and how they operate.
