by Levi J Parsons

SYDNEY, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) -- With the close of the 2018 SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar in Sydney (SIBOS), head of Markets and Initiatives at SWIFT Asia Pacific sat down with Xinhua on Thursday to discuss banking and technologies.

"The thing that has been repeated most clearly at this conference over the past few years is the future of banking," Philippe Dirckx said.

"How technologies are going to impact the way we are going to work and in a broader sense.

"We know that Asia is rising, and that there is a clear rebalancing of power happening across the globe," he said.

Spanning four days, almost 8,000 delegates from the world's largest financial institutions attended the forum, and according to Dirckx "what you see here is really where East meets West and where everybody is working together."

"Our role at SWIFT, covering around 12,000 institutions across 200 countries, clearly is to help bridge that rebalancing," he said.

Focused on solving problems through the development and implementation of financial technology, SIBOS offers newer technology-driven companies a chance to mingle with older, more traditional banking operations.

But it is this rapid technological transformation that is putting a great deal of pressure on financial institutions, Dirckx said.

"Clearly they have a lot on their plate! But what we've seen more and more of over the past few years is that institutions are not looking at doing things by themselves, they're looking outside at other fintechs."

With innovation and emerging technologies driving the future of the financial payments sector, Dirckx believed that Chinese banks are likely to have a leading role to play.

"What I think is very critical about China is that they've been able to take existing technologies and scale it to a way that nobody has ever done," he said.

"The world is looking at China and that is having a ripple effect because you see things like Alipay tags all over the world now, so clearly China is having a very significant impact."

"But where I believe China is going to take a more significant role in the future, is in the research of new technologies like quantum computing, supercomputers and artificial intelligence."

"I think this is where the impact is really going to be and that the investments that they are making is going to be a game-changer, not only for China but also for the rest of the world."