by Levi J Parsons

SYDNEY, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- One of the world's largest financial conferences started in Sydney on Monday, with the harbor city playing host to nearly 8,000 delegates from all over the globe.

Focused on the future of the financial services industry, experts at the Swift International Banking Operations Seminar (SIBOS) will spend the next four days examining what affect emerging technologies, innovation and digital disruption is having on the sector.

"The industry is moving very fast," head of payments at Swift Asia-Pacific, Michael Moon, told Xinhua.

"One of the major effects that new technology has had on the industry is the ability to be more flexible and more agile in the way you build services for customers."

"The future of financial services is about being fast and instant in real-time, it's about being information rich, it's about customers being able to consume services 24 hours per day, seven days per week."

With over 70 fintech exhibitors on show at the event, Moon explained that there's a great deal of opportunity in the financial industry for collaboration between the traditional banking world and the newer technology firms.

"There are about 500 to 600 fintech organizations in Australia, many of those are in Sydney," he said.

"So I think it is an opportunity... to curate solutions in order to solve some of the harder problems in the industry."

Among one of the most groundbreaking developments set to be discussed at the seminar, is the success of an international payments trial which allows financial institutions to make cross-border payments in real-time.

Developed by Swift, the Global Payments Innovation (GPI) trial involved a total of 12 banks from China, Australia, Singapore and Thailand.

"We launched this a bit over 12 months ago and we now have 280 financial institutions around the world that are subscribed to Swift GPI with 80 banks that are live on GPI," Moon said.

"China's financial industry has been very actively involved with Swift GPI."

"At last count we had 74 financial institutions in China that have joined Swift GPI and 15 of those are live today."

Previously taking up to 2-3 days to complete an international transaction, the trial's fasted cross-border payment was clocked at just 18 seconds and capable of almost instant, real-time transactions outside of normal banking hours.

But with such rapid change occurring right across the global financial services industry, Moon said it also presents tremendous challenges to all the major players and highlights the need for financial institutions to digitize and innovate.