02 November 2012 6:46am

The restraining hand of economic sanctions on the cross-border payments business of banks was a topic revisited, without much new insight, at the annual Sibos conference held in Osaka this week.

Yawar Shah, chair of the SWIFT (the Society for World Interbank Telecommunications) told the opening plenary session on Monday that the payments messaging cooperative, along with its affiliated banks, works "in a world of global sanctions with banks being impacted by political as well as by economic events."

Both Shah, who is also a senior executive with Citi, and SWIFT's chief...