If Utsit's readers and friends are familiar with Universwiftnet, it will no doubt be useful for Oaklen's friends to discover this major event in the banking-business relationship, the 2025 edition of which will be held at the Palais Brongniart on Tuesday, May 27.

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When I write major event I think of its age as well as its scale and impact.

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Universwiftnet, created by Utsit, celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, an "old-fashioned" coming of age, the age of maturity, of transition from one world to another. The marriage of Utsit and Oaklen is a marriage of convenience between two families eager to see their future together because the great reorganization of the world of payments is transforming the landscape and merging into a wide open field what we previously separated into "Electronic Payments" and "B2B Payments."

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The global rollout of instant payments, which are about to become cross-border under the auspices of the G20 and the Bank for International Settlements, is forcing stakeholders to reconsider the order in which the building blocks of a solution are stacked. While until recently, people first thought of payment method and then use, the order has been reversed and the payment method has become an often interchangeable underlying element of a user experience that defines “payment”. This is what we at Oaklen&Utsit call the transition from one world to another, or more literally, Matching the worlds.

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The scale and impact of Universwiftnet can of course be measured by the number and quality of the speakers and participants, but also, and for us above all, by its gentle way of showing the market the direction that the banking-business relationship profession is taking.

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Born to showcase the revolution that the opening of Swift to non-banking companies would bring, Universwiftnet continues to highlight the technologies, regulations and actors that will change the way banks and companies interact. Since 2023, we have entrusted L’Agefi with the organization and implementation of Universwiftnet, thus bringing to its logical conclusion the conviction that an event needs to be anticipated and then relayed by a coherent media.

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For this 2025 edition, Utsit&Oaklen has chosen, among other things, to highlight three main themes linked to similar challenges in the plenary sessions in which we will participate and the workshops that we are organizing.

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The first concerns the relationship between security and the identity of stakeholders, whether they are the beneficiaries of the operations or the principals, legal entities or natural persons acting on their behalf.

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The G20 and the European Commission's desire to see the increase in the use of the LEI, which is currently quite confidential, and the addition of the vLEI make this identification tool a key element in transaction security in the years to come. We have therefore invited the Managing Director of the foundation that manages the LEI, Mr. Alexandre Kech, to come and present to us the present and future of this identification scheme. Alongside him, in the 9:30 a.m. roundtable that I will moderate, will be Alain Raes, co-founder of IPID, a startup whose objective is to interconnect the planet's VoP schemes, Charlotte Pardou of Swift and Nicolas Trimbour of BNP Paribas.

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Olivier Ringard will lead a workshop at 2:30 p.m. to understand the new stage of the bank-business relationship proposed by Swift. A change in continuity, this stage is marked by the implementation of APIs for real-time exchanges, the switch to the ISO 20022 standard, and Swift's Transaction Manager, which guarantees the "end-to-end" of all payment messages. This stage is a cornerstone in the implementation of the G20 objectives, and while it is already a reality for half of international interbank transactions, businesses are discovering it largely thanks to the work of the Utsit teams, which is thus renewing its 2002 commitment that boosted the use of Swift by businesses. And since a winning team doesn't change, BNP Paribas and ArcelorMittal are once again heavily involved in this "track-blazing" led by Olivier.

Thierry Leblond and your servant will be hosting a workshop at 4:10 p.m. dedicated to instant transfers "for businesses," where we will see how the European legislator's desire to make Instant Payment the new normal can be implemented.

Thierry Leblond will also participate in the 5:10 p.m. plenary session, where the marriage of worlds that is so dear to us will be embodied by Charlotte Pagot of Mercatel and Eric Prételat of Schneider Electric. And for any marriage, witnesses who know both are needed, who better placed than Ouannessa Aissaoui of HSBC and Zakaria Moursli of La Banque Postale. The discussion will focus on instant payments and the urgent need for European countries to develop their payment sovereignty.

To all those who know Universwiftnet, we will be delighted to see you again, and to all of you who are impatient to introduce it to you.

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