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 executive, Gottfried Leibbrandt, repeatedly highlighted "political" events at the plenary session, a phrase most took to refer to the sanctions on a score of Iranian banks imposed by the European Union earlier this year.SWIFT, which is based in Belgium, cut these banks from its network in May.Some of Shah's audience also took his comments to refer to the fines imposed by the US over the last few years on HSBC, ING and Standard Chartered because of those banks' activities in processing payments for Iranian counterparties."How do you preserve that global franchise?" Shah asked.At a second forum, on Wednesday, Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the US Treasury, said banks could deal with blacklisted banks and businesses or they could deal with US banks, but not both.US banks will not be able to supply services to foreign banks that seek to maintain ties with designated institutions, such as those in Iran, Szubin said.There is already conjecture around the industry that one consequence, albeit long-term, of the US and EU sanctions, which could affect SWIFT and the banks' business model, is that banks may become more open to alternative methods of making cross-border payments.Leibbrandt addressed this prospect in an article published in the latest edition of The Banker magazine, noting a precedent in China, where regulators have fostered the development of a domestic retail card payment business, China UnionPay.Asked about these issues by Banking Day, Yawar Shad said: "The basic issue around the world is that entities need to be trusted, and independently of anything going on in the political environment. And, as we become more and more global, we need to make sure of that."If you look at SWIFT's history, we're basically a messaging network. We enable this. Our banks are the primary folks who do business [with us]."We are subject to the laws of the EU. SWIFT will abide by the laws. Simple as that. At the end of the day, banks will decide who to do business with."Those same banks can use the SWIFT network, the can use fax, they can use telex, they can use the internet. We are a network. It's the banks that do the activity."Shah doubted that alternative payment messaging solutions would mitigate the affect of sanctions."The laws as effected by the EU and the US refer to financial message providers; any of them, not just SWIFT, so those laws apply to everybody."Shah also clarified his remarks on Monday, saying: