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www.financialit.net • Fall Issue • 2026

THREE WAYS WALLETS ARE CHANGING CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS FOR GLOBAL PLATFORMS Andy Wiggan, CPO, Mangopay

PAYMENTS MODERNIZATION: SIMPLIFYING COMPLEXITY AND UNLOCKING EFFICIENCY Barry Rodrigues, Executive Vice President, Payments, Finastra

THE POWER OF ONE: WHY EVERY FINANCIAL INSTITUTION SHOULD OFFER AT LEAST ONE SHARI'AHCOMPLIANT PRODUCT

Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales, Ecommpay

Adil Ahmed, Vice President & Deputy Managing Director, MEA, Compass Plus Technologies

PSPS BOOST TRUST FOR AI PAYMENTS Back to the Table of Contents

Back to the Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

THE BIG CALLS EDITION WELCOME TO AN EDITION OF FINANCIAL IT THAT IS RATHER DIFFERENT TO ALL OTHERS THAT WE HAVE PUBLISHED. In many of the previous editions, it has been possible to link most of the articles to themes that feature prominently at major conferences where we have been a media partner. In some editions, almost all articles have related to a topic that is particularly current. With the help of our contributors, we have been able to share expert opinion in order to look at issues in great depth. This edition is not linked to a particular conference or to a particular theme. However, a diverse variety of contributed articles lead to four major insights into the intersection of financial services and technology. This is the Big Calls Edition of Financial IT.

People don’t entirely trust AI yet – and that may be a good thing At the time of writing of this Editor-inChief’s letter (mid-September 2026), the mainstream media (in the Englishspeaking world, at least) is pre-occupied with the possibility that Artificial Intelligence (AI) destroys humanity.

Some commentators are calling for the development of AI systems to be slowed. An important message from our contributors is that, for now, it is people who are in charge of AI – and not the other way. As one of them observes: “AI will become an essential compliance tool— but it will not replace human judgment.” A key issue is trust – or the lack of it. As another contributor notes: “The research revealed that consumers are broadly comfortable using AI for search, discovery and price comparison. However, trust falls sharply at checkout. Agentic commerce will only expand beyond support for searching and price comparison if trust is built into the checkout journey from the start.” A third contributor emphasises the need for transparency when AI is used to provide solutions: “The customer [does

Andrew Hutchings, Editor-in-Chief, Financial IT

not have] to understand the AI model, but they do need to understand why a pricing, credit, or risk decision was made, and how it affects them, and who remains accountable for the outcome. Guardrails are what make innovation scalable, and AI must be as compliant as it is intelligent.” Back to the Table of Contents

Fall Issue • 2026

Actual implementation of AI in financial services through 2027 may be slower than most people have been expecting.

Stablecoins could and should bring a revolution to crossborder payments Customer experience in cross-border payments can and should improve further. According to one of our contributors: “businesses feel that gap directly: nearly one-third of cross-border payments still cost more than 3%, and only 40% of B2B transfers settle within a single working day. The network they lean on is thinning, too: the global supply of correspondent banking relationships has fallen 20% since the mid2000s, and some corridors now have no intermediary at all. Nevertheless, a solution is to hand – stablecoins. As one of contributors points out: “the demand for stablecoins is greater where they are easier to source than dollars through local exchanges: for example, in India, Nigeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina. [Meanwhile], a large corporation in a developed market has no difficulty opening a dollar or euro account. Holding stablecoins isn’t going to solve a problem that that corporation doesn’t have. What it does need, however, is speed, transparency and lower transfer costs, without having digital assets on its balance sheet.” This presents new opportunities for intermediaries. “When a payment starts in stablecoins, somebody in the middle has to take the asset, convert it to local currency, screen the counterparty and produce reconcilable records. Similarly, when a business pays local currency to freelancers or suppliers who would rather receive stablecoins, that intermediary provider is needed.” Such an intermediary, moving stablecoins between wallets, will also need to build the trust of its customers. Expect this to be a developing story through 2027.

Wallets make multi-currency accounts more likely for all Wallets are, of course, not just for stablecoins. Nor are they necessarily the favoured method of payment across all Back to the Table of Contents

national markets. Nevertheless, as one of our contributors suggests: “Many global initiatives are pushing cross-border money movement toward a model that is easier to operate, reconcile and scale. The common goal is a more connected environment for domestic instant payment systems, where global businesses can collect, hold, convert and distribute funds with less friction, while still supporting the local experiences users and partners expect. In that context, wallets support platforms in meeting the new requirements of global cross-border finance.” In many developing countries, people are used to thinking in terms of more than one currency – often the local one and a major one such as the US dollar or euro. It is possible that this happens to a greater extent in developed countries – and especially in the event of a financial crisis. In this eventuality, look for the popularity of multi-currency wallets to grow rapidly.

Digital strategy plays a central role in any emerging market’s prospects The last word in this Editor’s letter goes to… Uzbekistan. Since 2023, the government has been transforming the economy as envisaged in its “Uzbekistan 2030” strategy. Simultaneously, the government has boosted investment and employment in digital- and fintechrelated areas, mainly through the IT Park network which spans the entire country (and not just Tashkent). In the 1980s and the 1990s, the key question for any emerging market revolved around the assumptions underpinning the development of the particular country being discussed. Were the assumptions still valid? In the mid-2020s, Uzbekistan shows how it is now other things that really matter the most: is the digital strategy really supporting sustainable development? The emerging markets phenomenon is even more exciting than it was 30 years ago. Once again, we thank our contributors and supporters – and wish all a successful 2026 conference season. Andrew Hutchings, Editor-in-Chief, Financial IT

Although Financial IT has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this publication, neither it nor any contributor can accept any legal responsibility whatsoever for consequences that may arise from errors or omissions or any opinions or advice given. This publication is not a substitute for professional advice on a specific transaction. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without written permission from the publisher. Entire contents copyrighted. Financial IT is a Finnet Limited publication. ISSN 2050-9855 Finnet Limited 137 Blackstock Road, London, N4 2JW, United Kingdom +44 (0) 208 819 32 53 Publisher Chris Principe chris.principe@financialit.net Editor-In-Chief Andrew Hutchings andrew.hutchings@financialit.net Research Abdu Turdialiyev Jamshid Samatov Maftuna Makhmudova Production/Design Timur Urmanov PM & Marketing Nilyufar Sodikova nilyufar.sodikova@financialit.net Founder Muzaffar Karabaev

Publisher’s Letter

Chris Principe, Publisher, Financial IT

SIBOS IS JUST THE START… Sibos is my fun time. It’s my favorite event. This will be my 21st Sibos, the latest in a trail that goes back to last century. Years ago, when Sibos was hosted in Dubai, I wrote that the event is my Super Bowl. It still is. My excitement level increases every time that I just think about walking through the doors. It is a chance to hear what’s new, see what’s new, meet old friends and make new friends. Sibos delivers it all… The excitement I feel for this particular event is closely linked to my excitement for Financial IT. Since the beginning of 2026, we have been hard at work to bring new aspects to our enterprise. Our focus has been on expanding our multi-media range. Let me tell you a bit about what 2027 will bring. First, consider Financial IT, our flagship publication: it will have added editions for 2027. Our content has increased in quantity

and quality. The challenge has been how to present this to you. This Sibos 2026 issue is likely our biggest ever – not just in terms of pages, but also in the number of timely and interesting industry driven articles. These have been provided by some of the most relevant and dynamic companies in Fintech. As a leading deliverer of Fintech content, it is our pledge to you our readers, that we cover what you need to excel and propel your products, companies and careers. At a time of faster change, what are we covering? We will lead with coverage of FX, fraud, stablecoins, crypto, payment rails, quantum, AI and other areas as rapid advancement arrives at the intersection of financial services and technology. Our Financial IT Newsletter will expand its coverage of press releases and commentary from Fintech leaders. If you have an announcement, send it to us, or ensure that your publicist does so. We will expand our reach leveraging multiple platforms through social media. We will deliver to you through the medium that you are most comfortable to receive industry happenings. Financial IT will reach you wherever you are and however you want. Our website is undergoing massive changes. It is designed to be the State of the Art for 2027. It will be centrally focused to present articles, events, video’s, interviews and – our flagship publication Financial IT – in an easy user experience. Watch for further announcements. Video will play a bigger part going forward. Interviews with industry experts and mavericks will keep you on your toes

– and us too. These will be stand-alone, podcasts, and Zoom events. Financial IT TV will start a new season with our streaming show, The Big Picture. Soon we will announce the start of our second show, Think Money. We will explore speaking with people both inside and outside the industry. We will seek interesting people to tell us about what is meaningful to them. This will be combined with discussing their own financial views. I am quite excited about this format as I see it as a way to connect younger generations with financial understanding – something that, I believe, is somewhat lacking both at home and in school. Unique to Financial IT will be an original series of reports. The first of these will be an in-depth review of AI as it affects the financial services industry. We welcome contributions for what will be a novel and must-read publication. Other reports will focus not on the technology itself, but rather where in the world it is being applied. Later in this issue you will see short piece about Uzbekistan – a teaser for a report to come. There is a Fintech-driven economic miracle underway in this, the most populous country in Central Asia. Similar developments are taking place in other emerging and frontier markets. We look forward to telling the stories. The exhilaration and anticipation for 2027 is real. For next year, we are turning up the volume on innovation and inviting you to be part of the conversation. The future of finance is loud and fast-moving. Financial IT continues to highlight innovations in Fintech. Sibos is just the start… Back to the Table of Contents

Spring Issue • 2026

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Publisher’s Letter

Contents

EDITOR’S LETTER 2

THE BIG CALLS EDITION

Andrew Hutchings, Editor-in-Chief, Financial IT

COVER STORY

PUBLISHER’S LETTER

FEATURED STORY

SIBOS IS JUST THE START…

44 RAILS ARE NO EXCUSE: HOW A BUSINESS CAN WIN BACK CONTROL OF ITS CROSSBORDER COSTS

Chris Principe, Publisher, Financial IT

FEATURED STORY 20 IT’S NOT BANKS VS FINTECHS. THE REAL DEBATE IS WHETHER PAYMENT RAILS ARE READY Dave Scola, Chief Product Officer and US Chief Executive, Form3

22 FINANCIAL INCLUSION NEEDS A DIGITAL BACKBONE

Alvin Feng, President of International Financial BU, Huawei Digital Finance

24 FROM ACCESS TO CONNECTION: THE OPEN-LOOP FUTURE OF DIGITAL WALLETS

Denys Kyrychenko, Co-founder & CEO, Corefy & PayAtla

PSPS BOOST TRUST FOR AI PAYMENTS Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales, Ecommpay

LEAD STORY 12 THREE WAYS WALLETS ARE CHANGING CROSSBORDER PAYMENTS FOR GLOBAL PLATFORMS Andy Wiggan, CPO, Mangopay

14 PAYMENTS MODERNIZATION: SIMPLIFYING COMPLEXITY AND UNLOCKING EFFICIENCY Barry Rodrigues, Executive Vice President, Payments, Finastra

18 THE POWER OF ONE: WHY EVERY FINANCIAL INSTITUTION SHOULD OFFER AT LEAST ONE SHARI'AHCOMPLIANT PRODUCT

Adil Ahmed, Vice President & Deputy Managing Director, MEA, Compass Plus Technologies

28 TRUST WON’T WAIT: WHY INTELLIGENT TRANSPARENCY WILL DEFINE B2B CUSTOMER LOYALTY Richard Ullenius, VP, Global Banking & Financial Services, CSG

32 CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS: THE COST IS IN THE WAITING Eric Barbier, Founder and CEO, Triple-A

34 TOKENIZATION – BUILDING THE FUTURE OF CAPITAL MARKETS German Soto Sanchez, Chief Product Officer and Co-President of Digital Assets, Broadridge

36 BEYOND THE BUZZWORDS: THE THREE TESTS OF A 4TH-GENERATION CORE Ross Harty, VP Product, 10x Banking

38 LOCAL PAYMENTS, GLOBAL AMBITIONS: THE FUTURE OF CROSS-BORDER COMMERCE

Richard Swales, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer, Paysafe

40 FIVE PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF COMPLIANCE AND GOVERNANCE

Iveta Krūmiņa, Chief Commercial Officer, COLIBRIX ONE

46 ON WHOSE AUTHORITY IS THIS THING ACTING?

Quentin Vigneau, Chief Product Officer, Spendesk

48 THE DIGITAL BATTLE FOR CANADA’S NEXT-GEN BANK ACCOUNTS Ben Goldin, Founder & CEO, Plumery

50 WHY FINTECH NEED A NEW WAY TO TURN DATA INTO DECISIONS Seva Ustinov, Founder & CEO, Plurio

52 TOKENISED CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS WON'T RUN ON BROKEN PLUMBING

Nick Fernando, Co-Founder & Director, Aqua Global

54 SHADOW AI IS FORCING ENTERPRISES TO RETHINK WHERE AI IS RUN

Adam Tarbox, Vice President & General Manager for Northern, Eastern Europe and CIS, Nutanix

56 WHY THE NEXT PAYMENTS BREAKTHROUGH WON’T HAPPEN AT CHECKOUT

Lynda Clarke, General Manager UK, Nayax

58 BANKING AT A NEW SPEED Belkis Lopez, Founder, Chlobe

60 UZBEKISTAN 2030 Chris Principe, Publisher, Andrew Hutchings, Editor-in-Chief, Financial IT

62 WHAT IF INTELLIGENCE BECAME THE CORE OF CROSS-BORDER FINANCE? David Hanna, CEO & Co-Founder, Finmo

Dr. Max Steiger, Chief Compliance and Governance Officer, Unzer Back to the Table of Contents

Free Buy Side Passes Now Available

17 - 18 Nov 2026 | The Tower Hotel, London

Europe’s Premier Event for Financial Data, Technology and AI Leaders 2026 SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Zachary Anderson Chief Data Analytics Officer JPMorganChase

Hiek Van der Scheer Chief Data & Analytics Officer ABN AMRO

Jez Davies Chief Information Architect Northern Trust

Jen Courant Chief Data Officer DWS

Massimo Proverbio Group Chief Information Officer Intesa Sanpaolo

Shahina Khan Chief Data and Analytics Officer, EMEA SMBC

Firas Ben Hassan Head of Agentic AI Solutions Hub Allianz

Chris Waite Chief Data Officer HSBC Asset Management

P RI NC I P AL S P O N SO R S SO F AR IN CLUDE

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Featured Story

Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales, Ecommpay Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales, Ecommpay, brings 15 years of commercial experience, including over a decade in payments. He spent more than eight years at Worldline, where he held strategic global sales and leadership roles. With expertise in localising payment strategies and leveraging payment orchestration, Roy has helped large merchants optimize payment acceptance costs and expand into new markets.

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Featured Story

Fall Issue • 2026

PSPS BOOST TRUST FOR AI PAYMENTS Roy Blokker, Head of Commercial for inclusive payments platform, Ecommpay, explains why agentic commerce can’t scale without consumer and merchant trust, and explains why PSPs are best placed to provide it. Agentic commerce is attracting increasing attention across online retail, with projections suggesting AI agents could handle up to $5 trillion in global transaction value by 2030. But such rapid growth will depend on more than technological capabilities. If consumers don’t trust agents to carry out secure payments and manage problems when they arise, progress will stall. To find out more about where perceptions are currently, Ecommpay recently commissioned a study of both consumer and merchant perspectives on agentic commerce. More than 1,750 consumers were surveyed across five European markets. In-depth interviews were also conducted with 16 senior executives from leading brands including TUI, Volkswagen, Tipico and Würth. Our report – ‘Before they check out: Why payment service providers should deliver trust in agentic commerce for merchants and customers – reveals a significant trust gap standing between the promise of agentic commerce and consumers’ willingness to let AI move beyond searching and into purchasing.

Key findings The research revealed that consumers are broadly comfortable using AI for search, discovery and price comparison. However, trust falls sharply at checkout. • 59.2% of consumer respondents have heard of using agents for online purchases Back to the Table of Contents

• 73.4% think agentic shopping will become common • 53.3% use AI agents to compare prices; 47.1% to find discounts/better deals • 50.1% would not trust an agent with their card details • 17.8% use agents to put in items in their basket – but the consumer checks out • Just 13.9% want agents to complete purchases – with their approval • Fraud and scams were meaningful concerns for consumers, cited by just over a quarter (28.1%) of respondents. Merchants are eager to introduce AI agents to support the customer journey but, unresolved questions remain around

authentication, liability, chargebacks and fraud. They also recognise the possibility of machine-to-machine failure, especially when agents talk to agents. Fraud and accessibility were identified as core issues the industry must address if agentic commerce is to become mainstream.

Trust breaks down at checkout As with any new technology, uncertainty is greatest when it is unclear what comes next. Consumers and merchants need clarity on what will happen in different payment or refund scenarios and reassurance that payment details

Featured Story

are secure. Consumers who took part in the research confirmed that they want approval before the final purchase is made (37.5%), easy refunds if the agent gets it wrong (30.2%), spending limits (25.8%) and strong security (25.2%). Merchants need to know how their checkout infrastructure is required to change to allow agents to complete transactions securely. And they need to build a solution with which their customers will be comfortable engaging.

The regional picture Interestingly, consumer attitudes and acceptance of agentic commerce differ fairly significantly across the key European markets surveyed. Overall, Spain was revealed to be the clear leader in awareness and confidence in AI, with just 9% of Spanish respondents saying they wouldn’t use AI agents. Spaniards were also more willing to allow larger spending limits, with 40% saying they would allow an agent to spend more than £100 on their behalf. Italy and Germany appear to have similar outlooks on AI, both sitting in

mid-range positions in terms of trust and comfort with AI. French consumers are more cautious, and the most likely after the UK to say they would not allow AI to spend money on their behalf (24%). Like France, the UK is more hesitant and less trusting of agentic commerce. 31% said they wouldn't let AI spend any money at all with the top barrier in the UK being payment distrust (51%). This is noticeably higher than all other markets surveyed. The UK also has the strongest preference for pre-purchase approval as a confidence builder (42%).

Agentic must be inclusive Accessibility is another key concern. A study by the Diversity and Inclusion working group of the UK’s Payments Association (UKPA) found that around 58% of respondents were vulnerable to some degree, whether in relation to their physical and mental capabilities, financial resilience, health or life events. That vulnerability can lead to lower levels of access to digital service, making accessibility a moral, commercial and regulatory issue for merchants. To avoid excluding a significant portion of their potential customer base, merchants must ensure accessibility is built into agentic commerce right from the outset. Done well, this could make online retail more inclusive and more accessible to vulnerable groups, increasing the customer base and, ultimately, profitability.

the trust layer for agentic commerce. They combine authentication, tokenisation, fraud controls and standards experience at the moment when trust is at its most fragile: the point of payment. PSPs can provide the baseline requirements that make agent-led payments feel safe enough to use at scale, including approval flows, spending limits, visible mandates and clear dispute routes. ID verification and validation tools are already familiar and will therefore reassure customers that their details and their transactions are secure. For merchants, partnering with a PSP to handle agentic payments means they can offer secure, accessible payments, fraud monitoring and chargeback frameworks without rebuilding their infrastructure. Sitting between consumers, merchants, banks and card schemes, PSPs can turn emerging agentic protocols into trusted, workable payment experiences for every customer.

The future opportunity Agentic commerce will only expand beyond support for searching and price comparison if trust is built into the checkout journey from the start. Merchants, banks, card schemes and PSPs all have a role to play, but PSPs are already closest to the operational controls that determine whether consumers feel safe handing over control to an AI agent. That makes payments the natural starting point for turning agentic commerce from an interesting retail experiment into a trusted commercial model.

PSPs can close the trust gap Payment service providers are already trusted by consumers and merchants, which positions them perfectly to serve as Back to the Table of Contents

Fall Issue • 2026

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Featured Story

Lead Story

Andy Wiggan, CPO, Mangopay Andy has more than 15 years of experience in the fintech, payments, and platform businesses. He held leading product roles at Spotify and GoCardless, with hands-on exposure to both the supplier and customer sides of the ecosystem. His experience now benefits Mangopay’s existing and future customers, bringing a perspective that matches the way platforms think and operate. His background covers digital goods, consumer payments, and high-growth environments.

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Lead Story

Fall Issue • 2026

THREE WAYS WALLETS ARE CHANGING CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS FOR GLOBAL PLATFORMS Cross-border payments is a onequadrillion-dollar market, according to the International Monetary Fund. From B2C and B2B transactions to peer-to-peer transfers, within that mix of transaction types, there is one that stands out for its complexity: multi-party payments. This type of money movement involves fund distribution across multiple parties depending on the business model, currency conversion, and compliance rules in every market involved. In this sea of complexity, cross-border money movement creates friction at every step, and it also turns into an operational challenge for platforms. In our most recent research, we asked payment leaders at enterprise platforms what would have the greatest impact on their payment operations, and 31% pointed to multicurrency and cross-border support. The same research ranks managing cross-border flows as the second-biggest challenge. The platform industry has begun to explore alternative models for handling this complexity. A paradigm shift has been emerging for a while now, and it revolves around wallets. These wallets are stepping in where bank accounts used to sit, giving platforms a virtual banking environment from which they can move money in a far more visible and centralized way.

Wallets as the new environment for multi-party payments Platform businesses don't always follow a straight line like traditional payment flows do, where funds are sent through a processor and settled into a bank account. A marketplace may need to hold buyer funds before releasing them to a seller. A travel platform may need to split funds between different suppliers, like local taxes or cleaning fees. In all these cases, the programmable wallet becomes the Back to the Table of Contents

environment where money can be organised before it moves further. Global companies have already adopted this kind of wallet, which is well suited for various business models. For example, in mobility and delivery, these wallets can support everyday spending and payouts, as seen in examples such as Uber Cash and GrabPay wallet. They also work great in retail to help platforms manage earnings, refunds, and settlements, as with Etsy seller wallet balances. In booking platforms, they can support host earnings wallets, such as those used by Airbnb.

The virtual banking environment that makes crossborder payments feel local Every stakeholder wants something. Businesses want to operate globally, while customers and partners still expect local payment experiences. Buyers want to pay in a familiar currency, and sellers want to receive funds in their home currency too. Finance teams want visibility over fund flows, and operations teams want less manual work. By linking wallets to virtual accounts, platforms can manage funds in a way that feels closer to local banking, without building a separate banking setup in every market. When combined with multicurrency wallets, virtual accounts can also support businesses that need to hold balances in different currencies before deciding when and how to convert them. At the same time, they give finance teams a clear view of fund flows and spare operations teams from a lot of manual matching and reconciliation work. This model is common among marketplaces and freelance and creator platforms, but it’s also highly relevant for crypto platforms, where users need to move between fiat and digital assets through local banking rails.

FX is now part of the revenue model FX used to be treated mainly as a treasury topic, but it's now an important P&L line. Conversions come with a cost, volatility, and unclear rates. The same research cited above found that 40% of platforms see FX costs only after settlement. This lack of transparency can get expensive if one doesn't see the fees and other markups baked into the exchange rate. With multi-currency wallets, platforms can apply FX at any stage in the payment flow and see all the costs involved. A buyer sees the correct price at checkout. A seller knows what amount they should receive. The platform can protect its revenue from currency volatility, and finance teams get more certainty over settlement.

The bottom line Many global initiatives are pushing crossborder money movement toward a model that is easier to operate, reconcile and scale. The common goal is a more connected environment for domestic instant payment systems, where global businesses can collect, hold, convert and distribute funds with less friction, while still supporting the local experiences users and partners expect. In that context, wallets support platforms in meeting the new requirements of global cross-border finance. That does not mean banks diminish their role in global finance. They stay essential to the wider platform ecosystem. But for global businesses, the ability to manage money flows with more control, visibility and flexibility is key. And wallet-based rails offer that at a large scale.

Lead Story

Barry Rodrigues, Executive Vice President, Payments, Finastra Responsible for Finastra’s payments organization, Barry Rodrigues has built his 35-year career in financial services around the world in leading companies. He has a compelling track record of working in both early stage and growth businesses, spanning digital banking, credit cards, buy now pay later, merchant acquiring, corporate/virtual cards and networks. Previous roles include Senior Advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Chief Executive Officer at Barclays Cards and Payments. He brings deep payments knowledge and strong leadership expertise to his role at Finastra.

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Lead Story

Fall Issue • 2026

PAYMENTS MODERNIZATION: SIMPLIFYING COMPLEXITY AND UNLOCKING EFFICIENCY Banks have hugely complex, mission-critical payments infrastructure to maintain. That's exactly why so many have been slow to change it. But the forces that once made caution the safe choice are now pushing the other way. Payments infrastructure is not something a bank can afford to get wrong. It moves the money, it carries the compliance obligations, and it sits at the center of every corporate relationship the institution has. So, it's understandable that many banks have treated modernization as a risk to be managed rather than an opportunity to be taken. This notion is shifting fast. Rising customer expectations, the pace of regulatory change, and relentless pressure to reduce cost are all forcing the issue. Standing still is no longer the low-risk option. It's the expensive one.

The forcing functions have changed For years, the safest thing a payments team could do was leave a working system alone. That logic held while expectations stayed Back to the Table of Contents

constant. Today, banks face a specific set of structural barriers that make maintaining the status quo impossible. These include: • Shifting customer expectations – with corporates seeking the exact same transparency, speed, and flexibility they get as retail consumers. • Increased demands around resiliency and reliability – driven by immediate payments, and expectations from regulators and customers. • Rising total cost of ownership – custom builds and complex integrations across a legacy stack drive up baseline costs, while compliance and upgrade cycles stretch longer every year. • Operational inefficiency – fragmented workflows across different payment rails and regions demand duplicate infrastructure, while low straight-through processing rates consume valuable staff capacity. • Technical debt – running unsupported software versions drives greater vulnerability and risk, especially when the shift to immediate payments requires a level of resiliency that legacy systems just can't provide.

Featured Story

• Inflexible technology – Without a cloud-native and ISO 20022-native core, older setups slow down API-enabled use cases like stablecoins, CBDCs, and nextgeneration cross-border payments, while strictly limiting AI capabilities. These compounding pressures are exactly why a piecemeal approach to payments no longer works.

The case for a unified payments hub A modern payments hub brings high value, mass, and instant payments onto a single platform rather than spreading them across separate, overlapping systems. The architecture is what makes that possible. A hub built in Java to be cloudnative, modular, API-first, ISO 20022-aligned and microservices-based removes the duplication that fragmented environments create. One environment can support multiple clearing systems, both global and local, and integrate cleanly with surrounding systems like core banking and fraud. The commercial logic is straightforward. Less duplication means a lower cost to run and lower cost to change. An ISO-native, cloud-agnostic design gives banks the flexibility to scale up and down with demand and the interoperability to connect across borders. Standardized software, based on microservices and containerization, is now the norm. Configuration through a standard integration layer replaces heavy customization, so unique requirements live outside the code and don't slow down future upgrades. It’s right to plan carefully for migration. This is where AI is doing real work. Advanced tooling can map new standard software to older customized versions, which lowers the risk of moving and shortens the path to configuring solutions for a bank's specific needs.

What's different now? Plenty of vendors have talked about modernization for a long time. What's changed is that the capabilities have now been validated in production. A natural-language front end, such as Finastra’s OperatorAssist, is giving operators a conversational way to investigate and repair transactions, typically reducing investigation times by 30-40%. Secondly, using a cloud-agnostic, open-source hub means that banks aren't locked to a cloud single provider. That gives them room to negotiate more aggressively with hyperscalers and database providers, which turns into serious efficiency gains on the infrastructure bill. Thirdly, advanced routing is selecting the most efficient path for each transaction in real time, factoring in cost, speed, scheme options, and regulatory requirements. The result is over 98% straight-through processing, which strips out rework and lets banks choose the lowest-cost route for every payment. These aren't isolated features. Together they let banks offer better capabilities to their corporate customers, while resilience, high availability, and blue/green deployments become table stakes rather than differentiators.

The outcomes banks actually feel Modernizing payments is not simply a technology upgrade. It delivers measurable outcomes across four key areas: cost, efficiency, revenue, and resilience. • Total cost of ownership – a unified, ISO 20022-native payments platform reduces TCO by eliminating duplication across systems and simplifying operations through automation and scalable cloud infrastructure.

• Operational efficiency – a streamlined environment, with intelligent routing, embedded controls, and AI-assisted workflows increases straight-through processing and reduces manual intervention. • Revenue growth and differentiation – a modern platform enables banks to launch new products faster, enter new markets more easily, and leverage capabilities such as best-cost routing to improve margins or deliver savings to customers. • Compliance, risk management, and resilience – as regulations and payment types continue to evolve, an ISO-native architecture simplifies compliance efforts while enterprise-grade security, multi-cloud deployment, and highavailability designs help ensure continuous service and customer trust. Ultimately, modernization simplifies payments at the platform level, reducing operational burden while creating a more efficient, agile, and resilient bank.

The real cost of standing still It's tempting to read "risk-averse" as "safe." It isn't, not anymore. The cost of doing nothing compounds quietly and then all at once. Tech debt turns into a business drag. Keeping pace with regulatory change and resilience expectations gets harder every cycle when you're building patch on patch. Customer expectations around speed, transparency, and availability keep climbing. And operating costs stay high precisely because the bank hasn't adopted the open-source technologies and efficiencies that free up investment instead of consuming it. The banks that move now won't just keep pace, they'll set it. The ones still patching will be playing catch-up on someone else's timeline. The question isn't whether to modernize. It's how much longer you can afford not to. Back to the Table of Contents

Fall Issue • 2026

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Featured Story

Lead Story

Adil Ahmed, Vice President & Deputy Managing Director, MEA, Compass Plus Technologies

THE POWER OF ONE: WHY EVERY FINANCIAL INSTITUTION SHOULD OFFER AT LEAST ONE SHARI'AH-COMPLIANT PRODUCT Back to the Table of Contents

Lead Story

Fall Issue • 2026

The next generation of banking customers is changing the rules. Young adults between the ages of 20 and 35 are looking beyond traditional financial products. They want banking that is digital, transparent, ethical and aligned with their personal values. Whether they are paying with a card, financing a new smartphone, shopping online or managing their finances through a mobile app, they increasingly expect financial products that are both convenient and responsible. For financial institutions this presents a significant opportunity that can be addressed by adding Shari’ah-compliant products. Adding a single Islamic banking product to a banking portfolio can help address ethical concerns that resonate well beyond Islamic communities, appealing to customers who value principles such as fairness, transparency, responsible finance, and the avoidance of exploitative practices. The good news is that entering the Islamic banking market does not require launching a dedicated Islamic bank, creating a full product portfolio or investing in major technology transformation. Sometimes, one product is all it takes. History has shown that many conventional financial institutions did not enter Islamic banking by launching a complete suite of Shari'ah-compliant products. Instead, they introduced a single offering, often a payment card or a simple financing product, to assess customer demand and build internal expertise. Once customer adoption exceeded expectations and operational confidence grew, these institutions gradually expanded into additional products such as personal finance, auto finance, deposits and wealth management. This phased approach has proven particularly successful across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, where banks have been able to grow their Islamic banking portfolios steadily without the cost and complexity of establishing a separate Islamic banking operation from day one.It is a "learn by doing" strategy that creates a solid foundation for long-term growth. Back to the Table of Contents

The first step is selecting the right product to fit the FI’s strategy and audience. Many banks choose service-based products because they are operationally straightforward, require minimal process changes and integrate easily into existing payment portfolios. Popular entry points include: • Ujrah Card – A simple, transparent payment card where customers pay a fixed service fee rather than interest. The fee remains the same regardless of how much the customer spends, providing clarity and predictability while remaining fully Shari'ah-compliant. • Charity (Tabarru') Card – Built on the same service-fee concept as the Ujrah card, this product also incorporates charitable giving into everyday spending. A portion of the fees supports community initiatives or social causes, allowing customers to contribute to positive social impact every time they use their card. Other institutions prefer financing products that closely resemble traditional credit facilities while complying fully with Shari'ah principles. These include: • Murabaha Card – Instead of lending money and charging interest, the bank purchases an asset and sells it to the customer at an agreed profit margin. The customer repays a fixed amount over time, providing complete transparency with no interest or hidden charges. • Shari'ah-Compliant Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) – As BNPL continues to grow in popularity among younger consumers, Shari'ah-compliant models offer an ethical alternative. These solutions avoid interest, use fixed and transparent pricing and ensure every transaction is backed by genuine goods or services, making them fully compliant with Islamic finance principles. These products are particularly attractive to younger consumers who value financial transparency, predictable costs, and

responsible borrowing. For many, Islamic finance is no longer viewed solely as a religious choice, it is increasingly seen as an ethical financial model that promotes fairness, accountability and shared responsibility. Starting with one Shari'ah-compliant product also delivers strategic benefits beyond customer acquisition. It enables financial institutions to establish Shari'ah governance practices, strengthen regulatory readiness and build credibility in an expanding market all without disrupting their existing business model. As customer expectations continue to evolve, banks that move early will be better positioned to capture the loyalty of a growing, values-driven generation. Those that delay may find themselves playing catch-up, and losing out on critical market share, in one of the fastest-growing sectors of global finance. Financial institutions that take a measured, phased approach achieve stronger long-term results than those attempting to launch a fully-fledged Islamic banking portfolio all at once. Beginning with a single, well-designed product enables banks to validate market demand, ensure return on investment, refine operational processes and build customer trust before expanding their offerings. In many cases, one successful product has served as the catalyst for a profitable and sustainable Islamic banking business. The future of banking is not just digital, it is ethical, inclusive and customer-centric. For many financial institutions that future begins with the power of one. Every successful journey begins with a single step.

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Dave Scola, Chief Product Officer and US Chief Executive, Form3 Dave joined Form3 in 2022 in order to lead the charge to bring Form3’s platform and capabilities to bear on the US market. Dave has worked in transaction banking for over 20 years and has joined Form3 from SWIFT where he was Chief Executive for the Americas, UK and Ireland with responsibility for the company’s largest relationship as well as its global securities business. Prior to SWIFT, Dave was the Global Head of Financial Institutions at Barclays, responsible for the bank’s correspondent banking, FI trade, flow FX, and liquidity management businesses for FIs. He has also worked at Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York in both product and strategy roles and across various products lines including cash, trade finance, custody and corporate trust. Dave holds a MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and a BSFS in International Relations from Georgetown University.

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Featured Story

Fall Issue • 2026

IT’S NOT BANKS VS FINTECHS.

THE REAL DEBATE IS WHETHER PAYMENT RAILS ARE READY As the debate around fintechs gaining access to Federal Reserve payment rails intensifies, Dave Scola, Chief Product Officer and US Chief Executive at Form3, says the industry is focused on the wrong question. The question shouldn't be about who gets access to the payment rails. Rather, it's whether those rails are ready for anyone new at all. When Kraken became the first US digital asset bank to win direct access to the Federal Reserve’s core payments system, it reignited the debate around who should have access to payment systems. Fintechs argue that expanding access democratises finance and drives competition, while banks warn that letting crypto firms onto the same rails as them would create systemic risk. At its core, this is a longstanding debate about whether nonbank financial firms should be permitted to access the same payment infrastructure as traditional lenders, and on what terms. But this framing, fintech versus banks, or access versus restriction, misses the more important question. Are the Federal Reserve's core payment rails themselves ready for a more diverse set of participants?

Long-established PSPs working with traditional payment flows have already demonstrated their value to the overarching payment environment and, for the most part, with comparable levels of control and oversight to banks. Moreover, they already enjoy direct participation in payment systems in the UK, Europe and most other global markets. Providing that same level of access in the US will ultimately benefit US consumers and businesses while adding manageable levels of additional risk to the system. However, the use of digital assets introduces a different set of risks and challenges that have not yet been subjected to the same levels of scrutiny and testing and should therefore be assessed and managed separately.

The rails haven’t caught up yet There is no doubt that use cases and controls

Before this important question about payment rails can be answered, we need to address challenges with ‘fintech’ categorisation. A fintech company can

for digital assets will ultimately be proven out over time, but they are just not at the same level of maturity as fiat solutions. That’s why their participation must be considered seriously and separately from fiat fintechs before access to payment rails is granted. The question for now is not whether digital assets will eventually find their place on these rails. It’s whether the rails are ready for them today. For that to be true, the industry needs a clear framework. If firms are seeking bank-like permissions to access core payment rails, then consistent requirements around capital adequacy, operational resilience, consumer protection and financial crime controls

be anything from a well-established fiat payment processor to crypto exchange and stablecoin issuer. Lumping all these different models under one label is an oversimplification and neglects the very real differences in risk and readiness each model brings.

become critical. A level playing field and proportionate supervision are what ultimately maintain confidence in the financial system, while enabling innovation to scale responsibly. Today, this framework is not yet robust enough to accommodate the specific

Fintech is one label with very different offerings

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complexities that digital assets introduce. For instance, what happens to liquidity settlement when an underlying crypto asset experiences the volatility we’ve seen in past market dislocations? Are there new types of fraud that crypto exchanges bring, given their unique transaction patterns? The industry needs to have answers to these questions and have standard controls in place before broadening access.

The future lies in collaboration rather than competition Kraken may be the first digital asset firm to access payment rails, but it won’t be the last. Expanded participation in core payment infrastructure has already started, and the pace will only accelerate. This makes governance and standards readiness more urgent than ever before. But it is worth remembering that this shouldn’t be a fintech versus banks story. Banks and fintechs are increasingly working together, a trend that will only continue. This convergence can create opportunities for efficiency, competition and financial inclusion. But those benefits can only be achieved if the right safety requirements, regulation and oversight are in place for every firm operating on these rails, regardless of whether they are a bank, a PSP or a digital asset firm. That is precisely why getting the foundations right matters to everyone, not just the new entrants seeking access.

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Alvin Feng, President of International Financial BU, Huawei Digital Finance Mr. Alvin Feng as the President of International Financial BU, Huawei Digital Finance, and responsible for global financial industry marketing and solution and product sales. Mr. Alvin Feng joined Huawei in 2007 and deputy general manager (solution) of the Bulgaria Rep, director of the Telenor Solution Marketing Dept, and director of the Global Marketing Solution Sales Dept of Huawei Software.

FINANCIAL INCLUSION NEEDS A DIGITAL BACKBONE Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

Opening an account is only the beginning. Meaningful financial inclusion depends on reliable digital systems that make financial services useful, trusted, and part of everyday life. For a rural resident of Bangladesh, paying a utility bill can take an entire day: traveling to town, waiting in line, and returning home. Today, however, a mobile phone and a nearby agent can make the same transaction almost routine. Payments, transfers, savings, and even small loans are increasingly within reach. What customers see is an app or an agent. Behind that experience, however, is a digital backbone connecting accounts, payments, merchants, partners, data, and risk controls. Its ability to process transactions reliably, securely, and affordably determines whether digital finance can scale—and whether customers will continue to use it. Access to an account is therefore only the first step. The next challenge is making that account useful.

Beyond account ownership The World Bank’s Global Findex Database reports that nearly 80% of the world’s adults had an account in 2024, the latest year for which figures are available. That’s up from 51% in 2011, so the long-term trend is encouraging. Still, the report notes, 1.3 billion adults remain outside the formal financial system. At the same time, 86% of adults own a mobile phone. This creates an opportunity to extend financial services beyond the reach of conventional bank branches. The challenge now is to turn that connectivity into sustained and meaningful use. An account used only once—for example, to receive a subsidy—and then left dormant offers limited value to its owner. Meaningful inclusion depends on whether people trust financial services and use them to meet everyday needs. Payments provide the natural starting point. They are relatively simple, frequent, and closely connected to daily life. An account becomes more useful when people can use it to receive a salary, collect customer payments, pay household bills, or cover the costs of transport, education, and healthcare. Once these services become part of a customer’s routine, financial providers can Back to the Table of Contents

add savings, insurance, and responsible credit. With the appropriate safeguards and customer consent, transaction histories can also help institutions understand customers who lack conventional credit records. The progression is clear: payments establish the connection; everyday services encourage repeated use; and data can help providers respond to customers’ needs.

Building for everyday use Delivering inclusive financial services is operationally demanding. Customers may be highly cost-sensitive while still needing to make frequent, low-value transactions. Platforms must manage large transaction volumes at a sustainable cost, remain stable during peak periods such as paydays and holidays, and serve customers dispersed across wide geographic areas. They must also be secure, adaptable to local regulations, and able to connect easily with merchants and other service providers. An integrated digital platform allows institutions to add services while maintaining a consistent customer experience and avoiding needless operational complexity. Huawei approaches digital finance as a system rather than a single product. Huawei Digital Financial Services (DFS) supports accounts, payments, and credit while connecting financial institutions with customers, merchants, and ecosystem partners. It has been used in more than 65 deployments worldwide, serving over 500 million users and processing transactions worth US$600 billion in 2025. The significance of this infrastructure, however, lies in what financial institutions can build on it locally.

Two paths to meaningful use Myanmar’s KBZPay, based on Huawei’s cloud-based platform, has developed from a digital payment service into a broader ecosystem connecting consumers, merchants and everyday services. It now serves more than 22 million users—nearly 60% of the country’s adult population. In 2025, it

processed more than 3.8 billion transactions, a year-on-year increase of more than 80%. In Bangladesh, bKash illustrates a different path. Its extensive communityagent network helps overcome the geographic barriers that have traditionally kept rural customers beyond the reach of bank branches. The platform has more than 83 million registered users. Having established payments as part of customers’ daily lives, bKash has also introduced embedded, paperless microcredit. This gives customers without conventional credit histories a potential route to smallscale financing when they need it. In 2025, bKash and Huawei received the GSMA GLOMO Award for Best FinTech Innovation for their digital-loan solution. The award recognizes how a platform established for payments can evolve to address a broader financial need. One model expands from payments into a broad digital-services ecosystem. The other builds on payments to extend access to credit. Both demonstrate the same principle: financial inclusion creates lasting value only when services move beyond registration and become part of everyday life. The next phase of financial inclusion will not be led by the institutions that launch the most apps or open the most accounts. It will be led by those with the integrated digital capabilities to make financial services safe, useful, and dependable—and to keep improving them as customers’ needs evolve.

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Denys Kyrychenko, Co-founder & CEO, Corefy & PayAtlas Denys Kyrychenko is the founder of Corefy, a global payment orchestration platform, and PayAtlas, a payment community platform connecting providers and merchants. With two decades of experience in software development, system architecture, and management, he brings deep expertise in online payments and fintech innovation. Over the course of his career, Denys has helped launch numerous PSPs and e-wallets and co-founded Interkassa, a payment aggregator. A graduate of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, he is dedicated to building scalable, efficient payment infrastructure that enables businesses worldwide to optimize conversions, reduce costs, and expand seamlessly into new markets.

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Featured Story

Fall Issue • 2026

THE HARDEST PART OF PAYMENTS ISN'T MOVING MONEY — IT'S CHOOSING WHO MOVES IT Paying for something has never felt easier. A shopper taps a phone, and it is done. Behind that tap, the industry that makes it happen has never been more complicated. Payments is now one of the largest sectors in the world economy, generating well over $2 trillion in revenue a year. Yet its most basic commercial decision — which payment company a business should actually work with — is still made almost entirely by hand.

Too Many Providers, No Way to Choose I have spent 20 years on the infrastructure side of this. Corefy, the orchestration platform I founded, connects a business to hundreds of providers through a single integration, so I have watched the supply side multiply in real time. Two decades ago, the choice was narrow: a handful of acquirers and a couple of card schemes. Today a business can reach wallets, account-to-account rails, realtime payments, buy-now-pay-later and stablecoins — and none of it converges on a single standard. What wins in one market is irrelevant in the next. Wallets dominate Back to the Table of Contents

much of Asia; cards still lead large parts of Latin America; account-to-account is reshaping India. For a business selling across borders, "accept the right payment methods" now has a different answer in every country it enters. There have never been more companies to choose from, and never a harder time telling them apart.

The cost of choosing blind Getting that choice wrong is expensive, and the bill is rarely traced back to its source. It surfaces later as lower approval rates, stalled market launches, and integrations that quietly underdeliver — never as a line item that reads "we picked the wrong partner." Our own research shows how unready most businesses are for this. In our 2025 study of payment maturity, based on 672 businesses worldwide, nearly six in ten still run what we classify as fragmented payments: multiple providers and tools that don't talk to each other. Fewer than one in eight have reached genuinely adaptive, optimized operations. Multiprovider setups are now the norm — more than a third of businesses run five or more

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providers — but running more providers is not the same as choosing them well. The choosing itself is the part no one has fixed. When we analyzed 112 paymentleadership job descriptions, sourcing and validating providers stood out as one of the most stubbornly manual parts of the role. There is no established tooling for it. Teams rebuild the trust layer by hand, market by market, leaning on personal networks to learn what a provider's sales deck won't tell them: whether it holds up once live. On paper, providers look alike; in practice, even well-known names underperform in specific markets, and most teams only find out by going first. The information needed to avoid this exists. It is just scattered across private chats, conference corridors, and the memory of a few well-connected specialists.

the methods and regions they support, and the experience of real users in one open place, so a business can see the landscape before it picks up the phone. Today that map covers more than 1,400 providers across 214 countries, with tools to compare them and, for those who want it, a guided introduction to relevant candidates. Every provider appears on the same terms, and reviews come from real users and stay up whether they flatter or not. The aim is not to rank the market in anyone's favor, but to make it legible.

Underneath all of it sits the context that makes those choices sound — guides to countries, industries, payment methods and regulators — and a community where the people who run payments publish, compare notes and hire. Together, that turns provider selection from something rebuilt by hand in every market into a shared, visible track record the whole industry can draw on.

From Guesswork to Shortlist

Most mature industries solved this long ago with a reference layer — a neutral, structured place to compare options before committing. Travel has it. Software has it.

Discovery on PayAtlas starts with structured profiles. Instead of a logo and a contact form, each provider shows the services it runs, the methods and regions it supports, and what other businesses say about working with it — the things that normally take several calls to establish. From there, the platform narrows the search. PayAtlas Navigator takes a business's geography, industry and requirements and returns a shortlist of providers that genuinely fit, rather than a directory dump. PayAtlas Provider Comparison puts two

The infrastructure of global payments is, broadly, solved: money moves faster, and in more forms, than ever. What hasn't kept pace is everything that happens before the money moves — finding the right partner, and trusting the choice. That gap is about to matter more. Businesses now begin the search the way people begin almost everything: with a search box and, increasingly, an AI assistant, not a phone call. Those tools can only work with data that is structured, trustworthy, and openly available — and a market whose knowledge lives in private chats and sales

Payments does not. Selecting a provider still runs on introductions and reputation, much as it did in the 2000's, even as the number of options exploded. That gap is why we started PayAtlas. The idea was straightforward: make the payments market legible. Put providers,

candidates side by side on the same criteria, so the decision rests on facts rather than on whoever pitched hardest. And for teams that would rather delegate the work, PayAtlas Assist runs a guided process: describe the project, budget, and timeline, and we introduce you to companies that match.

decks is effectively invisible to them. The missing piece, then, was never more infrastructure. It was a map of the market that anyone — a founder, a payments team, or the AI now running their first round of research — can actually read.

The Reference Layer Payments Skipped

What payments still has to build

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Fall Issue • 2026

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Featured Story

Richard Ullenius, VP, Global Banking & Financial Services, CSG Richard Ullenius is Vice President, Banking and Financial Services at CSG, where he leads the company’s Banking & Financial Services business, bringing CSG’s SaaS platforms to market with leading system integration partners. Based in Stockholm, Richard has spent over 16 years at CSG in senior global roles and brings more than 25 years of experience building new business models and transforming complex industries.

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Fall Issue • 2026

TRUST WON’T WAIT: WHY INTELLIGENT TRANSPARENCY WILL DEFINE B2B CUSTOMER LOYALTY In commercial and institutional banking, trust has always been the foundation of the customer relationship. Today, realtime expectations, connected financial ecosystems, and new digital infrastructure have compressed timelines, increased complexity, and raised the standard for business banking experiences. Simultaneously, new regulations such as the EU AI Act and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) bring newfound scrutiny on AI in banking. As banks invest billions of dollars in the technology, they need to weave AI thoughtfully throughout pricing, credit, treasury, and deal workflows without losing that foundation of trust. Successful banks will be able to explain AI decisions clearly to customers and demonstrate accountability. Done well, this intelligent transparency becomes the engine for faster deals, sharper pricing, and deeper institutional relationships. That also makes intelligent transparency the operating condition for speed: the way banks move faster without making customers or counterparties absorb more complexity. Back to the Table of Contents

Intelligent transparency starts at the foundation Intelligent transparency doesn’t necessarily mean that the customer has to understand the AI model, but they do need to understand why a pricing, credit, or risk decision was made, and how it affects them, and who remains accountable for the outcome. Guardrails are what make innovation scalable, and AI must be as compliant as it is intelligent. Regulatory frameworks such as the newly enforced EU AI Act and DORA reinforce the need for customer transparency, explainability, and clear, human oversight. Banks should see this as an opportunity, not as a brake on innovation. Instead, they should use regulation as a design principle that helps them scale responsibly. The most futureready banks embrace a compliance-bydesign mindset and build transparency into every journey from the start. They do so because the business impact is tangible: banks can improve products and experience without having to retrofit controls each time expectations or policies

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change. For example, as banks support faster cross-border banking, a complianceby-design ethos allows them to move quicker without compromising payment security and account protections. In turn, they can offer more to business customers without slowing the pace of innovation. When nearly every decision carries financial, regulatory, or relationship risk, human-AI partnership becomes especially powerful. A compliance-bydesign ethos puts human oversight at the centre of innovation to scale responsibly. Anything that touches a balance sheet or client relationship must be explainable, auditable, and reversible, and ownership must be clearly defined internally. When banks design around transparency, accountability, and clarity, they gain stronger tech stack continuity and the operational resilience they need to build for the future. This work starts with a connected data foundation.

Silos are the enemy of transparency Clean, connected data is a prerequisite for intelligent transparency. Banks need a shared view of the customer across channels, products, and lines of business so teams can understand how data informs a decision and where AI influences the journey. That’s where boundaryless banking comes in – a data strategy that enables banks to build a 360-degree view of the customer across channels and lines of business. The benefit is a central source of truth that lets teams act consistently across products, markets, and counterparties, based on customer needs rather than product architectures.

A full data cleanup may seem daunting, but banks can start with two or three highimpact use cases rather than diving headfirst into a multi-year core replacement. Dynamic deal pricing, cross-border banking experiences, and fraud management are strong candidates because each combines customer impact, operational complexity, and measurable risk. Teams can connect the data and decisions that matter for those workflows, then extend the model through SaaS and API solutions. We helped one North American bank embed intelligence directly into its fraud workflows, which saved the bank tens of millions of dollars a year. The lesson goes beyond savings and underscores how intelligence creates value when it changes a high-friction decision without removing accountability. The value of boundaryless banking then becomes clear: it is the ability to make better decisions sooner, then act on them without passing internal complexity to the customer. With more visibility into the customer, banks can make more accurate lending decisions, deliver smarter treasury management, optimize pricing based on cost-to-serve, and offer a faster and more consistent experience across products, markets, and counterparties. Bankers and operations teams can spot risks and opportunities earlier and instantly act on insights rather than letting them collect dust in a dashboard. Boundaryless banking also opens the door to a stronger human-AI partnership, where AI acts as a simplifier and accelerator, and humans act as the stewards of trust. When banks blend digital intelligence with the deep, advisory relationships that define corporate and institutional banking, they can magnify empathy and trust. Personal

advisory relationships then become an even greater competitive advantage as digitalnative and emerging financial models mature. Banks will see the commercial payoff as they accelerate digital initiatives without making the customer relationship feel automated. For example, let’s say AI flags a crossborder payment for review. Rather than presenting the alert alone, the bank can share the data behind it, disclose that its AI system caught it, and connect the customer with their relationship manager to review the decision together if needed. This way, the customer gets protection and a clear path to resolution, and the bank preserves control without creating unnecessary friction. That is intelligent transparency in practice.

Intelligent transparency and the boundaryless future Trust is how commercial and institutional banks scale into a more connected, realtime future. As banking becomes more connected, transparency cannot stop at a single model or workflow. Customers need confidence that the right data informs each decision, that risk is governed, and that someone remains accountable when something goes wrong. The advantage comes when those principles change outcomes: faster decisions, clearer accountability, and less friction in the moments that matter most. As banks adapt to new forms of financial infrastructure and as explainability and accountability shift from good practice to obligation, successful banks will make their intelligence accountable, fair, and empathetic across the full customer journey. Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

CX BFSI Exchange Week

Introducing North America's Leading Co-Located Events For Customer-Facing Leaders In Banking, Financial Services & Insurance

October 13-14, 2026

Miami, Florida

North America's Premier Invitation-Only Meeting For CX & Customer Contact Leaders in Financial Services

October 15-16, 2026

Miami, Florida

North America’s Must-Attend, Invite-Only Gathering For CX Leaders in Insurance

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www.cxnetwork.com/events-customer-experienceexchange-bfsi-east/cx-bfsi-exchange-series

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Eric Barbier, Founder and CEO, Triple-A Eric Barbier is the Founder and CEO of Triple-A, a global payment institution licensed in the US, Europe and Singapore, that specializes in stablecoin-based payment solutions for businesses worldwide. With 20+ years of experience in mobile and payments, Eric also founded Mobile 365 (acquired by SAP) and the cross-border payments platform TransferTo (now Thunes and DTOne).

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Fall Issue • 2026

CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS: THE COST IS IN THE WAITING Some years ago, when I was running TransferTo (now Thunes), I spent the last week of Ramadan not sleeping. Remittance volumes into Nigeria peak at the end of Ramadan — exactly when the banks there close for the holiday. To make sure our payouts would land, I parked a couple of million dollars with our Nigerian partners and waited. That money sat in someone else's account for a week, doing nothing other than making it possible for other people's money to move. That week illustrates what’s wrong with cross-border payments. The larger cost is not the fee or the FX spread: it is the working capital, held in every market, in local currency, ahead of demand. If I were building that business today, I would run it on stablecoins, for one simple reason: prefunding can be rebalanced daily, or even hourly, so a crossborder business needs only about a tenth of the working capital to operate.

own jurisdiction. But introducing stablecoins to this infrastructure adds a layer above those networks: an alternative way of getting from one to another. Where correspondent banking performs well, SWIFT can carry the payment. Where it doesn’t, stablecoins can move the value between two local rails in minutes, releasing capital that would otherwise be lying idle. SWIFT is not going to disappear. It will remain the main route for years to come. But businesses should be able to transfer payment from their existing accounts, and trust the infrastructure to select the best route based on cost, speed, availability and regulation. This is what stablecoins enable: a company in Europe pays a supplier in Mexico in euros, and the supplier receives pesos: a sandwich with local currency at either end and a stablecoin in the middle, with neither party needing to think about which rails carried it.

Another route, not a replacement

Trust is the harder part

Why did that money have to sit in Lagos in the first place? On many corridors, correspondent banking works well: a euro payment from Frankfurt to New York arrives predictably enough that nobody is looking for an alternative. But in developing markets, the route is less dependable. Payments pass through several intermediaries, each with its own cut-off times and holiday calendars, and the arrival becomes an estimate rather than a fact. To compensate, businesses pre-position capital as a workaround for unreliable routes. Local systems are not going to change. SEPA, Pix, FAST and ACH are each built for its Back to the Table of Contents

In the example above, the stablecoin links the payment and the payout, but neither side actually has to hold it. As adoption grows, we are seeing more cases where stablecoins do sit at one end, because either the payer or the receiver already holds them. The question then is whether the other side accepts stablecoins or opts to use what it knows. The demand for stablecoins is greater where they are easier to source than dollars through local exchanges: for example, in India, Nigeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina. A large corporation in a developed market has no difficulty opening a dollar or euro account. Holding stablecoins isn’t going

to solve a problem that that corporation doesn’t have. What it does need, however, is speed, transparency and lower transfer costs, without having digital assets on its balance sheet. When a payment starts in stablecoins, somebody in the middle has to take the asset, convert it to local currency, screen the counterparty and produce reconcilable records. Similarly, when a business pays local currency to freelancers or suppliers who would rather receive stablecoins, that intermediary provider is needed. But it’s not moving the token between wallets that’s the hard part: it’s being trusted to do it with other people's money. Stablecoin providers also need to earn the trust of the banking system it needs to use. It can take roughly a year of anti-moneylaundering due diligence. Banks can rightly be more cautious than their regulators, putting their best compliance people on these accounts, and asking tough but fair questions. And that’s as it should be. These are not obstacles to adopting stablecoins: they’re just the necessary conditions for deserving that trust. Ten years from now, Visa, Mastercard and SWIFT will still be here, but my expectation is that stablecoins will carry 15 to 20 percent of cross-border payments. They won’t replace the existing payment routes: They’ll work alongside them.

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German Soto Sanchez, Chief Product Officer and Co-President of Digital Assets, Broadridge Germán oversees enterprise product management and is the co-head of digital assets for Broadridge. In this capacity, he leads product operations, enterprise platforms, and innovation, as well as the enterprise-wide strategy, roadmap, commercialization, and execution of our firm-wide digital assets initiatives. Germán joined the company in 2021 as our Chief Strategy Officer. Prior to Broadridge, he was President and a member of the Board of Directors for Cloud9 Technologies, LLC, a cloud-based voice trading communications and analytics company. Previously, Germán held key roles at JPMorgan Chase & Co., AIC Private Equity, and McKinsey & Co. Inc.

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Fall Issue • 2026

TOKENIZATION – BUILDING THE FUTURE OF CAPITAL MARKETS In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange found itself having to close every Wednesday because Wall Street’s back offices were drowning in paperwork. Clerks couldn’t physically move stock certificates fast enough to keep up with the trading volume. But rather than hire more clerks to keep up with demand, the Paperwork Crisis was the catalyst for dematerialization and the creation of centralized ledger systems. Nearly 60 years later, we find ourselves at a similar juncture as tokenization gains momentum at the institutional level. Tokenization – process of representing asset ownership as a digital token on a blockchain or another distributed ledger – is becoming increasingly prevalent in financial services. Increased liquidity, lower transaction costs, and enhanced transparency when compared against traditional settlement rails has led 84% of financial services executives in North America1 to view tokenization as strategically important. Yet tellingly, only around one-quarter (26%) are in production with tokenization.

A hybrid approach While the $250bn+ AUM firms have fully embraced tokenization with ambitious plans to invest over the next few years, the rest of the market is steady, watching the biggest players move first. Indeed, 92% of financial services leaders believe digital and traditional assets will co-exist for an extended period, and more than two-thirds (69%) plan to hybridize their existing infrastructure, rather than build parallel systems. That’s because a complete shift towards tokenization is not the consensus view. For the foreseeable future, a hybrid approach has the advantage. It enables firms to integrate digital capabilities into existing operating models, governance, and risk frameworks, as well as there being no need to 1

set up a parallel infrastructure and reconcile two systems. The growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) offer a useful parallel, they have become a hugely successful investment product, but represent only a portion of total fund assets. Tokenization may follow a similar trajectory of being additive, rather than a replacement, coexisting alongside the traditional market structure.

Tokenization is no longer theoretical This is important because to a large extent adoption is being led by market infrastructure developments, as opposed to client demand. The DTCC, Nasdaq, and NYSE have all introduced initiatives that are further embedding tokenization into financial markets in the US, while the Financial Conduct Authority has recently announced plans to tokenize gold as part of its wider push to digitize financial markets. This is infrastructure-led change, which is why incumbents with existing frameworks are best positioned to shape it. Indeed, Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform hosted an average daily volume of $365bn in July 2026, up a 28% increase yearover-year, and processed $8 trillion in July 2026 alone.

Implementation complexity is the biggest constraint on ambition Yet while there is the institutional buy-in and infrastructure development for tokenization, financial leaders cite regulatory uncertainty as the main barrier to implementation. The CLARITY Act is still in motion and its timeline to pass the Senate is, while delayed, is starting to take shape. And in a move that underpins the speed at which technology and

Broadridge Tokenization Pulse Survey, June 2026

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development can move in financial services, regulators such as the SEC and CFTC are building their own guidelines for institutions to operate within. Outside the U.S., our colleagues in London and Brussels have avoided regulatory lags thus far. The FCA and Bank of England have built the Digital Securities Sandbox and launched a consultation on the Future of Tokenisation to feed into the Government’s Wholesale Financial Markets Digital Strategy. Meanwhile, the introduction of MiCA in the EU is the foundation of a statutory framework that is being continually developed and refined, in line with market need.

Concluding remarks What 1968 demonstrated is that in order to embrace new technologies you don’t need to completely abandon old systems before the industry is fully ready. Tokenization looks set to follow the same trajectory. The firms that do best from adopting this new market infrastructure will be those that let traditional and tokenised assets operate side by side, rather than racing ahead to go fully digital. With the largest institutions already committed, and market infrastructure moving ahead of client demand, the direction of travel looks settled, even if the pace of progress will vary by sector and jurisdiction. What regulators in the main financial centres do next will shape how quickly that pace closes the certainty gap, but for firms with an eye on where liquidity is heading over the next five years, waiting for full legislative certainty before adopting new technologies is no longer a viable strategy.

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Ross Harty, VP Product, 10x Banking Ross Harty is a product leader with over 15 years of experience building and scaling products across banking, lending, fintech, and platform businesses. As VP of Product at 10x Banking, he helps shape the future of banking technology; working with financial institutions around the world to modernise their technology platforms and accelerate innovation. Prior to 10x, Ross held product leadership roles at Funding Circle, Sainsburys Bank and NewDay, and is passionate about using product, technology, and organisational transformation to deliver real customer outcomes and meaningful commercial impact.

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Fall Issue • 2026

BEYOND THE BUZZWORDS: THE THREE TESTS OF A 4TH-GENERATION CORE

Modernity in core banking is not a vibe. It is a set of constraints you can verify. Every core banking platform on the market today calls itself modern. Cloud-native, realtime, AI-ready, composable: the buzz words are now so universal that they have almost lost meaning. For anyone choosing a system that still has to be fit for purpose in a decade, this is not much help, because every vendor makes the same claims. The solution is to stop treating modernity as a vibe and more a set of verifiable constraints. A true 4th-gen core is defined by what the architecture lets you do, and you can test it against three things specifically. Think of it as a trinity: genuine composability, zerodowntime upgrades and AI-ready data flows.

interest and fees, that you combine into products, rather than a fixed catalogue you’re stuck with. Banks should be able to recreate what they offer today or build something new from the same parts without a developer having to touch the core each time. The principles of composability are: the core stays closed to direct change, so it stays stable, while everything around it stays open, so you can keep moving. If a change to one product can break another, or if every new idea has to join the vendor’s roadmap queue, the platform is not composable. To test this, ask if you’re really innovating on your own terms, or as and when your vendor allows.

Legacy in modern packaging

Test two: zero-downtime upgrades

It is tempting to assume this only applies to thirty and forty-year-old mainframes, but plenty of newer platforms have the same problems. Some are built around pure configuration, so they’re quick to stand up and familiar to business teams, but ultimately limited by what the vendor has chosen to build and what’s on their future roadmap. Others give you genuine flexibility over the whole core, but that freedom needs real engineering discipline and governance behind it, which requires intensive resources and ends up becoming its own form of neo-legacy. You see the legacy packaging problem most obviously with AI. Launching a chatbot is quicker than replacing a core, and it looks like progress to some degree, so some banks will run a visible AI project while leaving the systems underneath the same. But a modern skin over an old core doesn’t change the core – that’s why you need empirical tests.

Test one: genuine composability In practice genuine composability means a platform built from modules, things like Back to the Table of Contents

On a lot of systems, change is the enemy. Every new release or tweak risks breaking something deep in the stack, so releases stop being about new value and start being about not breaking what already works. We're all used to seeing banking apps from legacy providers being taken down for maintenance at weekends – in a truly real-time world, that just doesn't work for customers anymore. A 4th-gen core should be built to be changed continuously, adding new capability and upgrades still running, with no downtime or interruption to service. Ask any vendor how they upgrade, and how often their customers go offline to do it.

Test three: AI-ready data flows Finally, every bank today wants to put AI to work, but few can truly leverage it. That’s because their data is trapped in systems built for an age of batch processing, whereas AI requires real-time data. To be properly AI-ready means running a real-time, eventdriven architecture that produces clean,

granular data as things happen, the kind of foundation AI can learn from. A batch system updating daily or even weekly with messy records is not that, which is why so many of the chatbots banks have bolted on so far feel underwhelming: nobody captured the realtime data they needed. I use a simple picture for this, which is putting AI on top of legacy architecture is like dropping a much bigger engine into a car without touching the brakes, the suspension or the steering. All it buys you is a faster accident.

Modernity you can measure The point to takeaway is that these are things you can measure. Some platforms are engineered to be the cheapest option for a segment, with the sophistication of design tied to price. As they get towards one and a half or two million accounts, or as payment volumes climb, those choices start to come back to bite, and the ceiling shows up. Architectures designed and tested from the start for tens of millions of accounts don’t hit the same ceiling. You can measure this. So the next time a platform is described as modern, cloud-native or AI-ready, treat it as a chance to run these tests and find out the reality. Ask whether it is genuinely composable, with zero-downtime upgrades and real-time, event-driven data. A fourthgeneration core will pass all three without hesitation. Everything else is legacy in a smarter suit. Learn to tell the difference now and you can avoid rebuilding again in five years.

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Richard Swales, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer, Paysafe Richard Swales is Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Paysafe, a leading global payments platform. He oversees the company's global risk, compliance and financial crime functions, helping ensure secure, compliant and trusted payment experiences for businesses and consumers worldwide. With extensive experience in payments, regulation and risk management, Richard works closely with regulators, industry partners and merchants to navigate the evolving complexities of digital commerce and cross-border payments.

LOCAL PAYMENTS, GLOBAL AMBITIONS: THE FUTURE OF CROSS-BORDER COMMERCE Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

For businesses with global ambitions, reaching customers across borders has never been easier. Digital commerce has removed many of the traditional barriers to expansion, allowing merchants to launch products and services into new markets faster than ever before. Yet while entering a new market may be simpler, succeeding there is not. Consumer expectations vary widely from country to country. Payment preferences differ. Regulatory frameworks evolve constantly. Requirements for customer verification, fraud prevention, data security and anti-money laundering controls are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For merchants seeking international growth, navigating these complexities can often feel overwhelming. This is where payments have evolved from a back-office function into a strategic growth driver. For years, businesses viewed payments primarily as a way to complete transactions. Today, payments sit at the intersection of customer experience, risk management, compliance and revenue generation. The right payments strategy can help businesses accelerate expansion, improve conversion rates and build trust with customers around the world. A critical part of that strategy is understanding that localization extends far beyond language or currency. Customers want to pay in the ways they know and trust. A consumer in Germany may prefer a bank-based payment method. A customer in Brazil may expect alternative payment options tailored to local habits. Across Asia-Pacific, digital wallets continue to gain momentum. When merchants fail to offer familiar payment experiences, cart abandonment and lost revenue often follow. However, delivering local payment experiences introduces additional layers of complexity. Different payment methods operate under different regulatory frameworks. Data protection requirements vary by jurisdiction. Financial crime risks differ between regions. Merchants must ensure they remain compliant while delivering seamless customer experiences. Back to the Table of Contents

Increasingly, businesses are recognizing that compliance is not a barrier to growth. It is an enabler of sustainable growth. Consumers are placing greater importance on trust when choosing where to transact. They expect businesses to protect sensitive information, detect fraud and safeguard their payments. Regulators share those expectations and continue to raise the standards for how organizations manage risk. At Paysafe, we've seen firsthand how businesses that embed compliance and risk management into their growth strategies are often better positioned to scale internationally. Rather than treating compliance as a box-ticking exercise, they view it as part of the customer experience itself. The challenge is magnified as technology evolves. Artificial intelligence is transforming commerce at an incredible pace. Businesses are using AI to improve efficiency, personalize experiences and automate complex processes. At the same time, fraudsters are leveraging many of the same tools to create increasingly sophisticated attacks. Traditional methods of verification are no longer enough on their own. The industry is moving toward a more holistic understanding of identity and risk, incorporating behavioral analysis, device intelligence and transaction context to identify suspicious activity without creating friction for legitimate customers. Achieving this balance is essential. Businesses need robust controls, but they also need seamless customer experiences. Security cannot come at the expense of convenience, and convenience cannot come at the expense of security. The most successful organizations are increasingly adopting a layered approach. Compliance teams, risk professionals, technology specialists and payments experts work together to create environments where transactions are both secure and frictionless. The goal is not simply to stop fraud; it is to create confidence.

That confidence becomes even more important in cross-border commerce. Fraudsters do not recognize geographic boundaries. Financial crime networks operate internationally, targeting weaknesses wherever they exist. As digital commerce becomes more interconnected, collaboration between industry participants is becoming essential. No single organization can address these challenges alone. Payments providers, merchants, regulators and technology partners all have roles to play in strengthening the ecosystem. Sharing intelligence, improving standards and embracing innovation collectively will be critical in staying ahead of rapidly evolving threats. At the same time, innovations such as tokenization, machine learning and advanced risk analytics are helping organizations modernize how they approach payments security. These technologies can reduce exposure to sensitive data, strengthen transaction integrity and improve the accuracy of risk assessments. Looking ahead, the businesses that succeed internationally will be those that view payments through a broader lens. Cross-border commerce is no longer simply about accepting transactions in multiple markets. It is about creating trusted, localized experiences while navigating an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. It is about balancing growth ambitions with risk management. And it is about building the infrastructure necessary to support longterm expansion. The companies that get this right will be positioned not only to enter new markets but to thrive in them. In today's experience economy, trust, compliance and localization have become powerful competitive differentiators. Businesses that embrace them will be best equipped to turn global opportunity into sustainable growth.

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Dr. Max Steiger, Chief Compliance and Governance Officer, Unzer Dr. Max Steiger is Chief Compliance and Governance Officer at Unzer, where he is responsible for compliance, anti-money laundering, information security, and ESG. Before joining Unzer, he spent nearly two decades in senior compliance leadership roles at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Since 2024, he has also served on the Executive Board of the German Association of Payment and E-Money Institutions (bvzi).

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Fall Issue • 2026

FIVE PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF COMPLIANCE AND GOVERNANCE By 2030, compliance will be more strategic, more technology-driven, and more deeply embedded in business decision-making. Yet despite rapid advances in technology and increasingly complex regulation, its foundation will remain unchanged: responsible leadership and sound judgment. The organizations that succeed will be those that treat governance, integrity, and data literacy not as separate disciplines, but as interconnected leadership responsibilities. Compliance is undergoing a profound transformation. Over the past decade, it has evolved from a largely control-focused function into a strategic business capability. At the same time, regulatory requirements, technological possibilities, and stakeholder expectations continue to grow. Companies are expected to innovate faster while maintaining regulatory certainty—a balancing act that will only become more demanding over the coming years. The following five predictions outline what I believe will define the future of compliance and governance by 2030.

processing. While this may seem efficient in the short term, it ultimately weakens governance by blurring responsibilities and eroding independent oversight. Compliance should—and must—advise the business, provide guidance, and make risks transparent. What it should not do is become part of operational decisionmaking. Once the second line of defense becomes an extension of the first, it loses the independence that gives it credibility and effectiveness. This independence will become even more important as organizations process larger volumes of data, automate more decisions, and operate under increasing time pressure. Precisely when decisions become more complex and less clear-cut, companies need an independent function capable of providing objective oversight.

reporting dashboards, and clearly defined responsibilities across governance, risk management, compliance, and internal controls. Companies are beginning to recognize that isolated control functions provide only a fragmented picture of risk and often overlook critical interdependencies. An integrated approach enables organizations to identify emerging risks earlier, make better decisions, and manage issues proactively rather than simply reacting when problems arise. It also strengthens organizational resilience while fostering a culture in which ethical questions are openly discussed and addressed.

3. A Culture of Integrity Will Become the Most Powerful Governance Tool

The foundation of effective governance remains a well-functioning Three Lines of

As regulation expands, so does the number of specialized control functions—from information security and ESG to operational resilience. The real challenge is no longer creating additional functions, but ensuring that they work together effectively. Clear responsibilities within the Three Lines of

Even in a highly regulated environment, no rulebook can cover every situation. Thousands of pages of regulation cannot anticipate every business decision. Most poor decisions are not driven by criminal intent, but by pressure, conflicting objectives, poorly designed incentives, or a lack of guidance. This is why, in my view, organizational culture matters just as much as systems and controls. Processes, policies, and technology are necessary—but they are not enough. A genuine culture of integrity will increasingly

Defense model. Yet as regulatory complexity increases, organizations often feel tempted to involve compliance more directly in operational decision-making in order to accelerate processes or reduce uncertainty. Compliance becomes involved in onboarding decisions, product approvals, or transaction

Defense remain essential, but organizational silos do not. Organizations increasingly need a single, integrated view of non-financial risk, consistent with the principles of Integrated Assurance. In practice, this means shared risk taxonomies, aligned controls, integrated

become the defining characteristic of effective governance. Employees need to understand not only what is permitted, but also what is right. That requires clear ethical principles, continuous training, and a strong speakup culture where people feel safe raising

1. Without Clear Role Separation, Compliance Will Lose Its Effectiveness

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2. Compliance Will Become the Integration Platform for Control Functions

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concerns. Just as importantly, employees need the confidence to recognize ethical dilemmas, ask difficult questions, and take responsibility regardless of their role or seniority. One principle, however, remains unchanged: compliance starts at the top. If leaders fail to demonstrate integrity through their own actions, even the most sophisticated compliance framework will fall short. The tone from the top still matters— but simply communicating policies and prohibitions is no longer enough. Leaders must lead by example. That also means giving employees

reductions in complexity are possible. Overall, however, regulation is still likely to increase, despite ongoing discussions about reducing bureaucracy and shifting from rules-based to principles-based regulation. At least, that has been the experience of the past two decades.

alone will no longer be enough. Future compliance leaders must also understand data, models, system risks, and—perhaps most importantly—know how to ask the right questions.

5. AI Will Become an Essential Compliance Tool—But It Will Not Replace Human Judgment Artificial intelligence is already transforming compliance. Today, AI supports a wide range

By 2030, the defining challenge for compliance may no longer be technological or regulatory—it may be political. What happens when powerful actors openly ignore rules without facing meaningful consequences? What happens to trust in institutions when regulations

practical support. They should be encouraged and empowered to uphold ethical standards even when doing so may conflict with short-term commercial objectives. Only when leaders consistently demonstrate that integrity takes precedence over immediate results will employees trust that doing the right thing is genuinely valued throughout the organization.

Regulators already expect significantly more data than they did only a few years ago, and this trend is accelerating. Supervisory authorities increasingly require more granular evidence, more reporting points, and faster analysis. As a result, internal monitoring capabilities must become far more sophisticated. Technology is no longer optional—it is essential. Automation, real-time analytics, and data-driven decision-making will become standard capabilities, particularly in transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, KYC, and cyber resilience. At the same time, new technologies introduce new risks, including cybersecurity vulnerabilities, privacy concerns, and increasingly complex system architectures.

of activities, from transaction monitoring and customer onboarding to identifying compliance gaps and detecting suspicious behavior. Its greatest strengths lie in structured, data-intensive tasks. Modern systems can analyze documents automatically, detect anomalies, identify potential manipulation, and verify plausibility within seconds. Their real advantage, however, lies in recognizing patterns rather than evaluating isolated data points. Inconsistencies in onboarding, unusual transaction timing, or similarities to known fraud schemes may each appear insignificant on their own. Combined, they can provide a reliable indication of elevated risk. This enables organizations to detect issues earlier while reducing the operational burden on compliance teams. At the same time, compliance can no longer be viewed solely as a legal discipline. Lawyers understand regulation, but effective compliance also requires technology specialists, data experts, behavioral scientists, communicators, and business leaders working together to ensure that rules are not merely understood but genuinely embedded in everyday decision-making. Despite remarkable technological progress, human judgment remains irreplaceable. Ethical dilemmas, contextual

continue to exist on paper, but their enforcement increasingly appears selective? We are already witnessing rising geopolitical tensions, growing pressure on multilateral institutions, and a renewed emphasis on national interests over shared international rules. In such an environment, the balance between law and power inevitably begins to shift. If economic or political influence increasingly determines whether rules are followed, a fundamental question emerges: What role do rules still play—and who are they really binding? For compliance professionals, this represents a profound challenge. Compliance depends not simply on the existence of rules, but on the shared belief that those rules matter. If organizations observe that violations at the highest levels go unpunished, behaviour inevitably changes throughout the system. Perhaps this will be the true test of compliance over the coming decade—not whether we can implement rules more efficiently through technology, but whether we can preserve trust in the very idea that rules should apply equally to everyone. There is no definitive answer today. But how governments, businesses, and societies respond to this question will ultimately shape not only the future of compliance, but also the resilience of the institutions

By 2030, the quality of a compliance function will no longer be judged by the number of tools it has deployed, but by how effectively it integrates, governs, and makes use of those technologies. Some regulatory simplification may occur. Recent initiatives suggest that targeted

assessments, and strategic decisions require experience, perspective, and accountability— qualities that cannot simply be delegated to algorithms. For that reason, technological literacy will become a core competency for compliance professionals. Understanding regulation

on which our economies—and our democracies—depend.

4. Technology and Data Will Define the Next Generation of Compliance

Conclusion

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Fall Issue • 2026

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Featured Story

Iveta Krūmiņa, Chief Commercial Officer, COLIBRIX ONE Iveta Krūmiņa is a finance and commercial leadership professional with over 13 years of experience in private banking, payments, and fintech. Her expertise includes sales leadership, business development, client relationship management, and commercial strategy. Throughout her career, she has worked with both private and corporate clients across banking and payments institutions, progressing from client-facing private banking roles to leading sales and commercial functions at a fintech company. Her professional interests include payments innovation, digital transformation, and building high-performing commercial teams in the financial sector.

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Fall Issue • 2026

RAILS ARE NO EXCUSE: HOW A BUSINESS CAN WIN BACK CONTROL OF ITS CROSS-BORDER COSTS Every conversation about cross-border payments lands on the same verdict: the pipes are old, the correspondent network is thinning, and only a long wave of reform will make cross-border payments cheap and fast. The infrastructure problem is real, but a business cannot change it. What it can move is narrower and more useful: the account where it holds its money, and whether the provider's terms fit the way it trades. In one line: where your bank decides what cross-border costs you. Keep a balance in every currency you invoice in, each under an IBAN in your company's name, and paying a supplier in that currency settles like a domestic transfer. No intermediary takes a cut, you pay the FX spread once rather than on every payment, and the funds land in hours, not days. None of this waits on a standards body; it is a change a treasury team can make now.

The Rails Will Not Be Fixed in Time The G20 drew a hard line for 2027: no corridor costing more than 3% of the amount sent, and three-quarters of payments credited within an hour. Six years in, the scorekeepers now say the line will be missed. The Financial Stability Board's 2025 progress report calls it unlikely that improvement will arrive in line with the 2027 timetable, and admits the effort has not yet reached end-users. The BIS reached the same conclusion across 82 jurisdictions: the targets will not be fully met. Businesses feel that gap directly: nearly one-third of cross-border payments still cost more than 3%, and only 40% of B2B transfers settle within a single working day. Back to the Table of Contents

The network they lean on is thinning, too: the global supply of correspondent banking relationships has fallen 20% since the mid-2000s, and some corridors now have no intermediary at all.

Where the Cost Actually Hides in Your Flows The friction is easy to find, looking for it in your own numbers instead of the headlines. First, count the hops: every intermediary bank between you and your counterparty takes a fee and a slice of the exchange rate, so ask how many sit in your busiest corridors. Second, count the conversions: convert on every transaction and you pay the spread every time, where holding the currency means paying it once. Third, read your IBAN: a pooled or foreign IBAN gets payments queried, delayed or refused, while one in your own name does not. Finally, find the trapped cash: money in transit for days is working capital you cannot deploy, and it rarely shows on a spend line even though it is a real cost. These are not four problems to solve separately, each traces back to the same decision: where the money sits, and whose name is on the account that holds it.

Turning a Cross-Border Payment Into a Local One In practice, the fix comes down to three things a company keeps in its own name rather than leaving to a correspondent bank. COLIBRIX ONE gives a business all three from one account, so the money, and every decision about it, stays under its control:

• A multi-currency account, so money sits in the currencies you actually trade in and the spread is paid once on the way in, not on every transaction after. • An IBAN in your own company name in each zone, so you collect and pay as a local, the correspondent hop drops out, and payments stop drawing the queries a pooled IBAN invites. • SEPA and Swift reach across markets, so you trade wherever you need to without a separate banking relationship in every country. "Businesses keep being told to wait for better rails, but the money is leaking today, and the one variable they fully control is where they hold it," says Iveta Krūmiņa, Chief Commercial Officer at COLIBRIX ONE. "The moment a company holds its currencies where it trades and pays under its own IBAN, the cross-border cost stops being a corridor problem and becomes a local payment, and that is something a finance team can act on this quarter, not this decade." Together, they turn a cross-border payment into a set of local ones and take the correspondent chain out of the path, which is exactly where the 3%-plus cost and the multi-day delay live. This does not replace the rails; it stops a business paying for their worst part while the roadmap catches up.

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Adil Ahmed, Vice President & Deputy Managing Director, MEA, Compass Plus Technologies

Quentin Vigneau, Chief Product Officer, Spendesk Quentin Vigneau is Chief Product Officer at Spendesk, Europe's leading spend management platform serving over 5,000 finance teams. He brings over a decade of fintech product leadership – from founding his own payments company to senior product roles at Checkout.com, and five years at Swile leading product for expense management, payments, and merchant network across Europe and Latin America. At Spendesk, Quentin is building the platform where AI agents act and the Financial Controller thrives – driving the company's transition to an open, agentic architecture at a pivotal moment for finance software.

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Fall Issue • 2026

ON WHOSE AUTHORITY IS THIS THING ACTING? Ask a finance team how it uses AI and you hear about the work that surrounds the work. Summarising a contract, drafting a supplier email. What you rarely hear about is the close, the ledger or the payment run. The usual explanation is that the models aren't ready and, for me, that isn't the main reason. They can't reconcile a supplier statement unaided, that is many-to-many matching across partial payments, credit notes, FX and a PDF that arrived looking like a fax but they can draft the reconciliation and explain the breaks. The sticking point comes earlier: what the system may see, what it may do, and who is comfortable granting that access. Until recently there were two ways to grant it, and both had issues: export the data and reason over a snapshot that went stale on the way out, or commission an integration and hand an assistant a service account that sees everything. The Model Context Protocol has largely closed that gap. It does not settle the OAuth layer around it, which decides whose authority a query runs on.

Finance already knows how to build trust Finance has spent a century here. Segregation of duties, delegated authority, four eyes on anything that moves money, an audit trail that survives contact with an auditor: a discipline built around who may do what with money. Most of the trust layer agentic finance needs already exists. The work is to make it legible to a machine, so an agent acts with the access of the person it represents, holds no standing authority of its own, and leaves every action attributable to a named human. A machine cannot answer to a regulator, so an agent given someone's authority inherits attribution, not accountability. Finance already automates without approving every act – nobody signs off Back to the Table of Contents

each test a screening engine runs – because that control has a named owner who set its limits in advance. A generalpurpose agent at full scope offers no such clarity, so the case for now is to narrow its authority rather than wait for better technology. That model was built around people, and priced in two assumptions that no longer hold. The first is that a permission-holder gets tired. A group controller may read every journal line, tolerable partly because nobody has ever exfiltrated a ledger by scrolling. Hand the same permission to something tireless and you have not been conservative; you have widened it. Limits on volume and aggregation, in the same policy language as the permissions, are missing. Second, a permission model bounds what an agent may do without bounding what it can be told, and supplier invoices arrive from parties you don't control. To an agent reading one, the text on the invoice and the instruction from its user travel down the same channel – separating them reliably is an open research problem, not an engineering task with a date on it. Hybrid Models is the answer for now There is no resolution yet, but there is containment: insulate one layer of automation from the next with a person. Four eyes, on condition that the second pair has a source of truth the first didn't supply. Two limits on that. An approval governs what an agent does, not what it reads or sends: an assistant that can fetch a URL needs no approval to leak. Insulation decays as the agent improves: an approver right about the last four hundred requests stops reading the next one. That is the honest case for read-only first, widening slowly to narrow, humanconfirmed writes. Read-only is not safe: the sensitive material sits on the read side, in the advisory invoice naming the acquisition target three weeks before

announcement. Safety comes from the scopes, not the setting. None of this is unprecedented. Open banking forced consent into machinereadable form a decade ago, scoped, expiring, revocable, retained for audit because trust across an institutional boundary could not be assumed. Inside a company trust could always be assumed, so nobody built the equivalent. Agents dissolve that assumption.

The prize is consistency The prize is not speed. Accounting was never deterministic. Two competent teams close the same ledger differently – on provisions, on cut-off, on what counts as one contract. Deterministic software could only execute a policy someone had already decided. A model can do what a database field never could: read last quarter's basis and say when this quarter has stopped matching it. The judgement still belongs to the person who signs off, but the reasoning behind it can now carry forward.

Start with the policy, not the model Inside a large group this is a multi-year entitlement programme. The first step isn't, and needs no AI budget. Take the three questions your team would most want to put to a system it doesn't own, and write down four things: which roles may see each answer, how much any of them may pull at once, who owns the switch that stops it, and where the reasoning gets recorded. That list is the specification. The firms that have written it will outrun the firms with nothing but a better model.

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Ben Goldin, Founder & CEO, Plumery Ben brings over 20 years of experience in financial services innovation, including executive roles at Mambu and Backbase. His contributions have been recognised by analysts from Gartner, Forrester, and Ovum. Today, Ben leads Plumery’s overall strategy and direction.

THE DIGITAL BATTLE FOR CANADA’S NEXT-GEN BANK ACCOUNTS Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

For decades, Canadian credit unions have won on trust, personal relationships, and local proximity. But in 2026, geography is rapidly losing its power as a competitive edge. The sector has shrunk from 500 credit unions in 2005 to fewer than 400 today, yet it still serves more than 27% of Canada’s population. With national heavyweights like EQ Bank and digital incumbents like Wealthsimple bringing global-scale technology to Canada, they are capturing the daily spending and attention of the next generation. Millennials, Gen Z and newcomers to Canada are the growth demographics credit unions need most and the ones least likely to open their first account at a credit union. Every year a credit union fails to win that first relationship, it loses that member for good. The members it already has are not risk-free either: if a credit union's platform can't match the speed and clarity of these challengers, members keep it on file for a mortgage and do their daily banking elsewhere.

Going up against the challengers Global digital-first heavyweights are bringing global-scale infrastructure to capture daily spending. By offering traditional banking alongside instant trading, crypto, and multi-currency accounts, these players present a unified ecosystem that attracts younger, wealth-building members while solving complex cross-border financial needs that legacy systems struggle to support. These challengers win because they deliver intuitive, user-friendly mobile experiences that provide financial clarity. Breaking free from legacy platforms For credit unions to hold their ground, digital capability is paramount. Yet, many institutions remain trapped by legacy architectures, fragmented member data, and limited ability to offer personalised features. Large credit unions running custom-built or heavily customised systems are stuck between a rock and a hard place. There is now hesitation surrounding the build vs buy dilemma – credit unions don’t know what Back to the Table of Contents

to build or what to buy. The way out isn't picking a side in build vs. buy, but rather being deliberate about which parts of the stack are worth owning and which aren't: • Stop building plumbing: Payment processing, security infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and Open Banking rails are areas where proven vendor platforms provide shared, cost-effective infrastructure. • Focus on differentiation: Unique member experiences, community knowledge, and tailored financial products are where character creates a true competitive edge. • Evolve, don't replace: Modern cloudnative platforms act as evolutionary accelerators, allowing credit unions to upgrade the digital experience in months without requiring a high-risk, multi-year core replacement.

Modern digital transformation requires a good partner Overcoming legacy friction used to require a risky, multi-year ‘rip and replace’ of core banking systems. Today, progressive modernisation lets credit unions upgrade the front-end member experience quickly while keeping core operations stable. The key lies in choosing the right technology partner that embraces a Buy-and-Build approach. By deploying a core-agnostic, headless digital engagement platform, credit unions can immediately acquire standard banking functionality out of the box, covering everything from onboarding to multi-currency and instant payments. That flexibility will become important as Canada moves toward consumer-driven banking, with standardised, API-based data sharing capabilities. This frees internal development teams to focus their energy on building the unique, community-focused features that actually set the business apart. With open APIs and pre-integrated vendor ecosystems, rolling out new capabilities no longer takes 12 to 18 months. A modern engagement layer allows institutions to launch tailored mobile and web experiences in months, delivering fintech-grade agility with total control.

Capturing the mid-market opportunity This digital agility protects the retail relationships credit unions already have, and opens a second front: business banking.As the Big Six including RBC, BMO and CIBC move away from relationship-based SMB banking, often by closing branches, routing business owners to automated call centers, and reducing local access, many Canadian small businesses are finding their needs underserved. Canadian SMBs need modern capabilities like instant payment integrations, multicurrency accounts, automated cash management, and real-time financial insights. Credit unions have the local trust and service mindset to fill this void, but business owners will no longer sacrifice digital utility for personal service. They expect both. If a business owner cannot integrate with QuickBooks or run instant cross-border payments, they will take their primary operating account straight to a competitor regardless of how established the local team is.

Building the future of credit unions To protect independence and win the next generation, credit unions must combine their inherent local trust with modern digital capabilities. This means equipping members and business clients with real-time insights, multi-currency accounts, full Real-Time Rail (RTR) and Open Banking readiness. Members judge each institution by what they can do on their phone in three taps. By adopting modern, open platform architectures, credit unions can shed legacy limitations and let members do in three taps what used to take a branch visit

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Seva Ustinov, Founder & CEO, Plurio Seva Ustinov is the founder & CEO of Plurio, a San Francisco-based MarTech startup building an AI agent for performance marketing teams spending $500K+/month on ads. Plurio minimizes marketers' manual work so they can focus on strategy rather than decoding dashboards filled with chaotic, uncertain figures. The agent catches inefficiencies early, scales winners, and accelerates decisionmaking turning data into action without manual overhead.

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Fall Issue • 2026

WHY FINTECH NEED A NEW WAY TO TURN DATA INTO DECISIONS When There is Too Much Data For years, fintech companies have been investing in systems that allow them to collect vast amounts of data – such as detailed information on transactions, customer behavior, acquisition, conversion, risks, and operational processes – all of which is spread across multiple platforms. For a company or startup operating in different markets simultaneously, the volume of information can be completely overwhelming to process effectively. Data does not always tell the team what to do next, and the inability to process it properly and draw accurate, relevant conclusions sometimes leads to the wrong course of action or even management mistakes. The payments team may notice that the percentage of rejected transactions in one country has increased over the past few days, while the customer acquisition team observes that the cost per new customer has risen, even though the advertising budget and traffic volume have remained virtually unchanged. Product developers discover that users are cancelling the registration process more frequently at one of the stages. The risk management team observes an increase in suspicious transactions among a specific type of customer – all of these changes are tracked in different systems and may have different causes. The most important thing here is to determine, in each case, whether this anomaly can be ignored or whether it is a real problem that requires immediate action. But what exactly needs to be changed to resolve this issue? As the company grows and the volume of data increases, it becomes more difficult to answer these questions, since various factors begin to influence the same outcome. Furthermore, data from different systems does not necessarily come at the same time and rarely gives a clear picture. Some results Back to the Table of Contents

are visible almost immediately, while others become clear only after a few days – and that is a real risk, because by the time you double check the metrics, identify the cause, and coordinate a response, moment X may already have passed.

What AI Agents Can Take On This is exactly where AI agents can take on part of the work. Here is how the process works: agents regularly check metrics, compare them with historical data, identify specific segments or processes where deviations have occurred, and suggest possible actions to a specialist. If the rules are predefined by the company, the agent can perform a standard, documented operation on its own. The agent role is not limited to reacting to every change, since there are too many metrics in fintech that may temporarily deviate from the norm. A one-day increase in the percentage of rejected payments could be due to a technical glitch or the specific characteristics of a particular market, while a rise in the cost of acquisition may turn out to be a short-term fluctuation. To distinguish a genuine signal from a temporary fluctuation, the AI agent will take into account the metric history, the rate of change, and related metrics. If the change persists or appears simultaneously in multiple metrics, the likelihood of a systemic problem will be higher.

How a System Can Learn from Previous Decisions This is especially important for processes where the final outcome isn’t clear until several days later. If you wait for all the information before making a decision, you will inevitably be too late. In such cases, an AI-based predictive model can estimate the likely outcome before the final data becomes available.

An AI system can also use the results of previous decisions to adjust rules – a rule established 3 months ago may no longer be appropriate for the current situation. By comparing decisions with their outcomes, AI can identify such patterns and suggest changes. Automatic optimization also carries risks – the agent may effectively improve a metric that isn’t key to the business. For example, lowering the cost of customer acquisition does not necessarily mean attracting higher-quality customers. Therefore, it is important for the system to take into account not just a single metric, but a broad set of business metrics and constraints.

Automate, but within set limits For this reason, I always say that automation should operate within the rules set by the company itself. It is necessary to determine in advance which decisions an agent can make independently, and when a manager should step in. It is equally important for the manager to understand why the system suggested a specific action and what data it was based on. The volume of data in the financial industry will continue to grow, and the number of decisions that must be made based on that data is also increasing. Therefore, one of the key competitive advantages in today's market is the ability to quickly turn information into actions and adjust an approach based on the experience gained. I am confident that, in fintech, AI agents can serve as a bridge between analytics and operations. Of course, this is provided that automation does not replace oversight, but rather enables the faster and more consistent making of a large number of small decisions.

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Nick Fernando, Co-Founder & Director, Aqua Global Nick Fernando co-founded Aqua Global in 1983 alongside his twin brother Mark, and the two continue to direct the company more than four decades on. From the very beginning, Nick has been at the intersection of banking and technology, starting his career as a programmer working on the creation of the IBIS banking system, gaining a foundational understanding of core banking infrastructure. Over 43 years, Nick has shaped Aqua Global into one of financial technology's most enduring independent names. His expertise spans the full evolution of financial messaging, from the earliest days of electronic banking through to today's ISO 20022 transformation of global payments. Under his leadership, Aqua Global has built a global client base spanning 23 countries.

Financial IT spoke with Nick Fernando about why tokenised cross-border banking hasn't had its moment yet – and why banks need to fix their plumbing before they build anything on top of it. Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

TOKENISED CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS WON'T RUN ON BROKEN PLUMBING Financial IT: Fintechs and neobanks promised instant, cheap payments. Why hasn't that translated cross-border? Nick Fernando: Making cross-border payments genuinely instant and cheap is more than just a technology problem. It requires deep integration across currencies, clearing systems and regulatory frameworks, and that’s not something even the best technology can build overnight. A fintech can make payments instant inside its own app, because it controls both ends of the transaction. But the moment it crosses into another country’s banking system it will face hurdles – currency conversion, local regulation, and different payment rails. Every one of those steps adds a cost, and all of it has to be reconciled. That's where the friction actually lives. Most neobanks also still rely on the same underlying infrastructure as traditional banks. They don’t necessarily have accounts or direct access to clearing systems in every market, so payments still go through partners. That means inheriting their pricing, processes and timings. The same goes for compliance. A payment must satisfy the AML, KYC and sanctions rules of every jurisdiction it touches, adding further operational overhead. Financial IT: What's the biggest risk as banks move towards tokenised flows? Nick Fernando: The biggest risk is that the new systems and the old ones won’t talk to each other. Plenty of banks are still running platforms built decades ago, designed for simple payment instructions and limited messaging fields. They were never built for the type of data that travels with digital transactions. Many banks have used translation tools to bridge that gap. But the problem is that every extra layer makes tokenised flows harder to manage. Each conversion Back to the Table of Contents

adds latency and strips out detail, so banks lose sight of the transaction end to end. As tokenised payments scale, those workarounds mean failed payments, lengthy investigation and eroded customer trust. Meanwhile, banks are already dealing with legacy problems they haven’t solved. Research shows 63% of banking IT leaders are still reliant on outdated messaging formats and systems that should have been retired. That’s having a direct impact on how quickly banks can process and resolve payments: 29% say reconciliation issues typically take more than a day to resolve, while 65% spend more time repairing payment data than producing it. The concern is that without fixing the underlying architecture, banks risk carrying those same data, reconciliation and operational problems into a much faster tokenised payments environment. Financial IT: What needs to happen over the next 18 months to make tokenised crossborder flows viable at scale? Nick Fernando: The next 18 months will be crucial for testing how well tokenised and traditional infrastructures can work together in live conditions. Tokenised deposits won’t replace existing payment rails overnight, so banks need to make sure the two can work together reliably. For banks, this is the window to get the foundations right. Always-on payments simply can’t run on infrastructure that relies on manual intervention. Banks need to improve real-time visibility, automate reconciliation and matching, and embed continuous monitoring across digital and traditional transactions. Fix that plumbing now, and banks will be in a much stronger position to scale tokenised payments with confidence. If they don’t, they risk building the future on infrastructure that is already holding them back.

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SHADOW AI IS FORCING ENTERPRISES TO RETHINK WHERE AI IS RUN For more than a decade, IT leaders have had to deal with the consequences of shadow IT. Most of us remember how it played out. A team signs up for a cloud service to move faster, and a department adopts a SaaS platform without involving central IT. The intention is rarely reckless; it is usually about speed and convenience. But over time, those isolated decisions accumulate, leaving IT teams to piece together visibility across an increasingly fragmented landscape. Enterprises invested years correcting this disconnect. They strengthened oversight, standardised architecture and improved alignment between business units and IT. The assumption was that the lesson had been learned. Now a similar pattern is emerging, but the stakes are higher. AI systems are not simply tools that sit quietly inside the technology stack. They process sensitive data, generate outputs and influence decisions. When they are introduced outside structured oversight, organisations lose visibility not only into how AI is used, but also where it is running and how enterprise data is being handled. That

73% of UK IT and engineering executives report encountering AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions. At the same time, 91% believe the use of AI tools and agents outside official oversight creates business risk. That combination reflects a familiar tension: innovation is advancing rapidly across the organisation, while enterprise operating models are still adjusting to accommodate it. For many, the challenge is not only managing how AI is used, but maintaining control over where AI workloads run and where sensitive data is processed.

loss of control is becoming a defining concern for many IT leaders. AI adoption across UK organisations is accelerating rapidly. Yet it is not always unfolding through structured, centrally governed programmes. According to the latest Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index research,

contained objectives and may even be labelled as pilots. But if you’ve worked in an AI team, you know AI does not tend to remain confined for long. Once a model influences customer interactions, operational workflows or financial decisions, it becomes part of core delivery.

AI rarely stays experimental Part of the challenge lies in how accessible AI tools have become. A generative AI assistant can be introduced to analyse documents or draft communications in a matter of days. A customer service function can deploy an automated agent to handle enquiries. A finance team can experiment with predictive modelling to improve forecasting. These deployments often begin with

And when that happens, the governance conversation changes. According to the report, 88% of UK executives say silos between business units and IT stand in the way of effective execution. In practice, that means AI initiatives can scale within departments before IT has full visibility into where data is being processed, how models are trained or what systems they depend on. Governance frameworks then find themselves responding after adoption has already taken place. This isn’t new, it should sound familiar to anyone who lived through the early cloud years.

Shadow AI is not just another version of shadow IT There is an important distinction, however. Traditional shadow IT created disconnected systems and security gaps. Shadow AI creates something more complex, which is autonomous behaviour within the organisation. An unapproved SaaS platform might store data in an unexpected location. An unapproved AI tool might analyse that data, generate outputs from it and influence decisions based on it. The risk is not simply about where information resides, it is deeper, it is about how it is used and what actions it drives. Back to the Table of Contents

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Fall Issue • 2026

Adam Tarbox, Vice President & General Manager for Northern, Eastern Europe and CIS, Nutanix Adam Tarbox is the General Manager at Nutanix, overseeing the Northern and Eastern Europe organization. With a career spanning 30 years in the technology industry, Adam has dedicated himself to supporting customers and partners in enhancing business outcomes and achieving competitive advantages. His passion lies in the intersection of people and technology. Throughout his extensive career, Adam has held various roles within the technology sector, including positions in presales, sales, channel management, and even entrepreneurship. Before assuming his current role as General Manager, Adam served as Vice President of EMEA Channel Sales at Nutanix, where he was responsible for developing and executing go-to-market strategies with resellers, distributors, OEM platform partners, systems integrators, and technology partners. Adam joined Nutanix following a successful 10-year tenure at NetApp, where he held several leadership positions across diverse business units such as public sector, Commercial sales, Enterprise sales, cloud service providers, global systems integrators, channel, and distribution.

This helps explain why 91% of UK IT leaders believe AI tools used outside official oversight pose business risk. These systems operate at scale and at speed and once they are embedded in workflows, they are difficult to unwind. The risk is that sensitive internal information can be fed into generative tools without clear guardrails, automated agents can interact directly with customers without consistent accountability structures, and models trained on regulated datasets can operate without sufficient auditability. In regulated sectors such as financial services or the public sector, that risk is magnified. Accountability does not diminish because an AI tool was introduced in one department, and regulatory scrutiny still applies, data protection obligations still apply, and reputational consequences still apply.

The pressure to expand AI use is growing What complicates matters further is that boards are not slowing down AI adoption. Across the broader Enterprise Cloud Index research, 59% of organisations globally expect to be running more than five AIenabled applications within three years, with 23% anticipating more than 10. Back to the Table of Contents

AI is steadily moving from experimentation into production environments and strategic workflows and it is influencing customer experience, operational efficiency and long-term growth strategies. That means governance teams cannot simply try to prevent adoption they also need to coordinate it. In the UK, AI deployment is also unfolding within a regulatory environment that demands clarity around data location and control. The research shows that 82% of UK organisations identify data sovereignty as a high priority or a must-include in infrastructure decisions, and 59% express the need to run infrastructure within a single country due to security or data protection concerns. These pressures are forcing organisations to rethink where AI workloads should run. Public cloud environments may offer speed and elasticity, but when AI models interact with sensitive data, regulatory obligations and enterprise governance frameworks, many organisations are reassessing the role of sovereign infrastructure closer to the data itself. For some, that means bringing AI capabilities back into controlled environments such as private cloud or datacentre infrastructure, where visibility, compliance and operational governance can be maintained more directly.

Have enterprises truly absorbed the lesson? Shadow IT exposed structural weaknesses in enterprise governance. It revealed that innovation without alignment leads to blind spots, prompting organisations to centralise oversight, improve architectural standards, and strengthen collaboration between business units and IT. Shadow AI is testing whether those changes were foundational or temporary. The difference this time is that AI systems do not merely store or transmit information. They generate outputs, influence decisions and interact directly with customers and regulated processes. What this translates to is that when governance lags behind deployment, the consequences extend beyond technical fragmentation to operational and reputational exposure. In many ways, shadow AI is simply the next chapter of a story IT leaders have seen before. The difference is that this time the tools do not just store data or run applications. They influence decisions. And that makes understanding where AI runs, how it behaves and who controls it far more important.

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Lynda Clarke, General Manager UK, Nayax Lynda Clarke is General Manager UK at Nayax and has more than 15 years’ experience in payments and fintech across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She began her payments career at Barclaycard before holding senior roles at Elavon and Network International, where she helped launch new products and build high-performing teams. Before joining Nayax, Lynda was Chief Operating Officer at Tribe Payments, supporting the business through a period of rapid growth. She now leads Nayax’s UK strategy and operations, with a particular focus on payments and technology for unattended and self-service environments

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Fall Issue • 2026

WHY THE NEXT PAYMENTS BREAKTHROUGH WON’T HAPPEN AT CHECKOUT Solving friction at the checkout has been the focus of payments innovation for decades, with chip-and-pin devices and mobile wallets both having been introduced to make payments faster and easier. Now, some sectors are taking payments innovation one step further by showing that the most successful payment experiences happen when the transaction fades into the background altogether.

From payment points to payment environments Historically, payments were concentrated at clearly defined points, such as a till in a shop or a cashier at a petrol station. Today, when someone parks a car, charges an electric vehicle, buys a coffee from a self-service machine or accesses a workplace micromarket, consumers have moved on from “go and pay” to the simple expectation that the experience just “works”. With modern services increasingly built around continuous customer journeys and environments rather than a single transaction moment, the need for embedded payments becomes clear. Instead of sitting at the end of a process, payments are built directly into the environment to ensure that payment becomes part of the service rather than a separate step.

Why invisibility has become the new benchmark Consumers have become accustomed to frictionless digital experiences in almost every area of life, from ordering food, Back to the Table of Contents

booking travel, accessing entertainment and managing finances. In fact, 88% of UK consumers say they would abandon a purchase if they encounter friction during the payment process, highlighting how strongly expectations have shifted toward seamless transactions. This has prompted businesses across multiple sectors to rethink exactly how payments work within their environments. One of the clearest examples of this shift is visible in unattended and self-service environments. An increasing number of transactions from vending machines and micro-markets to electric vehicle (EV) charging points are now taking place without staff involvement, with research indicating that 90% of consumers have used unattended retail since 2023. This is why embedded payments are becoming such a powerful competitive advantage, allowing operators to create environments where the service works smoothly without requiring customers to think about the transaction.

A strategic design choice This has resulted in payments becoming far more than a technical or operational decision for business leaders. The way payments are integrated into a service affects everything from customer satisfaction and loyalty to operational efficiency and data visibility. When payments are embedded directly into machines, devices, or automated retail formats, businesses gain access to realtime transaction data, customer behaviour

insights and new ways to tailor pricing, promotions or loyalty programmes. That data can then inform better operational decisions, from stock management to site performance. In other words, payment infrastructure is increasingly shaping the entire commercial model.

Payments as invisible infrastructure In many ways, the most successful payment systems of the future will be the ones consumers barely notice. The next payment revolution will therefore emerge not in traditional retail checkouts, but in the everyday environments where commerce is becoming more automated. Environments including EV charging networks, unattended food and drink concepts, micro-markets, automated car services, laundrettes, and connected vending machines are all examples of this shift in action. By embedding fast, familiar payment methods directly into the point of service so transactions happen instantly, without interrupting the customer journey, business leaders can design an environment where the payment disappears into the experience itself. Because when payment becomes invisible, the service becomes effortless. And in today’s economy, effortlessness is often the difference between a business that simply operates and one that grows.

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Belkis Lopez, Founder, Chlobe

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Fall Issue • 2026

BANKING AT A NEW SPEED The pace of technological change in financial services is accelerating, reshaping how banks approach innovation, infrastructure and the future of transaction banking. According to Financial IT Publisher Chris Principe, artificial intelligence, stablecoins and quantum computing are beginning to challenge longestablished approaches across the industry. “What was done a decade ago in a year is now done in a month or less,” Principe observes. “This time frame will continue to collapse.” For an industry historically cautious about adopting emerging technologies, this represents a significant change. Banks have traditionally preferred to follow proven trends rather than be the first to embrace them. Principe believes that is changing rapidly, particularly as financial institutions explore technologies that could fundamentally alter how banking services are delivered.

A Changing Approach to Innovation Over the past two years, Principe has seen a noticeable shift in how banks approach emerging technologies. Financial institutions have moved quickly to engage with both artificial intelligence and stablecoins, while some major banks are already leasing access to quantum computing resources to understand and develop potential applications. At the same time, the transformation of banking remains constrained by one of its longest-standing challenges: legacy infrastructure. Many banks, particularly in Western markets, continue to operate systems developed decades ago, including COBOLbased mainframe environments. These systems have demonstrated considerable reliability, supporting mission-critical banking operations for decades. The challenge, however, is flexibility. Back to the Table of Contents

As banking evolves, adding new functionality to established core systems can be difficult and expensive. This is contributing to a shift away from the traditional concept of a single, monolithic core banking platform towards environments in which institutions can integrate specialised solutions across different parts of the banking value chain. Principe also points to Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, where financial institutions can, in some cases, leapfrog legacy technology and adopt newer solutions without carrying the same infrastructure burden as more established banking markets.

Trade Finance Enters a New Phase The implications are particularly significant for transaction banking and trade finance, which connect payments, foreign exchange, documentation, insurance, inspection, shipping and cash management across global commerce. Principe identifies three technologies as particularly significant to the next phase of this evolution: stablecoins, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Stablecoins could support faster, more accessible and potentially lower-cost payments, while quantum technologies could eventually provide new capabilities for processing data and messages at scale. AI, however, is the technology he sees as having the most immediate relevance to trade finance. Trade finance has historically involved comparatively slow, specialised and knowledgeintensive processes. Transactions such as letters of credit depend on established rules, documentation and extensive human involvement.

AI could change that equation. “AI-assisted trade will reduce time, costs, errors and find potential issues before they happen,” Principe says.

With near-immediate access to information, increasingly sophisticated learning capabilities and predictive potential, AI could support many of the processes that currently require significant manual intervention. More efficient trade-finance processes could ultimately reduce friction across the wider trading ecosystem and improve the speed and reliability of global commerce.

Preparing for What Comes Next The convergence of AI, stablecoins, quantum technologies and modern application-based banking infrastructure points towards a financial industry that could look very different from today’s model. Yet the transition will not be uniform. Banks must balance the reliability of systems that have supported financial markets for decades with the need for greater flexibility, integration and speed. For an industry historically cautious about being first, the growing willingness of financial institutions to experiment with emerging technologies represents a significant change. The challenge now is turning that willingness into practical, scalable applications while navigating the infrastructure, security and operational realities of modern banking. As the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, the institutions best positioned for the next phase may not necessarily be those with the newest technology, but those capable of combining established reliability with the flexibility to adopt what comes next.

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UZBEKISTAN 2030 Emerging markets have been, well, emerging for a long time. In the mid-1980s, Uzbekistan was an obscure Soviet Socialist Republic known for its production of cotton. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the country was emphatically not of interest to even the most aggressive promoters of emerging markets.

30 years later, the picture is very different Chris Principe, Publisher, Financial IT

Andrew Hutchings, Editor-in-Chief, Financial IT

Uzbekistan is open for business, wired for growth, and ready to surprise the world. In 2023, Uzbekistan’s government, led by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, published a strategic plan called “Uzbekistan 2030”. The aim is to achieve upper-middle-class income by the end of the decade. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggested three things: encourage the growth of the private sector; use assistance from development aid agencies to promote renewable energy; and invest in education and human capital. The ADB noted that “An educated and welltrained workforce can better accommodate new ideas and technology [stress added] to make economic transformation successful.” Other observers are also upbeat about Uzbekistan’s prospects, even if their advice to the government has a different emphasis. By mid-2026, the ADB noted that the country “enters the next two years from a position of strength, supported by resilient domestic demand, high levels of investment, and ongoing structural reforms. The Silk Road once connected empires now connects innovation. Today, Uzbekistan’s digital dawn is rising and the world is only beginning to notice.

Central Asia's most populous nation, going digital Development of Uzbekistan’s technology infrastructure will play an important role in all this. This country of 37.9 million combines a large banking base with fastscaling fintech platforms. Digital payments account for 36% of spending. At the core is the IT Park, launched in Tashkent in 2019. The IT Park initiative provides structure for Uzbekistan’s digital export and talent attraction strategy. The government has established a separate Ministry for Digital Technologies. This Illustrates the importance of the sector to Uzbekistan. The Ministry will promote digital technology across “all sectors and areas, primarily in public administration, education, healthcare and agriculture”. This Ministry has the goal of digitising 70% of its services over the coming year.

A verified success, a new model When one looks at the enormous – and positive – changes in Uzbekistan, several conclusions are possible. Most obviously, the “Uzbekistan 2030” strategy is having a favourable impact on growth as a whole. The IT Park is real and expanding, and has moved well beyond the concept stage. Thanks in part to the IT Park, the benefits of the economic transformation are evident across much of Uzbekistan, and not just in Tashkent. Looking over the next five years – and past 2030 – Uzbekistan could and should be one of the world’s greatest emerging markets success stories. Already, it provides a proven model for other rapidly transforming countries. Uzbekistan isn't just catching up to the digital revolution – it's writing its own code for the future! Back to the Table of Contents

Fall Issue • 2026

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David Hanna, CEO & Co-Founder, Finmo David Hanna has over 20 years of expertise in the financial services and payments sector. Prior to founding Finmo, he held global leadership roles in Risk and Compliance for Financial Services companies headquartered in various locations globally. He has held senior roles across companies such as PayPal, Ernst & Young, Zurich, ING Bank, Banxa and others. He serves on several advisory boards and has invested in many startups around the world.

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Fall Issue • 2026

WHAT IF INTELLIGENCE BECAME THE CORE OF CROSS-BORDER FINANCE? Cross-border finance has made enormous progress in how money moves. Payments are faster and more efficient, businesses can reach more currencies and markets, FX has become more sophisticated, and new payment and settlement rails continue to emerge. But there is another question that matters just as much: how intelligently are we deciding to move that money in the first place? For a business, a payment is never really just a payment. It changes cash positions, liquidity, currency exposure and what the business can do next. Yet the intelligence around those decisions has traditionally sat apart from the infrastructure executing the transaction. The next evolution of cross-border finance is to bring those worlds together, so the movement of money is informed by a realtime understanding of the wider financial position.

Payments and treasury are two sides of the same ledger The challenge starts with fragmentation. Financial infrastructure has developed in silos. A multinational might have bank accounts across dozens of markets alongside payment providers, FX platforms, ERP systems and separate treasury tools. One system tells the business where its cash is. Another moves it. But every time money moves, the treasury position changes. Back to the Table of Contents

That is why we believe payments and treasury are two sides of the same ledger. You cannot make the smartest decision about one without understanding the other. Bringing them into one operating environment means a payment decision can be informed by cash positions, liquidity requirements, forecasts, FX exposure and other financial information at the point the decision is being made – rather than after the money has moved.

What happens when intelligence is built into the financial core? Unification is the foundation. The bigger opportunity is what can be done with the intelligence created by that unified view. Imagine intelligence operating across the financial environment rather than belonging to one dashboard or application. It is continuously interpreting cash positions, forecasts, payment activity, liquidity and risk, bringing those signals together to help the business determine what matters and what to do next. At Finmo, we increasingly think about this as an intelligence suite – different forms of intelligence working across treasury and payments rather than intelligence being confined to a single feature. The important shift is that intelligence becomes pervasive. It can help businesses understand what is happening, anticipate what could happen, evaluate what to do and ultimately connect those decisions back to how money moves.

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AI that looks out for your blind spots Consider something as ordinary as paying a supplier. A payment system can tell you whether the transaction can be executed. But what if the system also knows that making the payment today will take one account below the liquidity required for payroll tomorrow? Rather than discovering the shortfall afterwards, intelligence can identify the potential outcome beforehand. It might flag the risk, suggest funding the account from another balance, recommend delaying the payment or, depending on the controls established by the business, prevent it from proceeding until the issue is resolved. In that sense, AI starts to provide a second sight for CFOs; surfacing what they may not yet be looking for, but need to know before the consequences appear. The same principle can apply to unusual cash movements, FX exposure, payout failures or transactions that create compliance concerns. This is preventive intelligence – not simply predicting what might happen, but helping a business intervene in time to avoid a loss, fine, penalty or operational problem. MO AI within Finmo TreasuryOS is progressing this idea by proactively identifying issues such as liquidity shortfalls or payout failures, surfacing the underlying cause and guiding the user towards the appropriate next action.

Why plugging into an LLM isn't enough It is reasonable to ask why a business couldn't simply connect its financial data to Claude or another powerful general-purpose AI model. A general-purpose AI can perform extraordinary analysis, but it can only work with the context it is given. In treasury, creating and continuously maintaining that context is a significant part of the problem. Imagine a multinational with 50 entities banking across 50 institutions. To properly understand its financial position, AI needs a continuous flow of balances, transactions, forecasts, payment activity, FX positions and other financial information across that entire estate. And because that financial position is constantly changing, loading the data once isn't enough. The context needs to be continuously refreshed for AI to perform a rolling analysis of the business.

That can become a substantial data integration and orchestration exercise in itself. This is where embedding AI into the operating environment becomes materially different. MO AI is native to Finmo TreasuryOS, where treasury and payments operate within the same environment. The intelligence can continuously draw on the relationships between cash visibility, liquidity, payments, FX and related workflows rather than analysing an isolated dataset or individual interaction.

Copiloting AI Continuous context is one part of the equation. The other is what happens once the intelligence identifies something that requires action. Knowing that an account is heading towards a liquidity shortfall is useful. But if the AI sits outside the systems managing treasury and moving money, the user still needs to take that insight elsewhere to resolve it. When intelligence is embedded within a unified treasury and payments system, it can go further. It can identify the shortfall, understand where liquidity is available, recommend a course of action and connect the authorised user directly to the relevant transfer workflow. This is operationalization: moving beyond an answer in a chat window to bringing intelligence and controlled execution together within the financial operating environment. In this model, AI acts as a copilot – providing the context, recommendation and appropriate workflow while keeping the authorised user in control. That is a materially different proposition from simply plugging an LLM into one part of the financial stack. The difference isn't necessarily the intelligence of the underlying AI model. It is the environment in which that intelligence operates – whether it has continuous access to the financial picture and whether it is connected deeply enough to operationalize what it learns.

Where else could financial intelligence go from here? The possibilities extend well beyond identifying and resolving problems. Imagine intelligence that can evaluate several courses of action before a business makes a decision. If there is a projected cash

shortfall, it could model different responses – moving liquidity, adjusting payment timing or converting currency – and show the implications of each. That starts to become decision intelligence. Then there is the opportunity side. The same financial intelligence could recognise that payment volumes in a particular market are accelerating, that a corridor is becoming strategically significant, or that new customer and supplier patterns are emerging – signals that could inform where a business invests or expands next. That is opportunity intelligence. And the intelligence itself can keep improving. As actual outcomes come back into the system, models can be relearned and refined against what really happened – improving accuracy over time and reducing the risk of inaccurate or ungrounded outputs. Imagine, for example, a cash forecast beginning at 50 or 60 per cent accuracy. As the system continuously compares forecasts against actual cash movements, it can learn from the differences and refine its understanding over time rather than remaining at that initial level of accuracy. These are some of the ways we see MO AI progressing financial intelligence – from preventing adverse outcomes to helping businesses evaluate choices, uncover opportunities and continuously improve the quality of the intelligence itself.

When every movement of money has context If intelligence really does become the core of cross-border finance, we may eventually stop thinking about payments as individual transactions. Instead, the financial system begins to understand the context surrounding every movement of money: what happened before it, what that movement will change and what the business is likely to need next. Treasury provides that context. AI helps interpret it. Payment infrastructure makes the resulting decision executable. That is the direction we see for Finmo TreasuryOS and the intelligence suite we are building around it: bringing intelligence and execution progressively closer together. The next generation of cross-border finance will not be defined simply by moving money faster. It will be defined by making smarter decisions about when, where, why and how money should move. Back to the Table of Contents

CMY

Fall Issue • 2026

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Financial IT Fall Edition 2026