Going into 2026 it is interesting to reflect on what tendencies we saw in 2025 that will develop into major trends in financial services. In terms of digitalization, financial services is one of the most interesting industries since it is inherently an information industry. Basically banks are 100% digital companies by nature, a fate they share with few other industries except maybe pensions and insurance. That makes the industry uniquely positioned as a bellwether of digitalisation trends. Based on what we have seen in the preceding year a number of trends seem to be forming, from adopting AI to something as simple as optimizing digital service for customers. Let’s dive in and review the top five tendencies we saw in 2025 that may develop into trends in the year to come.
AI will increasingly be embedded in business processes – While AI has not been the silver bullet some had hoped and not one of the horsemen of the apocalypse either, it is slowly finding its place in the financial services industry. This is a piecemeal transition going at a case by case basis but the financial services industry is the most avid adopter of AI, as was clearly shown in the AI survey of Nordic organisations I conducted in 2025. AI has proven useful as helpers to employees ensuring proper procedures are followed and taking the bulk of standard support queries. This requires banks to continue to focus on outcome rather than technology.
The use of blockchain technology will split – a split in the crypto market is beginning to take shape. The traditional crypto with Bitcoin and all manner of interesting inventions of more or less ethical and practical value is hustling along though it is largely outside the scope of mainstream financial services, but another use of blockchain technology is entering: Central Bank Digital Currencies and stablecoins as well as ledgers documenting ownership. These prove solutions to long standing problems in finance such as settlement and clearance as well as tokenisation of assets to increase speed and efficiency of payments, supply chain finance and equities and commodity trading. The call to action is one of accepting that not all crypto might be bad and start to develop an understanding of how the safer forms can be leveraged to boost the basic value propositions of the financial services industry.
The customer journey will drive further digitalization – Banks have wrestled with a large legacy system portfolio that has grown organically in a fragmented way following employees needs. These systems are now being modernized, repurposed and replaced in a new way by focusing on the customer journey rather than internal organisational needs. Banks are succeeding in looking at customer journeys as the drivers of customer engagements patching up previously incoherent and fragmented loan origination processes. The imperative is to continue to focus on the customer journey and not (just) modernizing the legacy infrastructure.
Building data foundations becomes necessary to succeed – Considering that the basic commodity of banks is data, it is surprisingly fragmented and unmanaged. New drivers such as the use of AI, data mesh and a wish to create data products as well as a need to integrate systems, create a need to build the data foundations properly. More than a decade of agile focus on speed rather than coherence, has left the data landscape fragmented and approaches to building proper foundations are needed. The central question is how to start building the data foundations: data catalogues, logical data modelling and domain driven design are solutions being employed. The important task for banks is to develop an integrated holistic approach to building the data foundations that does not only focus on one of its applications such as analytics, AI or integration.
Fintechs will be increasingly integrated into the financial services ecosystem – Larger incumbents are increasingly integrating smaller nimbler fintechs that, through their focus and size, are better at solving isolated problems. Examples of such areas are open banking, transaction categorization, compliance monitoring, AML and digital identity. Banks are increasingly opening to such fintechs not considering them competition but as important parts of the ecosystem. The key is to find ways to integrate them into the core offerings.
Putting down the crystal ball, the key message is that many things are not really that new. So, looking for completely novel solutions may not be the most helpful. A common theme is that things we thought we nailed, such as digitalisation for customers (giving them a netbank solution did not solve all possible customer needs) and payments (sending money still takes days), may be further improved and expanded. Another theme is integration into a coherent whole, whether that is AI technology, customer journeys or fintech technology. Whatever happens the new year will bring interesting new solutions and developments in financial services that will point the way for other industries as well.
Photo by Marc Schulte on Unsplash
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