Discover Money20/20 Europe 2025

THE THINKING BANK

DISCOVER MONEY20/ 20 MAGAZINE

6 EVENTS

Fintech’s big top

Over the past 13 years, Money20/20 has become recognised as the event on the financial circuit. Organisers Scarlett Sieber and Ian Horne took time out of their frantic build-up to this year’s Amsterdam extravaganza to explain what ‘Money20/20 magic’ they had in store – and why it’s about to get even more exciting

10

CORE BANKING

The thinking bank

Bolting new tech onto legacy has clearly been a costly experience for banks. Real progress won’t happen unless they create the headspace for radical change, says Arun Jain of Intellect Design Arena

12 SUSTAINABILITY

From plastic to progress: can card recycling help banks go green?

Maya Reisinger from G+D and Mastercard’s Joe Pitcher explore sustainable solutions for the price of our payment habits

14 NEOBANKING

Everywhere you go

bunq set out to build a bank that travelled across borders – just like its users. Bianca Zwart tells us why staying close to them has made it not only popular, but also profitable

16 POINT OF SALE

Setting

payments free

10

Aevi believes it holds the key to releasing merchants from the ‘walled garden’ built by providers who tie them down to inflexible contracts and outdated solutions

19 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Not-so-secret

agents

Agentic AI is working alongside engineers at Globant to shape systems and processes for its banking and other clients. It’s probably the most important step-change in manufacturing ‘since Henry Ford’s assembly line’

22 EVENTS

Feeling the difference

The Temenos Community Forum 2025 in Madrid left its members with a challenge as the banking technology giant moves into a new phase

THEEDITOR’S VIEW

There is a lot of honesty in this issue.

Nationwide Building Society’s Otto Benz (page 24) is refreshingly up-front about vendor management and the perils of making the wrong call when it comes to build or buy.

Meanwhile, ING Bank’s Daniele Tonella (page 30) tells us that the full-stack engineer is dead in an organisation of ‘less dev and more ops’ –and that’s a loss some find hard to take.

Over in Spain, at the Temenos Community Forum (page 18), a new leadership team unveiled a new strategic course for the company, based on a world listening tour of customers who’d clearly said it like it was – the word Chief Product and Technology Officer Barb Morgan used was ‘tough’.

The point is, being upfront and transparent isn’t a competitive disadvantage. It often earns you respect – and is the start of a conversation that moves everyone forward. So hats off to full disclosure!

Ben Barbanel from OakNorth (page 47) isn’t trying to be something he’s not, either. Our profile reveals a ‘recovered banker’ whose professional and personal reinvention gives him a new perspective on a broken system... one he believes OakNorth is proving can be fixed.

That said, he was staying schtum on the bank’s plans for an IPO – and where! If (when) OakNorth does list, it will be among a small group of Euro-corns who are consistently profitable. And, as Hoxton Venture’s Hussein Kanji observes (page 39) that endears companies to London, but less so to investors on the US markets, where growth is king and fortune favours both the big and the brave. Sue Scott, Editor

24 COMPLIANCE

Be right back!

Nationwide’s Otto Benz shares the UK building society’s experience of creating a resilient payments stack and its approach to vendor management, as the industry recovers from third-party-related meltdowns

26 PAYMENTS

Plugging into payments

Mambu’s acquisition of Numeral comes at a critical moment, particularly for Europe, say Victor Mithouard and Leon Stevens

28 RECONCILIATIONS

Fixing the foundations

As customers enjoy ever-more frictionless payments, behind the scenes, reconciliation and reporting systems are buckling. There’s only so long you can paper over the cracks, says Kani

30 ENGINEERING

Less dev, more ops

As Group CTO at ING Bank, Daniele Tonella is responsible for 20,000 engineers whose creativity is being harnessed to build an architecture that’s simple by design

33 PUSH TO CARD

Pushing the envelope

Runa has extended its push-to-card payment solution to offer businesses a fast pass, addressing the stubborn problem of cross-border payments

36 DEBT MANAGEMENT

Open dialogue

Changing attitudes to credit and financial uncertainty, are driving new levels of consumer debt in the UK. James Hill, CEO of Flexys, explains how it’s using open banking to tackle and prevent defaults

39 SCALING FINTECH

The American dream

There really is still only one market to aspire to, if you want fast growth and not be punished for it, says Hussein Kanji, Co-founder of Hoxton Ventures

42 VENTURE CAPITAL

The SOS investment playbook

US VC Jump Capital specifically looks for startups that help bankers solve existential threats such as off-channel communication, friendly fraud and push payment fraud. Partner Tarun Gupta explains why

44 LENDING Only collect

Collecting data from a myriad of SME accounting systems and standardising it to support credit decisions could benefit borrowers and lenders. It’s a problem that Secure Trust Bank would dearly like fintech partners to solve

47 NEOBANKS Fit for business

OakNorth’s Head of Debt Finance, Ben Barbanel, reflects on 10 years of helping SMEs muscle up by raising the bar on lending

50 INFRASTRUCTURE

Building the next era of finance

XYB explains why financial institutions can’t deliver on AI, compliance or strategy without rethinking their architecture

53 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Getting the message

Hyper-personalised communication from your bank can be transformative – for it and you.

So why are some of them still spamming us? Here, Meniga and Boston Consulting Group advocate for targetted comms

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Over the past 13 years, Money20/20 has become recognised as the event on the financial circuit. Organisers Scarlett Sieber and Ian Horne took time out of their frantic build-up to this year’s Amsterdam extravaganza to explain what ‘Money20/20 magic’ they had in store – and why it’s about to get even more exciting

From Mario Kart challenges run by giant robots, to brass band serenades, and chance encounters resulting in enterprise-making deals, every attendee seems to have their own special memory from 13 years of Money20/20 events.

And, while recounting them might sound like someone’s indulged in too much post-seminar partying, for Scarlett Sieber Money20/20’s Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, and Ian Horne, Head of Content Europe, it is precisely this outlandishness that is the event’s super power.

Money20/20 is all about creating what Sieber calls ‘strategic serendipity’ – a visionary format designed to trigger delegates’ creativity and open their minds to new opportunities and relationships in the most unconventional of circumstances.

Nothing ever happens entirely by chance, of course. It’s all invisibly underpinned by meticulous programming, but all that’s asked

of the delegates is that they ‘plan ahead, wear comfortable shoes and bring along your true self to ensure you’re ready to squeeze the pips out of the opportunities we’ll lay before you’.

This year’s event, taking place from 3 to 5 June at Amsterdam’s RAI, heralds an exciting new era for the Money20/20 machine.

Originally established by industry insiders, following the global financial crisis, to chart the recovery of the world’s financial systems and rise of digitisation, Money20/20 is now under new ownership. Parent organisation Ascential was acquired by global events giant Informa in July 2024 – a tie-up that promises to present a world of new possibilities for Sieber, Horne and the team. In fact, as she spoke with The Fintech Magazine from her home in New York, Sieber was preparing to board a plane to Ryiadh, to start preparations for what will be the first Money20/20 Middle East show, scheduled to take place this September. It’s been made possible by another Informa acquisition –

of last year’s inaugural and highly successful 24 Fintech event.

The Informa organisational structure will enable the Money20/20 team to do things that weren’t possible before, says Sieber.

“Because Informa is the largest event company globally, it gives us access and expertise. We try to skate where the puck is going. And, clearly there’s a lot going on in the Middle East, so we were already actively looking at what we were going to do there [but] this has accelerated our growth – we can go in immediately with a pre-made team [24 Fintech in Ryiadh] who know the industry, the area and the geography super-well.

“They have a different model and we’re expecting more than 30,000 people to attend, but we’re going to bring the Money20/20 magic.”

That’s not the only new journey that it will be making.

“Another area that’s very interesting to us is Latin America,” says Sieber.

“We have a team of more than 100 people in Brazil, and the same in China, where Informa is also very strong.

“It’s a lot easier to achieve geographic breadth and depth now, with expertise and talent in-region. The future is very bright and we’ve got some big plans around taking Money20/20 even further.

Scarlett Sieber, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer for Money20/20

Ian

Horne, Head of Content Europe for Money20/20

How to make sure you leave with a pocket-full of possibilities

Do your prep:

“Maximise the potential by utilising the app to find exactly who you’re looking for. Favourite the sessions you’re interested in and the app will send you a synopsis if you can’t attend.” Ian Horne

Pre-plan your networking targets:

“We’ve programmed this agenda with five or six stages running simultaneously, so it’s important to pick the thing that’s right for you and arrange it.” Ian Horne

View the preview webinar:

“This tells you what to expect – there’s a lot going on and without prior knowledge it can feel a bit overwhelming.” Scarlett Sieber

“The secret sauce of Money20/20 is doing things differently. Now there’s an opportunity to take our exciting festival atmosphere and influence other brands in the wider Informa company,” continues Sieber. “It’s a massive opportunity to bring some fun and liveliness to other sectors.”

It’s often easier to create excitement when you’re a newcomer. But Amsterdam has been putting up the Money20/20 big tent since 2016. The challenge is to keep it fresh, which is where the experiential nature of the show comes into its own.

“We’ve all been to ‘normal’ events and trade shows and some of it’s quite sleepy and predictable. You’ll sit on panels, go to some stands; but what makes Money20/20 so different is it’s experiential,” says Horne.

“Every single moment of visitors’ day contains something that makes them pinch themselves and ask ‘did I just see what I thought I saw?’, ‘did I just hear what I thought I heard?’. That’s what the Money20/20 magic is all about – sensory overload in every kind of way.”

This year’s European event is

blockchain and quantum. The show is a really exciting place to experience it all.”

That said – and perhaps ironically for such a tech-focussed event – it’s the human element that drives everything.

“Banking is a complex world where it’s hard to get things done, so having everyone in one place accelerates business like nothing else,” says Sieber.

“Ian and his team have given us a fantastic platform by creating an incredible agenda, which speaks to the fact that many of the featured founders started at Money20/20. It’s all about seeing where this industry is going.”

Sometimes it’s what happens beyond the formal presentations, though, that matters most.

“Giving delegates chance to engage off-the-record during the stages is really important to us,” adds Sieber.

The secret sauce of Money20/20 is doing things differently. Now there’s an opportunity to take our exciting festival atmosphere and

Wear comfortable shoes!

“Bring the plasters so you can get to the other side! We’re also fun and funky and it’s cool for non-Americans to wear sneakers!” Scarlett Sieber

Be prepared to be real: “It’s really important to us to allow people to bring their full selves while getting business done.” Scarlett Sieber

Study how to get from A to B.

“There are lots of little shortcuts within the venue and building them into muscle memory so you can get around is always good.” Ian Horne

“The concept came from me going to events on just about every continent, bar Antarctica, and sitting there thinking ‘OK, the biggest speakers you want to hear from are up on the stage and they draw a crowd, but often they can’t really say a lot publicly. So, how do we allow conversations to happen where we really hear what happens? How did that company actually fail? How did that business get that round? How did that project at XYZ bank do well or not do well?’. That’s what our ‘off-the-record stages’ are for, and we’re evolving it year-on-year.”

Money20/20 is about getting business done and it’s individuals who make that happen.

“Experiences like the brass band ensure people take notice of the person at the centre of that and wonder what’s happening, which could give rise to their next partnership,” says Sieber. “This is why I use the phrase ‘strategic serendipity’, where we provide moments that are really special, that will stick in people’s minds forever.

“We hear about people sharing cabs from the airport to the venue and suddenly big things happening from that. Of people who met walking down the strip in Vegas or taking a boat in Amsterdam, and who ended up becoming an investor or co-founder.

“Whenever that stuff happens, either within our walls, which is obviously great, or on the periphery of what we have created, that’s amazing. And the more stories we hear about that, the more exciting it is.

“It’s a world for hustlers and we provide a platform to move that forward and help shape the future of this industry.”

Both Sieber and Horne roll up their sleeves and get stuck in at the Amsterdam event. So, what should delegates do if they spot them?

“I’m usually moving at about a thousand miles an hour so the best thing they can do is probably move!” says Horne. “When it all finishes on 6 June, I can collapse and curl up in a ball, but until then, it’s all energy.”

“A big high five, a hug or a smile is all I need,” adds Sieber. “Just reassurance that ‘you’ve got this, let’s go!’.’”

A sneak preview: The content they’re most excited about

“We have completely re-imagined our startup investor proposition,” says Scarlett Sieber.

“One of the things that’s nice about having multiple shows is we can test and build on things. We did a VC/Startup Connect at our Vegas show in October and their feedback – that they’d met the exact companies they wanted to – was really exciting, so we’re building that into our startup hub this year in Amsterdam.

“In addition to our off-the-record stage, the briefing stage is more of an ask me anything-type event,” adds Sieber. “There will be announcements for sure, but it’s where we can put the audience back in control and they can ask questions.

“It all depends what delegates are looking for – some stages will see experts pontificate about the future, while others will feature use cases and case studies showing ‘here’s how we did it’.”

“I have this concept called ‘return on attendance’,” says Ian Horne. “I like the idea that every session has something really pragmatic and useful for audience members to take away.

“In terms of what that specific thing is, there are so many shows within the show. People with different jobs, working in many

We don’t want fluff – it’s about genuine, actionable insight from people who are building the future and making the strategic decisions Ian Horne

different areas of fintech, banking and payments, could have a very different experience with the content. But there’s always something useful that improves their business or them as a professional.

“We achieve that by steering clear of vague thought leadership. We don’t want fluff – it’s about genuine, actionable insight from people who are building the future and making the strategic decisions.”

When it comes to specific events, Horne flags a segment on the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS’s) Project Agorá, and cross-border payments.

“This is a fascinating topic because we know payment technology is evolving and new rails are available. There’s so much talk around stable coins and CBDCs this year, but none of this works without cross-border collaboration and harmonisation. So, seeing where that’s going will be a fascinating sneak peek into the future of money.”

Sieber is particularly excited about the show’s new Money Awards.

“There are five categories around payments, startups and partnerships,” she says. “And we have the five jury presidents, whom we’re really proud of: Lynn Martin President of the New York Stock Exchange Group; Howard R Fields, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer for Mastercard; Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark; Joanne Hannaford, CIO and CPO Corporate Bank at Deutsche Bank; and Anthony Thomas, MD Fintech for Delivery Hero.”

What’s shaping this year’s M20/20 Europe: The content pillars for 2025

Digital DNA

This is all about identity and verification, as well as the unique nature of each organisation’s tech stack and how to balance the checks and balances needed to tackle rampant fraud with the need for immediate, seamless finance and payments.

Governance 2.0

A pillar devoted to regulation, the innovation challenge facing Europe, and how to create a more competitive future. The role of regulators will be discussed in a closed-door Bank for International Settlements session and at a public event.

Embedded intelligence

The focus turns to the rise of agentic commerce and AI and the filtering of AI and data into the way everything is done to make sure every experience in banking or payments is immediate.

Beyond fintech

‘Where do we go next?’ and ‘What does the future look like?’

There is a view that everything is fintech but what does that mean? Because fintech isn’t everywhere yet… but it’s getting there!

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DESIGN YOUR THINKI

Bolting new tech onto legacy has clearly been a costly experience for banks. Real progress won’t happen unless they create the headspace for radical change, says Arun Jain of Intellect Design Arena

‘How do you implement real and lasting change?’ is a question that many financial institutions continue to wrestle with.

The Digital Age demands agility and innovation, but many financial services’ inherent rigidity, inefficiencies, lack of customer-centricity and ill-preparedness for future challenges are all represented by – and by-products of – legacy systems.

bespoke to the organisation using it. Low-code iTurmeric enables users to create applications with minimal coding, reducing development time and making the process more accessible to a wider range of professionals.

Culture club:

Arun Jain says changing mindsets is as important as upgrading technology

However, implementing significant transformation cannot merely be about ‘adopting digital’ or ‘bolting-on’ technology to infrastructures simply not fit for purpose. According to Arun Jain, Chairman and Managing Director of Intellect Design Arena, genuine progress requires a fundamental, seismic shift in attitude and culture within an organisation. Intellect should know, as providing comprehensive banking technology is in its DNA.

For more than 30 years, the tech company, has provided composable and intelligent banking services. Today, it has more than 300 global financial institutions as clients in 57 countries. The four arms of its business now embrace: Intellect Global Consumer Banking (iGCB), Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), Intellect AI and Intellect Digital Technology for Commerce (iDTC). Underpinning all of these is eMACH.ai, which Intellect calls ‘the most comprehensive, composable, and intelligent open finance platform in the world’, specifically tailored for the banking, financial services, and insurance sectors. This platform leverages its iTurmeric environment to develop customisable microservices,

In August 2024, Intellect added to its offering by launching Purple Fabric, an agentic AI adoption platform. Purple Fabric creates a single knowledge bank from six sources: structured and unstructured enterprise data, policies, market data, regulatory information, and tacit knowledge, which allows companies to deliver actionable AI insights and solutions.

The Fintech Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Ali Paterson, sat down with Jain to discuss how best to stir slumbering banks into action and bring the customer experience to the fore.

THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: What do you see as the major challenges in modernising the financial sector?

ARUN JAIN: There are two faces of the industry that are very distinct from each other. On one hand you have innovations like open APIs, open AI, open finance, embedded finance and the like.

Then you have the 60-year-old technologies sitting in legacy financial services, which require transformation and cleanup of the layers and layers of monolithic and disparate architectures and legacy data structures. These really are broken systems, which require design thinking to simplify the entire transformational agenda.

And applying patches is not the solution, as they are inefficient and expensive. To me, technology costs for the financial institution should be coming down, not going up as they are now, with more streamlining and by bringing the customer into the centre.

TFM: So, how can these institutions implement the changes needed to bring them into the modern world?

AJ: Innovation is a culture, not a process. A lot of banks believe that by saying they are innovating, the job is done. I’ve heard the phrase ‘diseconomy of disorganisation’ to describe this. If I am paying lipservice to transformation, I am really justifying my presence. That doesn’t lead to the innovation fundamentally because I’m defending my

NG BEFORE YOU ACT

stuff. I’m actually fearful of change and will be overtaken by new demands.

A culture is a set of people who come together and start believing in change, and then make it happen. It’s about creating the right thinking space that brings the customer front and centre. Many of the large banks in Europe failed in transformation because they never organised a thinking space.

Look at Revolut, for example. It created a new culture of belief, a new culture of can-do, a new culture of the right technology, a new culture of the customer being in the centre – this is the thinking space for that business. From those strong foundations, you can build something special.

And you then move from thinking space to performance space by creating the right frameworks. What is a business impact framework for the customer? What is a functional framework? What is a technology framework? What is my transformation framework? If I create this framework, it will help me succeed in transformation.

TFM: If you’re a CIO or CTO in a big retail bank, what can you actively do to change that culture, which brings about innovation? AJ: I often point customers to our own very real experiences as a business. Twelve years ago, I set up a design thinking centre by creating 30,000 square feet of physical space. It was important to have a physical location to be able to show design thinking in action. A lot of the time, when innovation is just being spoken about by CEOs, people don’t believe it because they are just words they’ve heard before. Words have to turn into reality and be supported by proper frameworks.

The initial approach has to be not around solving problems but around the thinking of the business, changing attitudes and culture. The problem-solving can come later, once you have those building blocks in place.

If you create a hierarchical obedience environment, that’s not suitable for the design of the thinking culture. At Intellect, we help the client to first design the thinking, and once that is applied, then I can say ‘now you can build up a map to identify the opportunity’.And, finally,

you should also celebrate conflicts when you are at this thinking stage. Conflicts and creativity are the two sides of the same coin. Conflict means difference of opinion, difference of expectation, and difference of perspective – these are the three elements that are required for creativity.

TFM: So, with the all-important culture in place, how does eMACH.ai fit into the picture?

AJ: We identified that banks principally exist because of four financial events in the life of a customer: deposits, lending, investment and payments.

If these are defined, as we have, into 386 microservices, which are connected to each other with 2,015 APIs, and then put on the Cloud, it’s headless, so that when a customer needs three services of retail banking, five services of lending, three services of investment or two services of payment, they can compose a solution. This is what we call eMACH.ai. E for event, M for microservices, A for API, C for Cloud and H for headless. Together all these elements help the bank choose exactly what they need. We provide

the payment system. What’s the point of being in a restaurant and wasting 80 per cent of the meal? With eMACH.ai, you pay for what you consume.

TFM: You mentioned putting the customer first. What does a customer-centric rather than product-centric approach look like?

AJ: This is a hangover from when, 40 years ago, institutions launched lots of products with only a very small IT infrastructure. Customer data sat within all these separate products. So, moving forward to today, a customer may need those four services, deposits, lending, investment and payments, as we discussed. Banks now need to design a process that encompasses all four services, rather than logging into four different systems and four different services being provided.

The bank has a rule set, but these rules are embedded within its different products. Customers shouldn’t get three statements for the same month from the same bank. Efficient data design means that we can have all the customer’s data sitting in one place, and our composable platform iTurmeric, for example, can connect all the dots.

Innovation is a culture, not a process… It’s about creating the right thinking space that brings the customer front and centre. Many of the large banks in Europe failed in transformation because they never organised a thinking space

transformation certainty in delivery, time and quality. This is a solution at half the time and half the cost, and the transformation can be certain because they know what they are putting into their box. They’re not taking all the junk of transformation along with them.

Let’s look at another example of a large UK bank that we are currently helping with the internationalisation of its business, and it chose us because of eMACH.ai. The bank knows it can choose the pieces for one country if it’s going to Singapore, and another if it’s going to the UAE, effectively designing its own portfolio.

It doesn’t have to buy three data sets, one for the core banking system, one for the lending system, one for the wealth system and one for

TFM: Is altering the mindset of financial institutions a key part of your message at Money20/20?

AJ: Ultimately, we want financial institutions to keep customers’ future needs at the heart of creating a banking experience they want. All of this without any limitations. Digital isn't hardware or an application, it’s an ecosystem.

Understanding this will help banks become more business impactful, either in terms of gaining new customers, reducing costs, or becoming more compliance-ready.

We encourage banks to strategise with eMACH.ai, a robust platform which offers delivery certainty.

SUSTAINABILITY

From plastic to progress: Can card recycling help banks go green?

Maya Reisinger from G+D and Mastercard’s Joe Pitcher explore sustainable solutions for the price of our payment habits

As of the end of 2023, there were 17.45 billion credit, debit, and prepaid cards in circulation worldwide. And they aren’t going away any time soon –many are plastic and will remain in the environment long after their expiry date.

It’s a key consideration for banks who need to balance the need for functionality with moral, market and regulatory pressure for sustainability.

According to a report by Deloitte, 61 per cent of consumers are reducing their use of plastics. Additionally, a recent survey in North America revealed that 65 per cent of consumers prefer to purchase from purpose-driven brands with green credentials. While it’s uncertain if they will act on these preferences, customer-facing banks cannot ignore this growing desire.

Giesecke and Devrient (G+D) is one security tech company helping banks address the problem. Maya Reisinger is Product Management Director of the Convego Beyond eco portfolio at G+D and closely involved in its efforts to deliver sustainable products.

“Every year, a significant number of plastic cards become obsolete. We want to take responsibility and find sustainable ways to prevent them from ending up in the environment,” she says. “That’s why G+D is collaborating with banks to recycle expired payment cards.”

In her experience, some banks are primarily concerned with meeting

their ESG commitments but are not very good at communicating their sustainability policies in their marketing efforts. Others, she says, use card recycling as a way of communicating and engaging with cardholders.

Joe Pitcher is Chair of the Greener Payments Partnership and Vice President of the Sustainable Cards Programme at Mastercard, one of the world’s largest payments technology companies with more than 150 million acceptance locations, thousands of banking partners and other customers, and consumers and businesses that carry more than 3.4 billion cards.

He’s definitely hoping to re-educate customers and banks that ‘there can be a better way’.

“We’re looking to divert expired cards from their current end of life, which is landfill,” he says. “Card recycling is not an ideal solution, especially given most cards are typically made out of PVC, which isn’t the easiest or most widely recycled plastic, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s the first part of re-focussing on a better way forward.”

Recycling partnerships

The imperative is clear. According to the United Nations, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes, every day.

Even when not directly disposed of, it’s estimated that each year, 19-23 million tons of plastic waste leaks into aquatic ecosystems. Cards, while

Maya Reisinger, Product Management Director, Leadership of Eco-card portfolio at Giesecke+ Devrient (G+D)

Joe Pitcher Vice President, Sustainable Card Programme Lead at Mastercard

individually small, play a substantial part in that.

“An average payment card contains about five grams of plastic. It’s not a lot but if you think there are tens of billions of different cards around the world, if we can collect and recycle even a billion of those, that’s five million kilos of plastic waste we can remove from the environment,” says Pitcher.

G+D is putting this theory into practice through a card-recycling programme in partnership with Santander bank in Spain.

“We’ve collected more than a million payment cards, equivalent to roughly 5.6 tons of plastic,” says Reisinger. “We recycled the plastic into new products. In this case, we produced urban benches, which are being donated to communities.”

Santander, meanwhile, contacts the cardholders, thanking them for recycling and telling them what happens once they have handed in their cards.

“We can scale this to other clients and that’s what we hope to do,” says Reisinger. “And we will see a bigger impact. Billions of cards every year are thrown in the garbage bin, which we could take back and turn into something useful.”

The Santander project is so far estimated to have saved 360 tons of CO2 by avoiding newly-manufactured material being produced – not huge, but not insignificant.

“It’s a symbol,” says Reisinger. “Just removing plastic cards or reducing

plastic waste isn’t going to solve all of the environmental challenges the world faces. But it signals intent and shows to the bank’s customers that we’re taking these problems seriously.”

Similar to G+D’s partnership with Santander, Mastercard is working with HSBC UK to facilitate a way for customers to dispose of obsolete bank cards at a select number of local branches, using a self-service secure return unit.

“They place their card into the unit and it completely shreds it into about 300 pieces,” says Pitcher. “So you get rid of any concerns around fraud or data integrity. That unit stores the waste until a sufficient volume has been collected. The shredded cards are then collected and taken for recycling.

“Any bank in the UK that wants to recycle cards can join the programme now.”

But there are challenges to recycling, as Reisinger explains: “In Europe, there is quite a lot of expertise in recycling and we see many partners who are willing to recycle PVC, which is the main material for payment cards. But capabilities around sorting and separating materials differ from region to region.”

And many banks simply don’t know where to start with it all.

“They don’t have the expertise in card recycling, so we’ve tried to help by finding the

We keep [the] cost as low as possible, so it isn’t the barrier that stops banks participating Joe Pitcher, Mastercard

experts and partnering – with TerraCycle for example,” says Pitcher. “Then we can help banks with the details of transportation, shredding, and processing.

“By inviting different banks to join a single programme, we’re also trying to overcome the scale and cost barrier. The solution isn’t free – although it’s not a revenue earner for Mastercard in any way, there is a service to be paid for. By working together, we keep that cost as low as possible so it isn’t the barrier that stops banks participating.”

Reisinger adds: “What makes it difficult for banks is finding resources internally to drive a project that isn’t their main focus. And often they don’t have recycling partners in their network so they’re really starting from scratch. Collaborating with someone like G+D helps them get one step further without spending precious resources on developing and inventing things from scratch.

“We work with several banks and several partners across different geographies. So we can build this expertise and leverage it across different regions, thereby gaining the economies of scale.”

At G+D, end-of-life processes for cards is having a major impact on the materials it now uses to

develop new products. “It’s changed G+D as a company,” says Reisinger.

Mastercard, too, has gone on a significant journey. It will have eliminated first-use PVC from its cards by 2028 and given its issuers the option to have cards made from recycled or bio-sourced materials. It’s a major step by an influential card scheme.

There is a sense from both Pitcher and Reisinger that a shared focus is needed. Even if they are working on different projects, contributing to a more widely accepted process is going to make it more accessible for larger organisations.

“If we all work together and drive card volumes down a single stream, we can drive down costs,” says Pitcher. “What we’re trying to do is make a very simple solution so that everybody understands what they need to do.”

It’s a start at least, and it’s shaping the card supply chain’s entire approach to environmental issues.

“You can only achieve Net Zero by addressing all possible acts,” concludes Pitcher. “If we leave some of these things, thinking they’re too small – it’s only a five-gramme card, who cares? – we’re never going to get to the end game that we need to. So it’s about us working together to show, as an industry, this is what we want to achieve.”

Just removing plastic cards isn’t going to solve all of the environmental challenges the world faces. But it shows customers that we’re taking these problems seriously Maya Reisinger, G+D

NEOBANKING

Everywhere you go

bunq set out to build a bank that travelled across borders – just like its users. Bianca Zwart tells us why staying close to them has made it not only popular, but also profitable

Uber drivers are famously never shy of offering an opinion. Who won’t make it to the end of Big Brother. Where to get the best balti in Birmingham. Why Brighton won’t win the FA Cup.

They’re fun, fleeting, usually forgettable conversations. But when one driver started complaining about banks’ customer service on a ride through Dublin, his fare sat up and listened closely.

The passenger in the back was Bianca Zwart, Chief Strategy Officer for bunq – one of the most successful neobanks in Europe.

“The driver was talking about how no bank really gave him what he needed,” she says. “So I started telling him about bunq. I wasn't looking for market research, but at the end of the drive, we downloaded bunq and started using it. And he actually gave me very interesting insights, things I hadn’t thought about. That conversation led to product fixes that are alive today.

“It proves that great ideas don't come from boardrooms. They come from real moments with real users, people on the street. Moments like that are vital for us.”

It’s apt that an improvement to the bunq mobile banking app should come from an encounter whilst travelling, as the bank itself is the product of and for a new generation of worker-travellers. They go by many names – digital nomads, global nomads, remote workers, telecommuters – but they share the same lifestyle. They are no longer confined by the traditional employment norms, conducting their working lives remotely, and moving internationally.

According to Statista, more than 35 million people considered themselves to be in the digital nomad employment category in 2022. A report by the WYSE Travel Confederation

said it expected the global number of digital nomads to rise to about 60 million by 2030. Notably, roughly half of them are millennials (28-43 years old).

This increase, fuelled by technology, the desire for a better work-life balance, and cost-effective living, made possible by a more flexible global business community, stimulated the need for a banking alternative to that offered by incumbents.

Into that vacuum stepped bunq. Founded in 2012 in the Netherlands and headquartered in Amsterdam, it became the first neobank in Europe to turn an annual profit in 2023. Like others, it pursued a fast-growth strategy, but not at any cost.

“That gets straight to the core of what makes us different,” says Zwart. “We wanted to focus on profitability first because of a very simple conviction we had. We thought if we can build a product that people truly love to use, they’ll be willing to pay a couple of euros or pounds for it, right?

“If we cannot get that right, what are we trying to do in the first place? So we wanted to not only build a user-centric product, but also build a user-centric business model in the process.”

Our users are not dashboards. They’re not numbers. They’re real people with real feelings, real needs. And we focus on building products that they want

Today, the bank serves 14.5 million users across 27 (soon to be 29) countries.

“We’re profitable now, which is not only very exciting, but it also sets us up for the long term, because we now have a proven model that only allows us to be successful if our users are happy. That keeps us focussed on the right things.”

Those ‘right things’ remain in sharp relief because as, Zwart, acknowledges, ‘user expectations in banking have evolved faster

than ever’. With that in mind, its app provides a whole host of tailor-made features for today’s less-tethered customer, such as the ability to open an account in just five minutes, the provision of local IBANS, currency conversion, and a facility to create up to 25 sub-accounts instantly for travel savings, freelance income, or everyday expenses.

There are a few bangs and whistles, too. bunq’s app also allows users to review and share experiences that they’ve paid for on their card, such as a cheap eatery or a welcoming café in which to work.

Users, or ‘bunqers’, can easily sort their incoming payments into budgeting pots and effortlessly save, with the app automatically rounding up each payment and depositing spare change into a savings account. They can also see where their friends and other bunqers are spending their time and what stocks and ETFs they’re investing in. Meanwhile, bunq Elite users get a tree planted for every €100 they spend, through a partnership with veritree.

Add into the mix, personalised budgeting insights, the ability to upload invoices and an eSIM feature for frequent travellers, offering internet access in more than 160 countries and savings of up to 90 per cent on roaming costs, and the bank is a one-stop shop for nomads.

Zwart says that communicating with bunq users (existing and potential – such as that Dublin taxi driver) and acting quickly on their feedback, is very much part of the secret sauce in bunq’s success. The word ‘focus’ is a constant refrain.

“For us, staying ahead means staying focussed,” says Zwart. “It’s a super-crowded market, a lot of players doing lots of things, so it’s very easy to get distracted.

“Everyone at bunq, in whatever role they’re in, speaks to users at least a couple of times a week through a ticket or through an interview, because our users are not dashboards. They’re not numbers. They’re real people with real feelings, real needs. And we focus on building products that they want.

“A great example of that is bunq Stocks, which we recently launched. We didn’t wake up one day thinking, ‘we need an investment product’. We heard from our users that they

The report finds that individuals from the Netherlands are the happiest, but four in 10 French and Spanish nomads say they struggle with their mental health. That’s also true for a third of the Germans it spoke to. Zwart says that the people who work for bunq are motivated to tackle the issues highlighted in the report head-on and this is reflected in the services they offer. She explains: “We put everything into solving problems. It’s what works for the user, not the bank, that matters to us. If we do that, everything else will follow.

“It’s in our DNA to approach things this way round. Our people are ambitious, yes, but not for ambition’s sake. We want to make a positive impact on our users’ lives. If we are not providing a good service, Have laptop, will travel: bunq’s expansion into the US and UK reflects how the world of work is changing globally

there is no point in us being here.”

were struggling. They wanted to start investing, but they simply didn’t know how to. So, we built a product that made it so easy, anyone can do it.

“This all goes back to listening to people and providing what they want.”

Another key development at the end of 2024 was real-time speech-to-speech translation, as part of an upgrade to bunq’s AI assistant, Finn. Working across nearly 30 languages, this can now instantly translate the user’s speech, and the support assistant’s response in real time, negating the need for external translation apps.

At launch, Ali Niknam, founder and CEO said: “At bunq, we have always used technology to make life easy, and this update takes that to a new level. We’re excited to break down language barriers and simplify tedious tasks, making bunq more accessible (and fun) to users all over the world.”

The good, bad and the ugly Given her credentials as a practising nomad herself, splitting her life between the Netherlands and Italy, Zwart was the obvious person to

present bunq’s recent Global Living Report, a deep-dive into the benefits and challenges of the lifestyle.

Compiled from a survey among thousands of nomads, it provides insight into the motivations and, ultimately, the requirements of this growing demographic.

“There’s is more to the story than meets the eye,” says Zwart.

For example, the biggest thing nomads from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands miss is friends and family. But for the French, it is the local cuisine that they pine for most. For Spaniards, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the weather.

The Brits and the Irish say they long for their local humour, while one in 10 Dutch misses cycling.

Most digital nomads across Western Europe still worry about work-life balance, especially in the UK and Ireland. In Spain and France, people also worry about their financial wealth, and, across the board, feelings of instability and language barriers are a constant source of stress.

Bianca Zwart, Chief Strategy Officer at bunq

This ‘user-centricity’ as Zwart calls it, is clearly paying dividends, so much so that in September of last year bunq announced that it was expanding its workforce by 70 per cent by the end of 2024, in readiness for a future expansion into the US and a re-entry into the UK. Its first foray into the US will be intriguing, as 42 per cent of Americans now hold passports, up from the meagre 10 per cent in the 80s, and, according to Statista, the number of digital nomads in the United States has continuously increased over the last five years, reaching 18.1 million as of mid-2024.

Equally fascinating, will be the return of bunq to the UK. The neobank previously operated in the country but pulled out in 2020, citing regulatory complications as a result of Brexit.

In that time, the landscape has changed somewhat, with 50 per cent of people now possessing a neobank account in some shape or form, although bunq’s biggest rivals there are comparative minnows – Starling, Revolut and Monzo boast a combined user count of 50 million-plus.

“Yes, we’re going global,” says Zwart. “We’re building a product for people who live an international lifestyle, so they need their bank to be international, too. But wherever we operate, our fundamentals will remain the same – our users come first.”

SETTING PAYMENTS FREE

Payment processing has gone from necessary bugbear to potentially big business, driven by consumers who demand an increasing range of options for gaining access to products and services.

A new report from Grand View Research estimates the size of the prize, predicting the global payment processing solutions market – valued at $47.61billion in 2022 – will achieve a compound annual growth rate of 14.5 per cent from 2023 to 2030.

The merchants facilitating this growth need to satisfy their customers by offering an increasingly broad number of payment choices that blend the physical and the digital – from card to cash, contactless, e-wallet and account-to-account.

Nadim Ghafoor, Senior Product Manager at in-person payment orchestrator Aevi, says in order to provide that choice, merchants need help escaping the ‘walled garden’ imposed by an old-style monopoly characterised by high fees, lengthy contract tie-ins and the kind of monoline legacy point-of-sale solutions that are no longer up to the task.

Aevi is innovating to ensure its integrated, Cloud-based platform does just that by working with ‘any payment type, anywhere in the world’. Its white-labelled offering gives merchants the means to integrate with a raft of physical and digital payment solutions – as well as independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent sales organisations (ISOs). It collaborates with fintech providers to bolt on new solutions, including a recent strategic partnership with payments orchestration

Aevi believes it holds the key to releasing merchants from the ‘walled garden’ built by providers who tie them down to inflexible contracts and outdated solutions

platform Paydock last October, enabling it to offer omnichannel payment orchestration for financial institutions, merchants and ISVs.

Combining Paydock’s digital payments expertise with Aevi’s in-store payment solutions and processing via multiple acquirers has enabled it to offer payment methods like open banking, PayPal and buy now, pay later in face-to-face settings.

And, in April, Aevi partnered with another payment orchestrator, IXOPAY, again to bridge in-person and digital payment orchestration for merchants and businesses by blending Aevi’s card-present payment orchestration solution with IXOPAY’s card-not-present service.

We asked Ghafoor what the emerging challenges and opportunities are for merchants and how Aevi is helping tackle them.

THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: How has the point of sale (POS) changed over the past few years?

NADIM GHAFOOR: Payments was always seen as a kind of necessary evil and the point of interaction was very, very simple. Customers just inserted or swiped their card. But now, with SmartPOS and other smart solutions, there’s an opportunity to do way more at the point of sale.

Merchants want more flexibility. They want to be able to put other applications and different payment methods on those terminals.

Our expertise is in creating really compelling customer journeys at the point of interaction for consumers. For example, in certain markets, Visa and Mastercard are the preferred payment methods, but we might see

account-to-account payments too, or alternative payments, direct currency conversion – all of those things are starting to be offered to consumers in the retail landscape, and we can facilitate that.

Openness, and the ability to work with whoever is providing a solution running on those POS terminals, to not lock merchants in, is important, as many are telling us they feel trapped with their legacy payment solutions. Payment terminals that run on applications connected to a single acquirer are like a walled garden, whereas our solutions allow merchants to work with different third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) and software providers that can create compelling solutions that will change the customer journey.

TFM: What is Aevi doing to try to open up the options for merchants?

NG: Retailers and merchants really do not have control over their payment ecosystems, so introducing new payment methods or other fresh features into the payment flow – for example, a loyalty scheme – or connecting to a different acquirer, has been just impossible.

We’re breaking down those walls and showing them that, with our platform, they can connect to any acquirer at the back end and have any payment terminal at the front end.

They can then chop and change as they desire, and introduce new types of payment methods or terminal types without having to be restricted. We can make that possible because we work with third-party providers to

offer things like loyalty solutions at the point of interaction, and manage the entire flow for that merchant customer.

We offer different ways to use our platform. Our Smart point-of-sale (SmartPOS) offerings are a simple and easy way for merchants to take payments, with an interactive user interface that our customers absolutely love, and big, bright screens, allowing them to simply enter an amount and then take the payment. We call that our starter pack and it’s perfect for, say, a hairdresser who doesn’t always need a complex point of sale.

But, through our platform, we’re also able to address specific challenges, like

TFM: How does your gateway fit into the wider payments ecosystem?

NG: Our payment orchestration platform is the heart of what we do. It is our crown jewel. It enables us and our customers to connect any terminal at the front end to any acquirer at the back end. And what makes us unique is that by offering it as a white-label platform, our customers can brand it as their own.

We don’t see anyone else in the market doing that.

And by any payment terminal I mean it could even be SoftPOS. It could be an MPOC (Mobile Payment on Commercial Off-the-Shelf, or consumer mobile or

Merchants really do not have control over their payment ecosystems… with our platform, they can connect to any acquirer at the back end and have any payment terminal at the front end

the unattended space – at a petrol filling station or a vending machine, for example, where the user interface needs to be driven by the customer because there’s no merchant there, handing them the terminal.

Our platform and software make that type of journey easy.

tablet)-type device, like an Android smartphone or iPhone. They can all connect into our gateway and then utilise all the different acquirer connections we have at the back end.

For example, one of our customers has access to 24 different acquirers through the capability we offer. They’re

working with nine different terminals and we completely orchestrate all those points of interaction, through our platform, to all those acquirers at the back end.

We can connect a terminal in such a way that it could process transactions for Visa to one acquirer and Mastercard to another, for example, just by configuring the terminal.

With our platform also, ISVs can have their own POS, either running on the terminal and connected to our payment application, or running off the terminal and initiating a payment on it.

So, our single platform offers the ability to serve the small and medium-sized business market, where they’re just entering a number and taking payment, or as part of a more complex offering where the ISV is leading the solution. They’re providing the POS and we give them a single point of integration.

We have a very close relationship with our customers, working with them from the early sales phase to deployment. Often, the customers aren’t payment experts, but love that we can take all the pain away.

The great escape: Merchants want new payment methods to meet new customer needs

Nadim Ghafoor, Senior Product Manager at Aevi

Built for what’s next in payments, Kani automates reconciliation and reporting - giving you compliance, clarity and control at scale.

Not-so-secret agents

Agentic AI is working alongside engineers at Globant to shape systems and processes for its banking and other clients. It’s probably the most important step-change in manufacturing ‘since Henry Ford’s assembly line’

Consumers can no longer ignore the power of AI, with assistants entering the digital space in everything from Google search to WhatsApp and chat bots on retail websites. But for Globant, AI is more than a feature on a user interface – AI is developing the firm’s software from front to back.

The Argentine-hatched business has been invested in AI for more than a decade, operating a decentralised ‘studio’ model, where teams specialise in verticals such as airlines, finance, energy and media, or on specific client platforms, such as Salesforce and Google Cloud.

A primary focus of those teams is the development of AI agents to transform client IT workflows – including for banks.

“Agents help on one side to integrate workflows, and, on the other to change how software is made,” says Fernando Cea, Globant Technology Vice President for the Middle East and APAC.

“We call it AI programming. We use agents to read legacy code

and processes, which is a faster way of gaining a deep understanding.”

Globant counts more than 1,000 clients in 80 countries, including The Walt Disney Company, Nissan and Santander, and has evolved from a focus on software to the incorporation of AI into businesses’ systems.

Launched in Buenos Aires in 2003, it achieved unicorn status with a $1billion valuation in 2015, one year after its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The firm’s valuation now stands at around $5billion, and it employs 31,200 staff in 35 countries.

Globant’s work to replace an Argentinian bank’s legacy mainframe system with a modern Cloud infrastructure demonstrates how it uses AI agents to help run the process.

COBOL crunch

The client, a subsidiary of an international bank, was facing a cliff edge as a shrinking pool of IT engineers with expertise in the coding language

Fernando Cea, Vice President of Technology for New Markets at Globant

Antoni Vidiella, Managing Director for Financial Services at Globant

COBOL reached retirement. The bank’s legacy system, with around 60 million lines of code, was decades old, which presented security risks, and it was holding back the bank’s ability to launch modern products.

During a four-week pilot project, the Globant team used AI to document the critical knowledge held within the legacy source code, then developed Java microservices aligned with the bank’s target architecture to run a parallel system that performed the same functions, but better.

The rules held within the COBOL code – a language launched in 1959 – were extracted by Globant’s AI accelerator platform GeneXus Enterprise AI, and its findings were then validated by the bank’s IT team.

The proof-of-concept project resulted in 11,600 lines of code being translated into 4,921 lines of Java microservices code in 105 hours –compared to the estimated 560 hours needed for a similar project carried out using more traditional methods.

With that work done, Globant was able to forecast a three-year timeframe for the bank’s entire IT modernisation project, instead of the 10 years that such a job typically takes.

Antoni Vidiella, Managing Director for Financial Services at Globant, argues that while most attention on agentic AI has been focussed on using it as a personal productivity tool, including for banking services, it’s just as – if not more – useful in updating legacy IT.

“There’s a lot of data to be sorted out, there’s a lot of legacy technology that has to be addressed,” he says. “One of the main challenges is to move legacy fast at a lower cost. Everything going backwards in the operations, especially for incumbent banks, can be transformed using AI.”

Agentic AI systems work like individuals in a collaborative environment – which Globant says differs from large language models, which are solitary and rely on continuous input. The firm’s engineers now use AI agents throughout the software development process.

The first step in that process involves giving a product description to a ‘prototyping agent’, which then creates the backend of a business application, which can be subsequently modified by an engineer with text commands.

Next, an ‘application design agent’ brings the software to life by designing its front end. Once created, a ‘code fixer agent’ works on bugs found by engineers and proposes solutions – and, once approved, fixes them.

And finally, before launch, a ‘test agent’ is unleashed to scan the entire product for further potential problems.

Globant says agentic AI is a major step forward because an agent can act independently, requiring less human intervention than traditional standalone AI systems.

The level of ‘agency’ – from fully autonomous to semi-autonomous with a human in the loop – is determined by oversight needs, which for banks could be proscribed by a financial regulator.

Fully committed

Globant has gone all-in on AI in recent years, and its latest annual results reveal AI-related projects contributed more than $350million to revenue in 2024, a 110 per cent increase on 2023.

Total revenue hit $2.4billion, up 15.3 per cent year-on-year, with new markets in the Middle East and APAC rising 43.8 per cent, and revenue from Disney, the firm’s largest client, increasing by 23.7 per cent.

Company founder Martin Migoya has likened the opportunity presented by AI to Henry Ford’s groundbreaking implementation of the moving assembly line in the early 20th century, which transformed manufacturing across not just the motor industry but multiple sectors.

In the last six months, Globant has entered strategic partnerships with Faros AI (Globant engineers use Faros to assess software productivity) and Google Cloud – a tie-up that aims to boost the use of Google Cloud AI across industry.

Cea says such integrations are the ‘traditional way of introducing AI’, while investment in agents for the automation of workflows is a modern feature of the Age of AI.

Globant’s engineers are actively encouraged to keep abreast of industry developments and

Most recently, agents have helped to integrate workflows and change the way software is made

involve giving chat bots a human face and personality), and, lastly, ‘invisible experiences’ whereby technology anticipates a person’s needs.

For Vidiella, embracing these technology trends mean banks can transform how they interact with customers to present products and services. He believes the development of synthetic humans will be of particular importance in financial services, as it is already known that AI-driven systems that communicate to customers with human-like responses are, ultimately, more efficient and win trust.

The Tech Trends 2025 report quotes figures from US tech consultancy Gartner, which includes a prediction that by next year, 50 per cent of B2B buyers will interact with a digital human in a buying cycle.

build solutions that are not tied to any particular partner’s product.

“Most recently, agents have helped to integrate workflows and change the way software is made. We’re trying to look at problems in a very different way.

“Every day you wake up and have new options, new large language models, new solutions,” Cea says. “The challenge is to keep up-to-date and build agnostic solutions.”

Mega trends

The rise of agentic AI is one of five areas of key innovation highlighted by Globant’s Tech Trends 2025 report.

The other four are quantum computing, robotics, synthetic humans (which could

Synthetic humans mirror human personalities, behaviour and intelligence, and, according to the report, will soon ‘be your digital friend in every kind of experience with every business you deal with’.

When it comes to financial services, Vidiella says: “Customers will experience a new relationship with financial institutions, it will be more embedded in their daily lives.

“Customer experience will change from flat, non-personalised digital apps that are the same for everyone, to a multi-modal framework that adapts to the client, whether that’s an elderly person or a student.

“AI will change how a bank addresses you, how it serves you, how it recommends a product to you and gives you financial advice.”

EVENTS

Feeling the difference

The Temenos Community Forum 2025 in Madrid left its members with a challenge, as the banking technology giant moves into a new phase

African wisdom says it takes a village to rear a child. To invest a sense of right and wrong, make sure it’s not corrupted by greed or power, and respect the people who brought it into being. That shouldn’t just be the responsibility of its parents, right? So, what sort of community do we need to raise humanity’s most challenging offspring: genAI?

The co-parenting/co-design of technology was a recurring theme at the annual Temenos Community Forum (TCF), which was hosted this year in Madrid. A unique gathering of employees, customers and technology partners, the Forum is intended to imbue a sense of shared vision in the future of financial services and translate that into actionable co-operation across the Temenos supply chain.

This year, the executive team leading the event were all new to the Temenos family, and it was clear that following a rough 2024 for the global technology company, things had changed.

New boss, CEO Jean-Pierre Brulard, was back from a 145,000-mile round trip from Temenos HQ, talking to clients about their operational challenges, investment priorities,

Senior leadership at the conference were keen to commit to more strategic product development with design thinking at its heart and with clear delivery timelines.

“When we announce products, it’s going to mean one of three things,” said Morgan. “It’s live and ready to use; it’s in private review with customers; or it’s being actively co-developed with customers and we will guarantee general availability within six months.”

Chief Revenue Officer, Will Moroney spoke of a ‘huge organisational and mindset shift’ and observed that three of the top new senior appointments had begun their careers in service delivery, signalling a stronger focus on the client experience.

As part of that, he said, Temenos was introducing a new Delivery Partner Certification Programme and setting up an offshore delivery centre that would proactively monitor projects and identify issues before they became a problem, indicating stronger performance monitoring and accountability.

From now on, he added, the 8,000 staff working for partner organisations would be seen as Temenos colleagues.

So, what does that all mean in practice for customers of one of the world’s oldest

and experience of Temenos’ service delivery. The whole C-suite were in listening mode. Barb Morgan, seven months into her job as Chief Product and Technology Officer, told the conference: “Feedback has been direct and sometimes tough, but it’s appreciated.”

She went on to reveal that under its mission statement for 2025, ‘Leading Banking Forward’, Temenos would be building less but smarter, with ‘focus on what really makes the dial creep’.

studio would also be pre-loaded with banking models, with training and support provided so banks could build for themselves.

But there was also an invitation to join a new Temenos Design Partner Programme (DPP), which signalled a fundamental change to product delivery.

Already tested with three client banks, one of the first solutions to emerge from the programme is a Financial Crime Management AI agent, now successfully running at a European Tier 1 institution. As of last month, it’s generally available to Temenos customers.

Within 24 hours of attendees at the conference being invited to join the Design Partner Programme, 140 had signed up.

The shift from building for customers to building with them was clearly resonating. And nowhere was that collective approach to problem-solving more important than in the development of genAI, noted Temenos’ new Chief Marketing Officer, Isabelle Guis: “Many of you have said that TCF feels different and it is. As a company, as a community and as an industry, things are changing.”

and biggest financial technology providers, running core banking solutions – both on prem and as a software-as-a-service model –for 950 banks worldwide?

A raft of product and client announcements at the event included the general release in Q4 this year of a Microsoft Teams-based genAI Product Manager Co-Pilot that had originally been brought in to work alongside Temenos and its partner design teams. An agentic AI

Guis presented the results of a survey conducted among 400-plus banking leaders worldwide, which revealed their top three priorities to be customer experience, product launches, and operational efficiency. No surprise there. But the intelligence around genAI adoption was more insightful.

While only 11 per cent of banks had implemented the technology, 43 per cent said they were in the process of doing so. In

You told us that the Temenos Community Forum feels different.

And it is Isabelle Guis, CMO

many cases – and in the absence of a genAI officer – the bank’s leadership team was closely involved in the project. It was a sign, she said, that governance and risk associated

hope to facilitate here. Derisking an AI project is bigger than any one institution.”

José Manuel de la Chica, Santander’s Head of Generative AI and a member of TCF, emphasised that ‘responsible AI must be global… governance is critical’.

“We’ve come from a paradigm of processes to agents that make decisions; moved from a deterministic to a probabilistic world. That’s why there has to be a human in the loop, a human in control. This isn’t about synthetic coding. It’s about how we change the use. The agent is the new API. That needs to be the centre of our strategy.”

TECH AND TAPAS

Being a newbie at the annual Temenos Community Forum can be an overwhelming experience – like meeting ALL your new partner’s relations at one massive family event. And if it was deliberately trying to impress, it succeeded.

Madrid, where extraordinary tapas and world-leading banking technology competed for attention over the three days of the Forum, was a worthy host city.

As the Valdubon Roble flowed during dinner under the vaulting ceiling of the magnificent Castilo di Viñuelas, a Baroque estate on the outskirts of Madrid, I was reminded of Temenos founder, the larger-than-life Greek entrepreneur George Koukis, who died last year.

A man whose vision was to build more than a company, but a community, he once told this magazine: “Profitability is the consequence of happy clients. You need a system that does more things than that client dreamed of, and you need good services.”

with introducing the technology were top of mind for financial institutions, given the lack of a regulatory roadmap to follow in many jurisdictions.

Their prudence made banks ‘the heroes of the story’, said Guis

“When it comes to regulation, it’s still a patchwork,” she said. “Laws are still developing and they still lack teeth and it’s slowing down innovation. That’s what we

Temenos today appears to be working hard to honour his legacy.

Guest speaker, Dr Jonnie Penn, Associate Teaching Professor of AI Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge, said in this new world, fortune would favour collaborators.

“You have to kind of work together in the same way that, in a laboratory, you and other scientists would work together to try to figure out the answer. But if you can do that and find value and also trust, you are very well positioned to succeed.”

Computer says no:

Financial institutions have been forced to review the resilience of their infrastructures

COMPLIANCE

Be right back!

Nationwide’s Otto Benz shares the UK building society’s experience of creating a resilient payments stack and its approach to vendor management as the industry recovers from third-party-related meltdowns

The impact of repeated payments systems outages on consumers, prompting concerns about the safety of the UK financial system, has focussed the minds of regulators and lawmakers.

In 2019, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) launched an industry consultation to drive consensus around

Otto Benz, Director of Payments and Customer Technology at Nationwide Building Society

mitigating a catastrophic failure that could bring business and consumer activity to a halt.

Along came the disruption of the COVID pandemic in 2020 as if to illustrate why this mattered, and new rules requiring institutions to demonstrate appropriate resilience were introduced in 2022, with full compliance required by the close of March 2025.

Every UK financial institution took an urgent fresh look at their payments processing infrastructures and how to protect them against failure.

Among them was the nation’s biggest building society Nationwide, which acquired the UK’s sixth largest high-street bank Virgin Money in 2024, giving it a combined customer base of more than 23 million savers, current account holders and businesses.

Like other institutions, Nationwide identified its important business services, set impact tolerances for

maximum disruption, spotlighted operational vulnerabilities and then, says its Director of Payments and Customer Technology, Otto Benz, invested in enabling them to operate within those strict parameters.

As part of that process, Nationwide, like other institutions, had to calibrate the risk created by third-party suppliers of critical processes.

Plug-and-play approaches bought from software-as-a-service providers have been very much in vogue over the past few years because they offer greater speed-to-market.

But in July 2024, a Juniper Research article questioned whether the UK’s financial industry had become over-reliant on them, commenting that a recent spate of outages, disabling several organisations simultaneously, had made it ‘obvious that the number of monopolies in many technological industries increases our vulnerability to outages and cybercrime’.

“We generally try to buy solutions that are more of a commodity or where we can leverage somebody else’s investment as well as our own, as we have with our core payments platform modernisation programme.

“While in-house solutions might be more expensive or take longer to build, the packaged option, while cheaper, has the potential to tie you to the vendor, which you really need to be careful of.

“Whenever you buy something, you experience some degree of lock-in with the partner you’re using, but even if you invest in customisation, it could be cheaper and quicker to put live [than building in-house].

“With a vendor solution – while cheaper to install and customise initially – you also typically have a smaller pool of configuration, system or product experts to call on, and it can be more expensive to maintain products.

“You need to watch out for what happens when you need to switch vendors – if a vendor changes commercially in a way that’s disadvantageous for our customers and members, for example. We always consider the exit approach.

plans will be and how you know a potential vendor will be able to cope with that.

“Things like how you manage a Cloud solution or, in theory, multiple Cloud solutions, because you might be dependent on one but need to consider what happens if that is not there.

“All of this means that buying a solution, while it might seem simple at the outset, now comes with a load of additional considerations associated with managing the vendor.”

Nationwide began its migration to Cloud in 2023, to ‘simplify and reinforce’ its payments infrastructure – becoming one of the first UK financial services businesses to partner with software-as-a-service specialist Form3 from 2020 to support that process. That partnership is still going strong.

“In terms of balancing innovation, we’ve now got to a position where we tend to use built solutions with a fast pace of internal delivery for things where we are adding quite a lot of value to our customer experience, like our digital front end, our applications where the customers are really engaging with us via our apps.

“With our back-end solutions, we’re leveraging joint investments with partners to achieve regulatory compliance with very high performance and resilience.

The article followed what was dubbed at the time as ‘the biggest IT outage in history’ when a faulty Microsoft security update was rolled out by specialist provider CrowdStrike.

It prompted a Financial Conduct Authority investigation, whose report in October 2024 also noted the upward trend in third-party-related outages hitting UK banks.

Another three-day glitch in January this year, this time affecting Barclays account holders who couldn’t pay their bills and struggled to make their 31 January tax self-assessment deadlines, prompted MPs to write to the CEOs of nine top institutions, including Nationwide, demanding answers to the ongoing issue of meltdowns.

Benz says, given the various competing concerns, the decision whether to build in-house or buy has never been more pivotal, and is something Nationwide spends considerable time on.

“You need to build if it’s specifically to your customers’ advantage, and buy if it’s technology that’s not specific to your needs,” he explains.

“So, ultimately, it’s a bit of a trade-off between speed of implementation and that long tail where you’re potentially at risk of additional cost. We’ve experienced that with a number of our package solutions and sometimes you have to admit you’ve made a poor decision and restart – and your exit and contingency might actually lead you to more of a bespoke arrangement.”

The recent systemic issues and regulatory tightening mean institutions are asking probing questions around vendors’ own resilience.

“I think the innovation, even in that back-end where we’re relying on our partners, is really impressive – like our work with Form3 on our innovative, high-performance, resilient and compliant multi-Cloud back-end solution.”

In some ways, Nationwide has learned what works through trial and error.

“It took us quite a while to get to the level of resilience customers and regulators in the UK

Buying a solution, while it might seem simple at the outset, now comes with a load of additional considerations associated with managing the vendor

“You need to ask if the partners you’re choosing have the ability to meet the enhanced expectations for institutional resilience of the Bank of England and Prudential Regulation Authority,” says Benz.

“For critical business services like payments, larger institutions have to be able to recover and have a continuous operation within agreed impact tolerances.

“These are really tight. That forces you to consider if you need to change your partner if there is a risk of them failing. It also makes you consider what your backup and disaster recovery

now expect during the implementation of our payments modernisation journey,” says Benz.

“We needed to look at each layer of our stack and understand the resilience components in that. Had we come to that earlier it would have been quicker to implement because when we started the journey we didn’t expect to have such high resilience requirements.

“So, my recommendation for others is to really consider the non-functional requirements and likely future use of their payments platforms, and how those can be made effective, in their build-versus-buy decision.”

Plugging into payments

Mambu’s acquisition of Numeral comes at a critical moment, particularly for Europe, say Victor Mithouard and Leon Stevens

2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in Europe for payments, an environment that is seeing additional demands being placed on banks and fintechs – creating new opportunities.

Not least, the SEPA Instant Payments Regulation now expects service providers in the EU to offer real-time payments, executed within 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and without applying fees higher than traditional credit transfers.

Meanwhile, recent geopolitical shifts have strengthened Europe’s resolve to ensure it has more strategic autonomy over its payments systems.

“In Europe, we’re seeing strong momentum around real-time payments,” says Leon Stevens, Mambu’s Head of EMEA. “Markets like the Nordics and Benelux are really pushing the boundaries with instant, cross-border capabilities. PSD2 and the Instant Payments Regulation laid the foundation, but PSD3 [expected to be implemented in 2026] is likely to accelerate things even further.

“Notably, regulators are now actively pushing for greater competition and a more level playing field, ensuring that innovative fintechs can challenge incumbent Tier 1 banks and drive new waves of innovation. The focus is on seamless, secure, and fast user

experiences – and payments are right at the centre of that.”

Europe’s determination to break the region’s reliance on foreign payment schemes was summed up by Christine Lagarde, Head of the European Central Bank, recently.

“Whether you use a card or a phone, typically it goes through Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Alipay,” she said. “Where are all those coming from? Either the US or China. The whole infrastructure mechanism that allows for payments, credit and debit, is not a European solution. Brussels should make sure there is a European offer.”

And it’s trying, by leveraging its own instant settlement schemes for real-time cross-border transactions.

The always-on TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) service is a multi-currency platform that already settles payments within the SEPA Instant credit transfer scheme. But plans are well underway to plug in TIPS to other fast payment systems globally. There are also moves to connect it to a multilateral network of instant payment systems through Project Nexus, led by the Bank for International Settlements.

And, separately, the region is assessing the feasibility of creating a bilateral link between TIPs and India’s Unified Payments Interface.

All of that means cross-border transactions should become easier and cheaper if you have sophisticated technology with direct access to Europe’s payments infrastructure. And Mambu, through its acquisition of the payments mechanism provider Numeral, does.

Founded in Berlin in 2011 and headquartered in Amsterdam, Mambu

Victor Mithouard, Senior Director of Payments at Mambu

Stevens, Head of EMEA at Mambu

is a Cloud-native platform provider of composable banking services to more than 260 banks, fintechs, retailers, telcos and other global customers. Together, they serve in excess of 110 million end users across more than 65 countries.

Mambu focusses on building the underlying framework while providing seamless integrations with specialist partners, so it can customise the stack to suit most businesses.

In December 2024, Mambu announced that it was acquiring Numeral, a French paytech that had operated as one of Mambu’s standalone plug-ins for its payment functions.

Only four years old, but already processing more than £10billion of payments annually, Numeral’s key features include a centralised dashboard for managing payments, reconciliations, and account information across all connected banks; automated bank payment processing, enabling businesses to focus on their core products with real-time access to payment statuses, errors, account balances, and transaction information; and integration with businesses’ systems through a single API, which, it says, ‘abstracts the complexity of building and maintaining direct bank integrations’.

Numeral’s payment operations platform connects to all bank channels, from those that use legacy systems, such as SFTP, to more modern integrations using APIs, allowing businesses to manage payments across multiple institutions. It’s a one-to-many solution.

The acquisition saw Mambu Payments Gateway payments platform replaced by Mambu Payments (aka the

Leon

Numeral integration) as the company works towards integrating Mambu core and Mambu payments in the future.

Key to the deal was Numeral’s significant partnerships with a host of European fintechs, including WorldFirst, Argentex and Alma, and major banks, such as BNP Paribas, Barclays, BPCE, ClearBank and LHV.

In Europe, we’re seeing strong momentum around real-time

payments

Leon Stevens

At the time of the acquisition, Mambu said: “The size of the market opportunity for bank payments is striking. In 2022, the value of bank payments in the Eurozone stood at €191trillion, which is 58 times more than card payments (€3.3trillion)… With its robust bank integrations, a modular API and modern dashboard, Numeral’s platform will enable Mambu to capitalise on this market opportunity.”

The European conundrum

By combining both companies’ expertise, Mambu clearly believes it can help move the regional payments agenda in Europe forward. Because, according to Victor Mithouard, until recently VP of Growth at Numeral, and now Senior Director of Payments at Mambu, ‘Europe is still stuck’.

“Forty per cent of payments are instant in the UK, but only 20 per cent of them are in

continental Europe. Markets like Brazil with Pix [64 billion payments a year] and India with UPI [131 billion] have completely leapfrogged to instant payments. Bringing Numeral, with its track record of helping banks and financial institutions migrate from rigid, traditional core systems, into the Mambu fold, will hopefully make a significant impact on this picture.”

Stevens agrees there has been a ‘huge shift’ happening beyond the bloc’s borders.

“Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are investing heavily in building out digital payment infrastructure as part of broader national strategies,” he says. “Many organisations there are skipping over legacy systems entirely and going straight to Cloud-native, API-first, real-time setups. We’re also seeing more non-bank players, especially in retail and telecom, getting serious about embedded finance.

“In Africa, it’s a very different landscape, with infrastructure and regulation still catching up in places, but markets like Kenya and Nigeria are leading with mobile money and digital wallets, and the focus now is on interoperability and scalability.

“The direction across all regions is clear: faster, simpler, more connected payment experiences.”

The

road ahead

This year’s Mambu Partner Predictions Report identified the accelerated adoption of AI, open finance and embedded finance as being among the top trends for 2025.

AI, it says, will boost the efficiency and security of transactions for customers, as ‘sophisticated algorithms capable of analysing large amounts of data in real-time [can] identify valuable patterns and anomalies – aiding fraud detection and heightening customer satisfaction’.

Open finance, meanwhile, will be leveraged to bring new services to market while ‘going beyond regulatory compliance to unlock growth opportunities’. But embedded finance – integrating banking, lending, insurance, and investment services into apps and platforms used by companies outside of the finance sector – is predicted to ‘create endless opportunities for innovation’ and put control firmly ‘in the hands of non-financial players’.

Mithouard confirms that embedded finance is a big focus for Mambu right now.

“We believe that every company is going to become a payments company or a financial services company,” he says. “Embedded finance can be so seamlessly integrated with most experiences that there’s no reason customer-centric organisations wouldn’t want to adopt it.”

Stevens is seeing that already playing out in real time.

“Fintechs embedding BNPL, telcos launching mobile wallets, and even established banks opening up their capabilities to third parties through banking-as-a-service models –Mambu’s role is to make this not just possible, but easy because these experiences need to be built on infrastructure that’s flexible, modular, and fast to launch,” he says.

We

believe that every company is going to become a payments

company or financial services company

Victor Mithouard

Meanwhile, borders are already being erased by the likes of Wise and Revolut, points out Mithouard.

“And that’s only going to increase. But a lot of companies won’t be able to do this last-mile connectivity to so many payment systems.

That’s where we come in – to level the playing field for innovators to ensure that you can really deliver that global payment experience seamlessly.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time for everyone involved.”

Fixing the Foundations

As customers continue to enjoy ever-more

frictionless payments, behind the scenes,

reconciliation and reporting systems are buckling. There’s only so long you can paper over the cracks, says Kani

The rise of real-time payments, open banking initiatives, and embedded finance solutions has created new possibilities – but also surfaced dizzying new complications.

Financial institutions must now manage an increasingly diverse array of payment rails, regulatory and scheme reporting requirements, settlement timeframes, and reconciliation challenges.

This fragmentation opens the door to data inconsistencies and errors, especially when businesses rely on outdated infrastructure with processes that lag behind business growth. Misaligned systems happen for a number of reasons, including the challenges of managing unstructured data, dynamic regulatory changes, higher-than-planned transaction volumes, and the inherent headache of trying to persuade disparate systems to talk nicely with one another. Everyone wants to enthuse about front-end offerings, but data

reconciliation is something of an elephant in the room, an issue which, if unaddressed, risks financial errors and regulatory non-compliance.

Failure to modernise systems and improve processes leads to missed opportunities and weakened competitive positioning, too. Because, as operations teams stay bogged down in daily reconciliation and error correction, strategic initiatives – such as product innovation and customer experience improvements – are often, inevitably, pushed aside.

In an industry where customer expectations are evolving rapidly, this technical debt becomes an increasingly expensive burden.

“Processes are fragmented, reporting is reactive, and most businesses aren’t set up to scale if regulation intensifies,” says Roger Binks, Chief Commercial Officer at Kani, a UK-based leader in automated reconciliation and reporting. “Companies struggle with resource constraints, manual workarounds, and formatting inconsistencies by default, not exception”.

Indeed, dependence on manual, spreadsheet-based payments remains shockingly widespread, according to Kani’s PaymentsReconciliation& ReportingSurvey2025

It found that spreadsheet-based processes were still a cornerstone for 56 per cent of the 250 UK payments businesses it surveyed, with a whopping 94 per cent of those struggling to meet reporting deadlines.

“Our survey found that 41 per cent of respondents still prefer using Excel. That’s a crazy number,” says Binks.

Part of this is clearly down to mindset. The report found that undertaking ambitious new update plans is seen as risky, a concern echoed in a 2024 Financial Times study that reported the pervasive fear of ‘disrupting the status quo’ significantly hampers the scale and ambition of modernisation efforts.

“But that very disruption can create strategic advantages – exposing inefficiencies, revealing compliance gaps, and enabling the transparency needed for faster, smarter decisions,” says Binks. “It’s a shift from viewing reconciliation as a routine cost of doing business to recognising it as a source of insight and value.

“The biggest shift is mental, not technical,” says Binks. “Stop thinking of reporting and reconciliation as a chore. They’re strategic capabilities.”

The value of experience – and a reality check Kani’s story is emblematic of what that mindset can achieve. In the words of its founders, Kani was not dreamed up on a pitch deck, but born from the operational trenches.

The founding team cut their teeth working within payment firms that were scaling fast – gaining new users at the cost of clarity and control over transaction data. They witnessed first-hand what poor implementation can do, an

Roger Binks, Chief Commercial Officer at Kani

experience that led Kani to create a purpose-built product for automating reconciliation, reporting, and compliance processes in the payments space.

“One of the things I love about my job is helping customers fix the things that are really broken in their business,” says Binks. Many companies opt to construct their own solutions. Control, flexibility, customisation are all compelling advantages of this approach, but reality doesn’t always match expectations. Kani’s own findings support this, revealing that while 10 per cent of firms still rely on in-house tools, 71 per cent say reporting takes too long and 64 per cent suffer frequent data errors.

A further 41 per cent note that fixing those errors drains critical internal resources.

“In-house systems might offer control, but they require continuous development just to keep up with scheme and regulatory changes,” says Binks. “Firms need to be honest with themselves. Are they trying to build a payment reporting tool or trying to run a business? Because, if it’s the former, they’ll need a dedicated roadmap, team, and support model to match.”

For teams who want control of their tech stack, without the burden of maintenance, new models are emerging.

Processes are fragmented, reporting is reactive, and most businesses aren’t set up to scale if regulation intensifies Roger Binks

A 2024 Gartner report champions the pursuit of ‘composable banking’ as a critical capability for financial institutions, claiming that those that adopt a modular, API-driven approach to critical functions like payment operations can respond to change 40 per cent faster than those with monolithic systems.

Industry appetite is growing for this partner-led strategy, with a recent EY study finding that 55 per cent of banks expect partnerships to play a ‘very important’ role in 2025, which is up from 32 per cent in 2023.

By leveraging the benefits of systems such as those offered by Kani in a partner-based model, banking providers are able to draw on the strengths of

a specialised, focussed team, without having to dedicate their own personnel to achieving these goals.

Kani’s customers are able to mix-and-match required functions as their current needs dictate. And, by giving finance and operations teams real-time visibility into flows, fees, and scheme performance, a black-box mystery can become a valuable source of insight, which can also accelerate financial close and reporting cycles, delivering more timely and reliable data.

Moreover, automation frees finance teams from repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value work like financial analysis and strategic planning. With consistent, real-time financial data, CFOs and finance leaders can produce insights that guide corporate strategy, investment decisions, and risk management.

This high-impact approach helped Kani secure a multi-million-pound Series A investment to support its global expansion, starting with the US.

At its core, Kani’s mission is to give companies greater operational flexibility – a growing advantage in what the Alliance for Innovative Regulation calls the era of tech-driven financial regulation.

Flexible and future-ready

In today’s environment, new rules can emerge and take effect with little warning, demanding constant adaptability rather than reactive compliance. That requires reconciliation and reporting systems designed for change, with configurable fields, flexible logic, and real-time validation.

When clients face new reporting or regulatory requirements, they don’t need to rely on their dev teams to make updates. Instead, Kani’s platform allows compliance changes to be configured directly, keeping processes fast, flexible, and future-ready.

As financial services evolve, payment operations are becoming both a challenge and a strategic opportunity. Forward-thinking institutions now see reporting and reconciliation not as back-office tasks, but as competitive advantages.

By standardising data and automating processes, they’re better equipped to navigate rising regulatory demands and shifting customer expectations.

In time, this approach will separate leaders from laggards–making back-end systems as seamless and agile as the payment experiences they power.

Less dev , more ops...

ENGINEERING

As Group CTO at ING Bank, Daniele Tonella is responsible for 20,000 engineers whose creativity is being harnessed to build an architecture that’s simple by design

Spending more on technology alone does not lead to better performance. Fact.

According to a report by McKinsey in 2024, banks have been increasing their investment in IT by nine per cent a year on average, reaching roughly the GDP of Belgium and Sweden by 2023 at $650billion. But that investment outpaced banks’ average annual revenue growth of four per cent.

IT spend can be a bottomless pit – especially if you’re trying to compensate for successive waves of upgrades that haven’t quite delivered what you hoped. But modernising the banking IT estate doesn’t have to follow the law of diminishing returns.

A survey of the world’s largest banks by Bain & Co, found the most successful IT strategies delivered an average five percentage points higher total shareholder return, 10 percentage points lower cost-to-income ratio, and 12 points higher net promoter score than their peers. Those are much more positive statistics.

Bain found the most successful strategies were based on ‘sustained simplification, low cost and adaptable processes’. But that does require ‘a persistent focus by the C-suite, an excellent engineering function, commitment to transform the business

Daniele Tonella, Group CTO at ING Bank

and not just the technology, and consistent investment over time’, it said.

‘Simple’ doesn’t mean easy, then!

Daniele Tonella, who joined Dutch bank ING as Group CTO in August 2024, would no doubt agree. His role as head of a 20,000-strong engineering team, requires him to master three critical considerations – time, complexity and personnel.

“I’m the one that permanently has to hedge between the short-term and the long-term,” Tonella explains. “We are a very entrepreneurial bank that wants to go very fast, but in tech, if you go too fast without thinking long-term, you end up building up technical debt and future issues.

“At our size and with our history, we sit on a very large estate and complexity tends to grow by itself, so one of my focusses is to ensure that we keep it at bay.”

That sometimes requires him to rein in developers’ natural enthusiasm to innovate. He clearly has huge affection for engineers, describing them as an ‘extraordinary force’.

“But they also need to be focussed and converged into the strategic direction that we are taking. That’s a human journey and it’s probably the most fascinating part of the story,” says Tonella.

It’s required a mind shift, away from the heady days of software developers taking priority in the DevOps cycle towards one that’s more balanced towards IT operations as the two teams work together to build and maintain platforms.

“DevOps has been a sort of freedom from infrastructure, but now, that journey is coming to an end,” says Tonella. “With a dev-centric DevOps, you end up creating complexity that just keeps growing, because we are engineers and, if you get three engineers in a room, you get four opinions, and that creates a fragmentation of your underlying stack.”

Platform engineering by contrast, requires a more collaborative approach, with a level of robustness that reduces complexity by design.

“If I’m a developer and the pipeline is designed by platform, if I don’t comply with some of the controls, it just comes back to me,” says Tonella. “It’s like when you compile code. If there’s a syntax error, you can compile as many times as you want, but you don’t get something you can use.”

Experts are optimistic about the efficiencies that a platform engineering approach can bring, but it’s not necessarily easy to implement.

“Platform engineering, is a strong layer and allows us to converge on complexity,” says Tonella. “That requires a huge culture change because it means we are moving away from the full stack engineer, away from the super-engineer who does everything from the front to bare metal, and instead towards a specialisation of engineers.

“You could almost say there are three families of engineers. There are the ones that do business features, who are really focussed on client impact. There are the ones that build the components for the first ones to glue together into services, and then there are the ones that manage the platform. Somebody said that culture is the operating system of a team. Well, then platform engineering is the kernel.”

The accumulation of these changes at ING has led to what Tonella describes as a ‘virtuous circle of attractiveness’ to engineers, one in which ‘the team spirit is extremely strong and you really feel, “I can solve serious problems here”.’

“There is a challenge, of course, in being a technology company with a legacy, with a history, and with a size,” he adds. “But if you’re an engineer who wants to create a technology platform of the future that is built to reduce complexity while the business is exploding, then we are the right place to be. That story is resonating.”

ING’s selective use of genAI is helping in these engine rooms of change.

“ING has been very proactive in adopting AI and genAI, but doing it in a smart way,” says Tonella, “avoiding a proliferation of small ideas all over the place just because ‘it’s cool’, and concentrating instead on five key areas: KYC, hyper-personalisation, contact centres/chat bots, a specific part of wholesale banking, and engineering.”

The transition of AI from fancy to functional is being echoed industry-wide, with a McKinsey article published late last year urging banks to ‘move beyond experimentation to transform

At our size and with our history, we sit on a very large estate and complexity tends to grow by itself, so one of my focusses is to ensure that we keep it at bay

critical business areas, including by reimagining complex workflows with multi-agent systems’.

As in all areas of advanced intelligence there’s a lot of myth about the impact on the workforce, says Tonella.

He defines ING’s approach to developer recruitment as ‘not looking for talent obsessed with toys’, but engineers who understand the framework within which they are operating, and seek creative solutions within its parameters.

“There is this hype that AI is coding faster than coders, but that’s only a part of the truth.”

In reality, the amount of time they spend coding is proportionally much less than widely thought, he says. “[So] where we see AI helping engineers is in reducing what we call the cognitive load.

“At our size, complexity, and history, when an engineer touches something, they have to take into account a lot of contextual information. AI is helping by accelerating that context analysis, essentially saving engineers’ time. It allows us to focus our best people on interesting work, and not just menial activities.”

Cloud-focussed

The Cloud plays a key role in making all of this possible, but the way that financial institutions approach the Cloud has changed. Embracing it no longer entails the wholesale shifting of legacy infrastructure to a different environment, but enables organisations to re-imagine how their applications are structured. It’s what McKinsey has termed ‘the progressive Cloud’.

“At ING, Cloud is a core pillar of the transformation from multiple axes,” says Tonella. “The bank started many years ago to migrate away from monolithic mainframe systems, but not just monolith to monolith, like I’ve seen happening in some places, but really re-architecting the application around microservices, a heavy modularisation of functions, and global platforms and services.”

In effect, it’s using Cloud infrastructure as the agent for re-engineering systems.

“Cloud was misunderstood for a while as a sourcing strategy: if it’s not inside, it’s in the Cloud,” says Tonella. “It’s somebody else doing it [but}… in the way we set it up, it represents a different set of principles around how to architect, develop, design and deploy software.

“Public Cloud has been a help in that space, but we also create a very large private Cloud that is essentially doing exactly the same thing.

“When you go higher in the stack – so not infrastructure, but software-as-a-service –Cloud, of course, has made a difference, less because of the technical functionality, but more because it’s an easier way to standardise some processes and features.

“If you take CRM systems, or workflow management systems, or HR management platforms, for example, they tend to have a very simple, out-of-the-box type of service, and most of the time, that is enough. So in that space, Cloud has been a profound driver of standardisation.”

ING works with – and invests in – many technology providers, so, for Tonella, the question ‘build or buy?’ is somewhat irrelevant.

“Even when you buy, you have to build,” he says, “because you have to integrate into your ecosystem. And the movement towards Cloud also means glueware is code. Documents are code. Pipelines are code. Everything is code.

“So, build-versus-buy is an old sourcing logic in the sense of ‘I should stop building, I should buy because it’s more efficient’. Cloud has been abused a bit in that sense.

“You could say, it’s build, buy, and rent. And all three have advantages and disadvantages. There is no one that fits everything.”

While domestic instant payments have been the norm in many countries for some time, mirroring their speed, efficiency and convenience across borders has been a harder nut to crack.

Regulatory differences and challenging integrations posed by large-scale payments infrastructures can only be solved at a macro level. But while central banks and governments address political and technological barriers, fintech payment service providers are taking matters into their own hands to overcome specific user pain points.

One such is Runa, with an answer to a global issue for business – how to make instant cross-border payments to individuals, be they customers, staff or freelancers.

While authorities try to figure out seamless bank-to-bank payments – the politically preferred solution – Runa’s Pay to Card uses the parallel instant payment rails provided by card giants Visa and Mastercard.

Ty Bennion, Runa’s Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for new sales, existing customers and operations, says: “There are faster rails across the globe, but they’re all geographically confined. This is really the only solution that gives a globally-focussed corporate customer access to real-time, immediate payments with full visibility.

“Most of the existing options are consumer offerings that have been twisted into a corporate solution, and that’s not really going to solve the corporates’ problems. In fact, it only adds to their burden—now, to satisfy the demands of each payee, they’re forced to juggle three, four, five, or even 15 different connections.

“So what they want is a partner that’s truly global, that can bring everything under one roof and is actually focussed on solving the corporate side of the problem.”

The growing impatience for solutions is understandable, given the slow pace of cross-border acceleration in banking services and an increasingly global market and workforce to satisfy.

Ty Bennion, Chief Revenue Officer, Runa

Instant payments are vital to businesses, with the European Central Bank stating they can potentially reduce businesses’ liquidity risks by more than 50 per cent. Runa says its alternative to bank-to-bank infrastructure, is simpler, easier and more cost-effective for organisations on the ground to implement.

Pay to Card allows them to push funds ‘instantly and seamlessly’ to a recipient’s debit or prepaid card in more than 190 countries by leveraging the card schemes’ existing instant payment rails, Visa Direct and Mastercard Send.

“Cross-border has been stuck in the wires around EFTs (electronic funds transfers) where it’s very black box,” says Bennion. “Pay to Card represents a real breakthrough in terms of the ability to deliver money almost anywhere on the globe within minutes, if not seconds, knowing exactly how much is going to land there, and not being stuck in this old wire world where you’re trying to track a payment through every single bank it might have touched on its way there.

Runa has extended its push-to-card payment solution to offer businesses a fast pass, addressing the stubborn problem of cross-border payments

Pushing the envelope

Rail advantage: Runa leverages the two biggest card schemes for its Pay to Card solution

“This is an important development because it’s so critical to know exactly how much is going to show up, with real accuracy, to set and manage customers’ expectations.”

Pay to Card uses Runa’s proprietary API and builds on its experience of making payouts globally to giftcards, prepaid cards and digital wallets. This new offering, it says, ‘lowers the burden businesses face’ from fragmented payout systems by making sending money ‘faster, easier and more flexible than ever’ for everything from ‘paying gig workers and independent contractors instantly, to disbursing commissions or streamlining incentive payouts’.

“For us, adding Pay to Card to the existing network that we’ve spent almost the last decade building, is a natural extension, because having the ability to meet their customers where they’re at and do it on a global scale, is what is really key to corporations today,” says Bennion. The purported benefits include reduced banking delays, no high transfer fees, and the ability to originate funds from 40 currencies and pay out in 160 currencies, knowing exactly how much in local currency the recipient will receive. Enhanced security and

compliance is provided via its Runa Assure security suite, which is designed to protect against fraud, cyber attacks and compliance risks.

At launch, Runa CEO Aron Alexander said its new offering provided greater recipient choice and speed while removing unnecessary barriers, saying: “For too long, businesses and their recipients have had to navigate outdated banking infrastructure, slow processing times and limited payout options. Runa Pay to Card is a game-changer – we’re making the payout experience as seamless as a card tap… empowering businesses to move money faster and more efficiently.”

Originally called WeGift, the paytech was renamed in 2023 as Runa, which expanded into building ‘digital value infrastructure’ enabling people to ‘pay and get paid anywhere instantly’ and incorporating the ‘instant conversion and exchange of digital gift cards, shares, crypto, donations and other digital assets’.

But it believes it can further increase payment ease for consumers and businesses alike.

“Businesses need a partner that can execute in more than one geography for them and offer more visibility and easier access to consumers. Pay to

Card brings a global rail that allows the payee to get their money in real time and the sender to know that it’s going to arrive before they’ve actually clicked the button.

“So it gives that speed and visibility, but now we’re looking at how we can enhance it further so that both consumer users and corporate customers know where their money is at every point along the path, and it’s very easy to provide customer service and updates to anyone asking questions about it.”

Pay to Card brings a global rail that allows the payee to get their money in real time and the sender to know that it’s going to arrive before they’ve actually clicked the button

Runa is also looking to incorporate biometric identity verification.

“It’s really about setting the expectation, moving funds in a very streamlined fashion and looking at other potential that Pay to Card might have,” says Bennion.

“For example, could it be expanded to give us access to wallets and the many other different payment types we’re starting to see today, again through a single card infrastructure?”

OPEN DIALOGUE

Changing

attitudes to

credit

and financial uncertainty, are driving

new levels of consumer debt in the UK. James Hill, CEO of Flexys, explains how it’s using open banking to tackle and prevent defaults

Debt levels are rising fast as cost of living pressures persist, with new accessible forms of credit playing an increasing role in people’s everyday financial interactions.

As debt spirals, so, of course, do defaults. This has prompted a more sophisticated approach to debt recovery that leans into the developing open banking landscape and the ‘always-on’ nature of the digital economy.

Credit isn’t inherently bad. It can be used for major life expenses, such as a wedding or a new car, that may otherwise be unaffordable. The problem is, more and more people are becoming reliant on it. Recent figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveal that in 2025, a fifth (21 per cent) of UK adults reported borrowing more or using more credit compared to a year ago.

“Their view of debt has changed significantly,” says James Hill, CEO of Flexys, which provides collections management technology, rooted in real-time insights.

“More innovation has prompted different financial products that are now available to them at the point of sale. We’re seeing people use pay by bank to order pizza, whilst in Malaysia they’re now using buy now, pay later

services to purchase their KFC meals. As debt grows, there is a need for a more sophisticated, responsible approach to debt management.”

Flexys provides end-to-end solutions to financial institutions, such as TSB Bank and Virgin Money, and other organisations that need to collect more outstanding debt faster, while also delivering the enhanced customer experience that consumers expect, while all the time remaining compliant. It’s a huge task.

“Flexys is operating at the forefront of debt collection software, and we’ve seen firsthand the challenges and opportunities in our industry,” adds Hill. “Consumer expectations have changed significantly; people expect to be able to reach their bank, their lender, or any provider 24/7 and get outcomes and feedback in real time. Our customers have had to react quickly and adapt in order to provide the services their customers are looking for.”

From a product perspective, Flexys is aiding the transition from manual, inbound conversations between consumers and customer agents towards a much more agile, self-service approach that empowers people by giving them access to around-the-clock debt resolution.

“In terms of the efficiencies you can get from that, some of our clients realise a 10-fold increase in their case-handling capacity,” says Hill. “Others have significantly reduced complaints by implementing innovative new technologies. And then we have customers who are simply collecting much faster than they were before, with one seeing a five per cent uplift in monthly cash collections.

“In order to deliver a customer-first, self-service approach, you really need to be able to offer smarter workflows and automation in the back office to support that real-time resolution in the front office. Our product

supports real-time data, which means any information provided by the end customer is available in real time to the agent.

“So, if the end customer has to divert from a self-service journey to an inbound phone call, all of that information is available, without having to repeat or re-enter anything.”

The open banking shift

Traditional debt collection processes rely on customers, in effect, self-declaring their financial circumstances. But it’s often outdated, misinterpreted or incorrect, the inaccuracies compounded by a deficit in financial literacy. Given the data they’re working with, it’s often hard for lenders to come up with fair resolution plans. And, so, the risk of defaults rises.

Open banking has been a game changer as it gives real-time access to a customer’s financial data, enabling more precise income and expenditure assessments. This, in turn, leads to on-point affordability calculations and better forbearance options.

And, with more accurate data, debt collection agents can create tailored repayment plans that reflect the customer’s current financial reality, leading to more sustainable outcomes. Personalised and realistic repayment plans help

to eliminate bias and assumptions from the decision-making process, better aligning with the UK’s Consumer Duty regulations that entered into force in 2023. This alignment is crucial as regulators, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), continue to emphasise the importance of fairer treatment in financial services.

A report by the Civil Justice Council (CJC) highlighted figures from the FCA showing that, as of January 2024, 14.6 million people in the UK (around 28 per cent of adults) weren’t coping financially. Yet the report also found that a complex and inefficient civil enforcement system was failing both debtors and creditors.

Debt advice charities subsequently told a public consultation run by the CJC that traditional debt collection methods often discourage effective engagement with those who owe money. This point can perhaps be best illustrated by the popular, and brutal, Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away! reality television show.

The CJC report concluded that both ‘sides’ of the enforcement debate find the current system arcane and difficult

In Malaysia, people are now using buy now, pay later services to purchase their KFC meals

for all involved to understand. The CJC said it recognised many debtors were seeking to balance competing financial commitments and weren’t ‘wilfully seeking to avoid paying that which they owe’, although there was also a category of those who ‘could pay, but won’t pay’.

Surely, therefore, it’s much better to prevent lenders and the consumers they serve from ending up in legal action in the first place. And this is part of the promise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like Flexys, who can harness open banking to enable consumers and lenders to reschedule what they owe in line with changing affordability before they hit a crisis in the courts.

Artificial intelligence, powered by open banking data, has the potential to revolutionise debt collection even further. It can enable more predictive decision-making, as well as automated negotiation of repayment plans.

For lenders, categorisation accuracy is increasingly integral to the collections process, and this is where the latest developments in AI are shifting the dial.

Last summer, Flexys announced a partnership with open data platform Moneyhub, combining Flexys’ expertise in collections management with Moneyhub’s award-winning AI-powered open banking technology to create a more efficient and customer-focussed collections process.

Moneyhub uses community-based, machine-learning technology that constantly improves as customers confirm or amend categories. It shows the merchant, brand, and location of where a transaction was made and delivers categorisation accuracy of nearly 99.5 per cent.

By automating data collection and analysis in this way, open banking significantly softens the pain points associated with manual collections processing. In fact, according to research by Flexys and Moneyhub, it can cut agent handling time by up to 54 per cent, leading to less stress, reduced operational costs and improved customer satisfaction.

This more modern approach also leads to faster decision-making and increases the likelihood of completing transactions in real time.

There are other benefits to consider, not least that the verification of financial data through open banking adds an additional layer of security, making it easier to detect fraudulent activity. This reduction in fraud risk not only protects creditors but also ensures that genuine customers are treated fairly.

“The collaboration with Moneyhub marked a significant milestone for Flexys, and indeed the collections industry as a whole,” says Hill. “It allows us to bring unprecedented levels of accuracy, efficiency, and fairness to debt collection processes.”

It indicates the emphasis Flexys places on partnerships, too.

James Hill,

CEO of Flexys

“We’ve integrated with the best vendors on the market, so we can deliver a faster time to value,” says Hill. “This includes modern core banking platforms like Tuum, through to open banking providers like Moneyhub, and also innovative payment providers like Acquired.com.

“This means we can provide our clients with an optimised end-to-end journey, supported by world-class integrations.”

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T he American dream

There really is still only one market to aspire to, if you want fast growth and not be punished for it,

says Hussein Kanji, Co-founder of Hoxton Ventures

The world may be reeling from Trumponomics, but for the tech sector, the sun hasn’t set on Silicon Valley.

EU startups still aspire to cash in on the US market, enticed by the eternal lure of California and the heady success of 2010s’ tech stars, including the company formerly known as Facebook, the app formerly known as Twitter, as well as Uber, Stripe, et al.

Yet scaling into the US can be a tricky process, even for Series D companies. German digital bank N26 withdrew entirely from the US in 2021. British neobank Monzo gave up its US banking licence application the same year and has downsized its ambitions there.

And, with the current administration's increasingly isolationist policies, EU fintech startups

might be wondering how on earth they get a foot in the door.

Enter Hussein Kanji, Co-founder of Hoxton Ventures, a UK-based VC focussed on early-stage tech companies in Europe with dreams of following in the footsteps of US tech darlings and expanding into the region.

Kanji – a self-professed ‘proud New Yorker’ – has helped a queue of European startups achieve their American Dream for more than 10 years.

His company writes first cheques for seed-stage tech companies across Europe from its Oxford Street offices in London – which is a stone’s throw away from Google, naturally.

As a Stanford grad with a background in the Silicon Valley startup scene, Kanji leverages his experience in leading US tech companies in order to open doors for ambitious European entrepreneurs, helping them win a seat at the table with the right stakeholders to forge a commercial path across the Atlantic.

Having been involved in three entrepreneurial ventures within the Bay Area startup community – and come away with an honest analysis of his own abilities – Kanji decided to pursue a career in VC.

“As American VC and billionaire John Doerr said ‘If you can’t invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it’. And, since I'm not a very good inventor

Hussein Kanji, Founding Partner at Hoxton Ventures

or a very good engineer, this side of the job is the best contribution I can make towards building the next generation of tech products,” says Kanji.

Before throwing his hat into the investor ring, he was encouraged to work at an established company. After four years ‘growing up’ in Microsoft’s ranks to reach senior management in the early 2000s, Kanji set off across the Pond for an MBA at London Business School. The VC hopeful then joined Accel – a global venture capital firm immortalised in VC lore after a relatively early investment in Facebook resulted in the most lucrative return in venture capital history.

This experience in London also opened Kanji’s eyes to the opportunity of investing in EU startups in their earliest stages to grow them into tech giants. The caveat was they had to have the ambition to buy into the US market early on.

“When I left Accel, there was almost nobody doing early stage investment in Europe,” he says. “There were obviously going to be good companies from this side of the Pond that could scale up but nobody really wanted to finance them back then. So, when you see an opportunity like that, your entrepreneurial instincts kick in."

Kanji became one of the founding partners of Hoxton Ventures in 2013.

Fast-forward to today, and Hoxton’s positioning remains largely unrivalled.

“There are only a handful of big US firms that can offer the same thing that we do. And most of them don’t do first cheques or cheques into early-stage companies,” says Kanji.

Start here. Scale there. It’s this unique Silicon Valley mindset, combined with a European-focussed investment thesis, that has informed the three pillars of the Hoxton Ventures playbook.

First, any startup it backs must adopt a ruthless US-focussed go-to-market strategy as a priority to scale fast. That’s because, regardless of which administration is at the helm, the US remains one of the world’s two biggest markets, and when the alternative is the unfamiliar business culture, language and regulatory framework of China, it offers a much more accessible path to greatness.

someone who’s an early product manager at Stripe and you really understand what great could look like,” says Kanji.

Hoxton’s thesis has paid off. Its investment approach has resulted in more than 16 exits in 10 years – including three IPOs from a pool of 17 investments in its first fund alone.

Two of those – Darktrace and Deliveroo – floated on the London Stock Exchange, while Babylon Health floated in New York.

Dysfunctional markets and cultural differences

These experiences working with the London Stock Exchange weren’t without challenge. Hoxton spent three years supporting the board to list Darktrace in the UK.

It debuted on the London Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of £1.7billion in 2021. The company is now private again following an acquisition by private equity firm

Profit or growth: The UK public markets have been focussed on the former

The second is that Hoxton taps into the well-established landscape information of California to help spot companies in Europe with the potential to be best-in-industry.

“If you don't know what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s very hard to compare and contrast,” says Kanji. “So a lot of our connectivity out on the West Coast is to help us do what we call ‘calibrate’. Usually, if you have a good insight as to what’s going on in the US, you have a good proxy of what’s going on in the rest of the world as well.”

The third is to tap into an experienced team with ‘scaling knowledge’. That is, teams that have know-how acquired through building the previous generation of tech companies in Silicon Valley.

“You need to be plugged into that network to figure out how to level set. You may think you’re looking at ‘great’, but then you meet

for the company, which had also had a hard time convincing traders of its worth.

Profitability v growth

Kanji’s experiences provide an insight into the more fundamental differences in the investment cultures of the US and UK, including the UK’s propensity to value dividend-oriented businesses that prioritise profitability over growth.

“As a result, these high-growth companies – that would probably dip into unprofitability or sacrifice profitability for growth – tend not to get as much of a premium as in the US, where people are much more forgiving about profitability in the short term because they’re trying to optimise for growth in the long run. That’s just a cultural mindset. And I think that tends to plague the UK economy.”

Regardless of whether you subscribe to ‘growth at all costs’, rapidly-growing companies do command higher valuations at IPO in the States. It’s therefore understandable when UK companies choose to list there. But that, ultimately, puts the UK’s strategic position in the global innovation economy at risk – including its position as the second biggest fintech hub in the world.

That said, in the current climate of uncertainty created by Trump, fintech juggernauts are weighing up their choices. Klarna has already postponed its US IPO listing. Monzo will only commit to being ‘IPO ready’ by the end of the year. And much speculation revolves around UK-headquartered neo Revolut, the most valuable tech company in

You may think you’re looking at ‘great’, but then you meet someone who’s an early product manager at Stripe and you really understand what great could look like

Thoma Bravo in 2024, which Kanji speculates was due to it being undervalued by the public markets at the time.

“You wouldn’t buy something in the public markets at a premium unless you believed it was undervalued and that you could either grow it into something much bigger or relist it at a higher valuation. I think they’re going to grow it and relist it in America where valuations of comparable companies are just much, much higher.”

Deliveroo was also removed from the London list in May 2025 when US-based DoorDash made a successful £2.9billion bid

Europe, which was frequently criticised for prioritising growth over profit, although latest figures put it firmly in the black by £1billion. Kanji observes that the neobank’s IPO – and the valuation it commands – will serve as a ‘witness test’ for what the UK public markets prioritise – growth, or profitability. He’s sensing change, though, not least because former Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson, who led the company during its IPO, is now the UK’s Investment Minister. And he’s optimistic that the country can be ‘a really world-class engine for producing great companies’.

Hoxton stands ready to help.

US VC Jump Capital specifically looks for startups that help bankers solve existential threats such as off-channel communication, friendly fraud and push payment fraud. Partner Tarun Gupta explains why

When US national security adviser

Michael Waltz accidentally added the editor of The Atlantic to a group chat about air attacks on Houthi targets, it revealed that the problem of chat apps being used for official business goes right to the very top.

Though US President Donald Trump repeatedly brushed aside concerns that using Signal for such highly sensitive conversations compromised security, the use of such unofficial channels for business has long been a headache for the financial industry.

It’s just the sort of ‘hair on fire’ issue that Jump Capital Partner Tarun Gupta gets excited about: a potentially existential threat that can be turned into an investment opportunity.

Jump Capital is a Chicago-based venture firm which backs early-stage founders, solving problems in fintech, application software, and infrastructure software. Gupta leads fintech investments from its New York office, looking for businesses that can tackle acute issues fast, with a clear and measurable return on investment.

And right now there are three areas where he’s seeking innovative candidates to join Jump’s portfolio, including the sensitive issue of so-called off-channel communication (although channels are precisely the problem!).

Careless words

Bankers talking with each other through the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger is, for Gupta, one hangover of the COVID pandemic, when internal risk and compliance procedures were compromised by a culture of ‘growth by any means necessary’.

And he believes now is an opportune time for investing in technology in this area, since

weaknesses are being identified and aggressively tackled by regulators, creating opportunities to ‘move compliance from a cost centre to a potential revenue driver’ by differentiating providers from their rivals.

“With strong procedures and internal compliance rigour it can be a way for them to win business,” he says.

Working from home, enforced by COVID lockdowns, fuelled a rise in communication through informal channels, despite the financial industry’s regulations around record-keeping and confidential information protection. In November 2024, the UK’s NatWest bank decided to block messaging services WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Skype on its company devices to stop employees using them to communicate with one another.

Fines for rule breaches has run into billions of dollars in the US. And although Nikhil Rathi, Chief Executive of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, said in January it would not introduce rules on bankers using encrypted apps for unauthorised business communications, Rathi added that the regulator was ‘working with firms on a case-by-case basis to understand how

The SOS investment playbook

they are monitoring these activities’. Gupta believes that, in the US at least, the imposition of fines by the Security and Exchange Commission for careless use of off-channel communications will only accelerate.

“Banks will try to crack down on employee usage of WhatsApp and other text channels, but I think it’s unrealistic to believe you’re going to stop people from communicating in the way that they want,” he says.

“So we think there’s an opportunity for new compliance tooling to flourish, by doing a better job of capturing all the different lines of communication someone might be interacting with.

“But the real north star would be to get in front and pre-empt problems. If you get to a point where you have full connectivity, full monitoring and oversight, a system could flag up a potential problem with what an employee is typing and suggest compliant language instead.

“Such a solution could be a way off, but it’s a vision of how you could build a really interesting product.”

Gupta doesn’t underestimate the challenge of compliantly recording and archiving communication across multiple channels to allow later retrieval for regulators. And he highlights businesses Global Relay and Smarsh as existing players that have done a ‘really great job’ of doing that.

But he adds there’s an opportunity for new entrants to do a better one, especially when it comes to the newer communication platforms.

“There are a handful of early-stage players in the ecosystem that we’re tracking,” he says. “Right now, searchability is pretty broken. There are lots of false positives that get surfaced to compliance teams, based on specific keywords that aren’t actually problematic conversations. So, with improvements, there’s a really interesting business to be built.”

Faking it

Chargeback fraud is another problem draining billions of pounds from businesses – and one that is so commonplace it is viewed by many perpetrators as a victimless crime.

Merchants have estimated that

almost half of chargebacks to banks and credit providers are just such ‘friendly fraud’ – that is, they are made by the purchaser using their own identity.

Reasons can include genuine consumer mistakes that result in them seeking a chargeback because they’ve forgotten they made a purchase or don’t recognise the merchant’s name on their account statement. But others are due to buyer’s remorse or intentional abuse in order to get a product for free.

Last year, Mastercard and Worldpay predicted chargeback volumes would hit 337 million cases by next year, a rise of 42 per cent since 2023, while Sift Research said Americans disputed $65million of credit card charges in 2023.

“On chargeback disputes, the volumes are crazy, the numbers are just absolutely massive,” says Gupta.

“Gen Z consumers, in particular, are pretty comfortable with disputing charges with their banks, regardless of whether the dispute is real or not.

“Several really solid businesses have been built around solving chargeback disputes, specifically for merchants, but we think there’s an opportunity on the issuing bank side. Issuing banks are a little behind the eight ball on streamlined automated solutions to determine which disputes are worth pushing back on.”

Banks will try to crack down on employee usage of text channels, but it’s unrealistic to believe you’re going to stop people from communicating in the way they want

Pushing the envelope

Friendly fraud isn’t the only issue draining banks’ energy and coffers. According to the industry group UK Finance, authorised push payment (APP) fraud hit £460million in 2023 and accounted for 40 per cent of all fraud losses.

APP covers frauds whereby a consumer or business is duped into forwarding money to a criminal, increasingly using instant payments.

In October, the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator introduced a scheme

protecting people moving money from one bank account to another via Faster Payments or CHAPS with ‘most APP fraud victims being reimbursed within five business days and additional protections for vulnerable customers’.

Gupta believes similar legislation will follow in the US, which is also suffering an explosion in APP abuse.

ACI Worldwide predicts losses will amount to $3billion by 2028.

He says: “There’s less of a push for banks to adopt something when consumers are holding the bag [for APP losses]. If you introduce regulation so banks are the ones on the hook, then software adoption and the desire to bring in solutions to get in front of that fraud dramatically accelerates.

“Banks and payment apps will need to get better at identifying potentially fraudulent activity to stop consumers making payments. They need to leverage prior transaction behaviour to identify problems.”

Find the ideal founders

Launched 13 years ago, Jump Capital is now investing out of its seventh fund, a $350million vehicle with a particular focus on crypto that closed in late 2021.

Its fintech vertical currently features 24 businesses, with solutions covering digital currencies, blockchain, financial services compliance, investment platforms, cross-border payments, cash management, sports betting and car loans. So who’s catching its eye?

“One thing we look for is unique founder insight,” says Gupta. “Either they have a unique angle to solve a problem, or they are so well-read and up to speed that you know they live and breathe their particular interest – it’s not a side project or hobby, it really is core to their being.

“There are a lot of problems that exist across the ecosystem for B2B software to solve, but if folks are going to spend time and money on it, it has to be solving an existential threat to their business. So, we also ask, have founders identified that and built a solution that can solve it in a measurable way, not in 12 months, but in three or six months?

“When we see the confluence of all of those things, we get really, really excited.”

Tarun Gupta, Partner at Jump Capital

ONLY COLLECT

Collecting data from a myriad of SME accounting systems and standardising it to support credit decisions could benefit borrowers and lenders. It’s a problem that Secure Trust Bank would dearly like fintech partners to solve

“We see so many companies that aspire for growth but they haven’t got the working capital to fund that growth. Sometimes that can lead to them going out of business.”

That’s the observation of Secure Trust Bank’s James Hodkinson, and it probably won’t surprise anyone who’s fought to build an SME.

The UK’s incumbent banks typically have a corporate lending strategy that targets big businesses at the expense of small and mid-sized companies, while startups are supported by a variety of government-backed incentives.

The weakness of incumbent bank interest in SMEs was underlined by a British Business Bank report in March that revealed challenger and specialist banks now account for 60 per cent of gross lending to the sector –£37.3billion out of a total £62.1billion – outperforming the UK’s big five

James Hodkinson Managing Director, Commercial Finance at Secure Trust Bank

banks for the fourth year in a row. At the same time, however, borrowing appetite has been weakened by elevated credit costs and uncertainty caused by the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, with the number of smaller businesses using finance sliding from 50 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 to 43 per cent nine months later.

Some 77 per cent of SME bosses polled for the report said they would accept a slower growth rate of their business rather than borrow to grow, and 58 per cent agreed with the statement that ‘credit is too expensive’.

The government believes the situation is squeezing a brake on the economy, and meetings with leaders from the ‘big five’ banks have been held to discuss SME claims of a lack of credit since the pandemic. A review of lending to the sector closed in May, and ministers are considering whether to impose obligations on banks to make it easier for businesses to access competitively priced loans.

The government has also launched a ‘call for evidence’ ahead of the publication of its small-business strategy later this year to better understand the pressures SMEs face.

Statistics quoted in the government’s Small Business Access to Finance document, of the 46 per cent of SMEs that were using external finance in the fourth quarter of 2024, around one-third were borrowing with credit cards and many others were using an overdraft.

It claimed that when firms seek credit from banks they are often refused, adding: “Overall loan success

rates for firms applying for bank finance are low in the UK, at less than 50 per cent on average, down from an approval rate of 67 per cent in Q1 2018 to Q2 2019.”

Secure Trust Bank is among those smaller lenders that offer alternative solutions to big bank lending, in its case asset-backed finance of between £5million and £50million.

It originally launched in Solihull, West Midlands, in 1952, with the Commercial Finance arm being established in 2014, giving it a long and successful record in

Figure it out: Collecting data from SMEs and quickly turning it into actionable information for a lender is a challenge

asset-based borrowing, which offers an alternative to unsecured loans.

Its offer can prove attractive to businesses operating in unpredictable markets or navigating inconsistent cash flow, and, of course, it allows borrowers to keep hold of equity and leverage the value of assets.

The bank grew its loan book by 3.2 per cent to £3.73billion in the first quarter of 2025 – an increase of 10.5 per cent year-on-year – with both business finance and consumer finance (mainly car loans) net lending balances up 4.9 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively.

Meanwhile, deposits grew 3.9 per cent in the quarter to £3.37billion on the back of very attractive interest rates. STB’s primary source

said the UK economy had grown faster than expected in the first quarter of 2025, albeit by only 0.7 per cent which perhaps boosted borrowers’ confidence.

There are many reasons companies seek finance, of course. STB has provided working capital to fund contract opportunities, helped SMEs survive a short-term cashflow crisis and supported management buyins and buyouts.

Last summer, for example, it provided lending to support private equity firm Modella Capital’s acquisition of arts and crafts retailer Hobbycraft from Bridgepoint, which had owned the shop chain since 2010. Hobbycraft had 124 stores at the time and was boosted by a sales explosion during the pandemic lockdowns.

of funding is retail deposits from individuals, and, at the time of writing, the bank was offering a market-leading 4.42 per cent fixed rate on a two-year savings bond.

In its first-quarter trading update this year, STB said it was ‘moving closer towards our £4billion net lending ambition’ (the bank passed the £2billion milestone of business and consumer lending in 2018), and, despite the uncertainty that has shadowed business over the past 12 months or so, Hodkinson himself – who’s MD of the bank’s Commercial Finance division –reports seeing ‘green shoots’ of lending activity. In May, the Office for National Statistics

where the client has won a contract, so has more revenue, so we provide an invoice discounting facility, and possibly a stock facility, so they can borrow to fund the growth.”

The challenge for STB, Hodkinson explains, is to harness and interpret data to guide its decisions and pricing. And, unfortunately, the corporate lending market does not have the rich data pools that consumer lending enjoys, drawn from large portfolios with high-volume, low-value transactions.

He says: “In the corporate market, it’s the exact opposite, as we are dealing with a low-volume, high-value scenario.

“The data that we’re keen to extract is at client level, and that comes in all shapes and sizes which, in itself, is a challenge. If there was one accounting platform that everybody used, then it would obviously be easier to extract data. But we come across all sorts.

“It’s a challenge that the corporate lending market needs more investment in. When we deal with Excel spreadsheets, for example, we have to slice and dice the data into a format that the bank can use. If there were solutions that could format that data into something that is consistent across every accounting package, that would be really powerful.”

Hodkinson reveals STB is looking for a technology partner to provide insights for the due diligence phase before a lending deal is agreed. But, ideally, he would like a solution that supports the whole lending life cycle.

He says: “Can we make the onboarding slicker for us and for our client? Can we make it easier for the client to do business with us? Can we get better data to make better decisions?

“If there’s a system that enables the customer to be more efficient in terms of data collection, gets the data to us, then we can possibly lend more money on the back of that.

“One challenge is that we’re often looking at partners at isolated parts of that life cycle.

The data that we’re keen to extract is at client level, and that comes in all shapes and sizes which, in itself, is a challenge James Hodkinson, Secure Trust Bank

“Our facility was largely based on the stock, and that enabled the private equity firm to acquire the business – that’s a great use of asset-based lending,” Hodkinson says.

“In another instance, we provided funding to a company that wanted to install solar panels as part of its environmental, social and governance strategy. We also have examples

I think there’s a big opportunity in fintech for somebody to wrap around the whole, including the banking platform. We would much rather have one application, that is slick and quick, than a legacy banking platform and plug three or four different applications into it.”

And anyone that can solve that problem would also be boosting UK plc.

OakNorth’s Ben Barbanel reflects on 10 years of helping SMEs muscle up by raising the bar on lending

Ten years ago, Ben Barbanel made a career-defining decision.

He stepped out of a comfortable senior leadership role in Santander UK’s corporate and commercial banking team to join a startup fintech. The panic set in pretty much immediately.

“I thought ‘What have I done? I’ve left one of the biggest banks in the world – what you might describe as a cruise ship – for a rubber dinghy with a hole in the bottom’,” he says.

The founders weren’t professional bankers, they were investors and software entrepreneurs, albeit with a super-successful exit under their belts.

And when one of them told him the as-yet-unlicensed neo would be making £1billion of business loans a year within five years, the idea sounded so fanciful that Barbanel thought he could kiss goodbye to his carefully built reputation in finance for good.

But he stuck with it and, a decade later, the banker and the business are doing fine. More than fine. The dinghy isn’t just still afloat, it’s bobbed all the way to America.

Transformation of a banker

Five years after Barbanel joined in 2015, and despite the challenges of the COVID year, OakNorth did indeed lend £1.1billion to high-growth, scale-up UK businesses in what it refers to as ‘the missing middle’ – lower mid-market companies that slave away in the engine room of the economy, but struggle to find the finance they need. The bank’s metrics were – and remain – all positive.

To date, the lender that was founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, has provided £17billion of flexible, bespoke finance to companies as diverse as café chains and housing developers, all requiring a funding package as unique as their proposition. It entered full-year profitability in 2017 and has stayed on the right side of the balance sheet ever since.

Barbanel, meanwhile, has gone on his own journey of transformation, professionally and personally.

Back in 2015, he described himself as a ‘boring banker’, experienced in

Ben Barbanel, Head of Debt Finance at OakNorth

working with the daily frustrations of legacy systems, but powerless to challenge the industry’s collective conviction that there was only one way to make business lending work – despite what he now sees as clear evidence that the model was broken.

So, when a corporate headhunter asked him to meet OakNorth’s founders, he agreed to go, out of curiosity as much as anything. How could two non-bankers possibly think they could do better than the establishment?

The first in a series of early-morning meetings in London’s West End got him no closer to the answer.

“I was approached by a headhunter who had worked for me and the conversation was along the lines of, ‘Ben, we’ve met these two crazy entrepreneurs and we can’t find much on the internet about them. We think they pay not be profiled.’ They wanted me to meet the directors to see if they were wasting their time with them.

“I went along to Knightsbridge at 7am, wearing a suit. I was shown into this plush meeting room and Joel [Perlman, OakNorth’s co-founder] came in and asked if I wanted a whisky. I said no, but I think it was a test,” says Barbanel. “We then had an hour-long chat about everything but banking.”

Fit for business

He met Joel and his partner Rishi Khosla for whisky-free breakfast meetings multiple times over the course of two weeks, intrigued by the proposition, until he finally agreed to head up a small team for a wannabe bank with no customers and still no licence.

You don’t see him in a suit much these days, He’s bought into the ‘business casual’ look. But the transformation goes deeper than that.

OakNorth’s Head of Debt Finance has regular appointments now with a barbell, not in a bar with clients. His favourite accessory is a water bottle. And, thanks to a personal training company, that was coincidentally funded by OakNorth, he’s happier (‘less grumpy’) and fitter than ever, despite a lifelong condition of ulcerative colitis that robbed him of part of his intestine – an experience he wrote about candidly for The Telegraph newspaper.

The bank is similarly in robust health, announcing, subject to regulatory approval, the acquisition of Community Unity Bank in Michigan in the US earlier this year on the back of a 15 per cent hike in profits.

OakNorth began actively lending at arm’s length to America’s own squeezed middle, a segment worth $4.2trillion, soon after Silicon Valley Bank’s shock collapse in 2023. But it had been contemplating expansion outside of the UK for a while. It just couldn’t decide where.

“The UK is a tiny island and we are not sure how much further we can grow our market share here, even if we keep seeing double-digit loan book growth,” says Barbanel. “Europe is a fragmented market with language barriers and different legal infrastructures. We kept coming back to the idea of the US – its sheer scale and volume.

“Not only do we have strong similarities in terms of the legal system and language in the US, but structurally the markets are alike. If you are growing a business and you want to borrow a million bucks it’s relatively easy to find in the States. At the other end of the scale, the investment banks will lend you a hundred million to a billion. But if you’re in the middle, your experience is similar to that of companies in the UK. We started planning to enter in 2023 and moved two staff out there.”

The market responded far quicker than OakNorth had anticipated and by this year, it had channelled $1billion into US companies, as well as British companies operating Stateside – three times more than anticipated.

“What we noticed in the US particularly is the volume of repeat business, which is fantastic,” says Barbanel. “Speed, the ability to transact

quickly, bringing borrowers into the investment community, has all gone down really well there. It’s been refreshing for the market. The issue was that we did not raise deposits in the US, so there was a currency mismatch. Although it was nothing derivatives could sort out, we started looking to acquire a small bank.”

He reveals that OakNorth considered starting a US lookalike and ‘had a couple of false starts’ before the Michigan opportunity arose.

Community Unity Bank is only two years old and was founded by a former Oakland county treasurer specifically to plug the small business lending gap he’d identified through his work with the local economy. It was only the second new bank to open in Michigan since the Great Recession and at the time of the OakNorth announcement had around ¢14million of loans on its books. The similarities with OakNorth were spookily similar.

offices in Manhattan from where it can support the bank’s lending in the States.

On the face of it, the uncertainty caused by the rewriting of America’s fiscal rules by the new administration in 2025, doesn’t make for the most promising of starts there.

“We are in a whole new world now in terms of the US political situation,” says Barbanel. “None of us has any real idea how things will play out. Banks have retrenched. We’ve seen term sheets pulled and pricing changes. But, in the UK, we said we’d continue to lend through every stage of the economic cycle, which we proved with Brexit, COVID, and Truss [the disastrous Liz Truss premiership]. That’s what we will also do in the States.”

One of the drivers for OakNorth’s dollar loan book has been companies expanding from the US to the UK and many making the opposite journey – Barbanel’s own personal trainer,

Big banks’ inability to fund UK companies across border continues to amaze me

“We have built a business in the UK where at any one time we have 500 borrowers. My point is you don’t have to be huge,” says Barbanel.

“If you do what you say you are going to do which is a) if you say yes, be fast to execute, and b) if you say no, say no quickly and explain why, people love it. There’s no rocket science to that. But what we do have is incredible data that we use in all our underwriting and modelling.”

Funding the American dream

Following the pandemic, OakNorth packaged up its proprietary data intelligence software that had enabled the bank to scale so successfully in the UK, into a SaaS offering called OakNorth Credit Intelligence (ONCI). Now, with insight into half a trillion dollars of loan data, OCI has

Ultimate Performance, is one of them. And the US is where he believes OakNorth can make a real difference to UK businesses.

“Big banks’ inability to fund UK companies cross-border continues to amaze me,” he says. But then, there is a lot about the banking industry that, viewed at a distance, makes lending cycles completely predictable. “Their behaviour is very plottable,” he says. “Banks here regularly pull out of the market and before they do there’s peak liquidity. People are doing deals that do not make any financial sense.

“I don’t think you can fix it, it’s a structural problem in the banking market. They are all trying to chase shareholder value by doing the wrong thing. What we have proved consistently is that if you do the right thing, everybody wins.”

INFRASTRUCTURE

BUILDING THE NEXT ERA OF FINANCE

XYB explains why financial institutions can’t deliver on AI, compliance, or strategy without rethinking their architecture

For years, banks have been told to transform. Modernise tech stacks. Rethink customer experiences. Move faster. Integrate smarter. Embed everywhere.

But, despite ambitious roadmaps and significant investments, many financial

institutions remain stuck. Not for lack of vision, capability, or funding, but because the very foundation they’re building on wasn’t designed for change.

Engineers are drowning in integration backlogs. Product launches stalled. Leadership is caught between patching outdated

systems or committing to multi-year transformation programmes that overpromise and underdeliver.

The real blocker? It’s not capability. It’s architecture. Until that changes, transformation will keep falling short. Legacy systems, even those wrapped in

Cloud were built for a different era – one that prioritised stability over agility and control over composability. Back then, products launched annually, customer expectations were predictable, and quarterly release cycles were enough to stay relevant.

But today’s market doesn’t move in predictable cycles. It moves in real time. Banks are expected to launch new products at speed, pivot to market shifts overnight, and connect seamlessly across fintechs, platforms, and partner ecosystems. Real-time finance demands real-time financial infrastructure, but that level of adaptability can’t run on rigid, siloed systems.

Today’s most profitable new financial providers didn’t win by offering radically different products. They won by offering them at the right time, and iterating fast enough to stay relevant. Because, in a market where customer needs shift quickly and margins are under pressure, time-to-market has become a proxy for competitiveness. The providers able to respond to demand in weeks, not months, are the ones that repeatedly earn loyalty.

For larger, incumbent institutions, the challenge isn’t lack of ambition. It’s the inertia baked into complex systems, where every new product requires orchestration across teams, platforms, and approval layers that were never designed to move together.

This growing divergence in speed –between what strategy requires and what systems allow – is where the next wave of differentiation will play out.

The intelligence gap

Ask anyone in finance what will define their business over the next five years, and the answer is almost always AI. The ambition is real: predictive fraud detection, dynamic pricing, and hyper-personalised experiences. But the financial infrastructure to support it is still stuck in the past.

Despite 91 per cent believing in its transformative impact, only 27 per cent of banking executives say their organisation has the infrastructure to fully leverage it, according to Accenture. The gap isn’t ambition – it’s financial architecture.

Clean, connected, real-time data is required for intelligence-driven finance. But most banks are still grappling with dirty data, siloed systems and brittle integrations. Proofs of concepts are everywhere, but real outcomes are rare. And until the architecture evolves to handle dynamic, event-driven processes and real-time responsiveness, AI will remain a proof of concept, not a key differentiator.

AI may be in the spotlight, but it’s not the only area where outdated systems are holding institutions back.

As regulatory demands intensify and risk management grows more complex, legacy systems aren’t just slowing innovation, they are also turning compliance into a costly, constant struggle that patching can’t resolve.

Compliance under pressure

Financial institutions are under mounting pressure to adapt to new and evolving frameworks – such as DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), ISO 20022, and real-time regulatory mandates.

These frameworks demand more dynamic risk controls, faster auditability, and policy orchestration at scale. Yet, most compliance processes remain hard-coded and manually maintained, making updates slow, costly, and complex.

For global banks with extensive interdependent systems, DORA presents a particular challenge. Demonstrating resilience across all critical information technology services requires a level of orchestration that fragmented legacy systems can’t deliver.

Ask anyone in finance what will define their business over the next five years, and the answer is almost always AI. But the financial infrastructure to support it is still stuck in the past

Siloed data, overlapping risk controls, and disconnected workflows turn compliance into a high-stakes stress test.

So, what’s the alternative?

When policies, risk controls, and workflows are embedded directly into an infrastructure that is dynamic, orchestrated, and auditable by design, compliance ceases to be a bottleneck and instead starts becoming a strategic advantage.

This is the direction leading financial institutions are moving in:

n Launching modular propositions in new markets without re-architecting for each region

n Adapting to shifting risk and fraud signals in real time, not in retrospective batch cycles

n Embedding governance into every product flow, instead of managing it from the sidelines

In the next era of finance, execution won’t be driven by standalone software or point solutions. It will be driven by financial infrastructure that can adapt to business intent, customer behaviour, and regulatory shifts, without slowing down.

The new infrastructure for adaptive finance

The future of finance isn’t another core platform or Cloud-wrapped monolith. It’s a structural reset.

Adaptive Financial Infrastructure (AFI) is XYB’s answer: a composable, intelligent, event-driven platform that helps institutions move from strategy to execution without lengthy development cycles or a full rebuild.

Whether it’s launching in new markets, embedding AI models, or orchestrating data across third-party systems, AFI turns strategy into action. The XYB componentised banking platform is open, transparent, and built to work alongside existing systems – until you’re ready to move beyond them entirely.

Derek Joyce, CEO at XYB sums up the core challenge facing financial institutions today: “XYB exists because banks can’t keep building tomorrow’s products on yesterday’s systems. Our mission is simple: create infrastructure that adapts, thinks, and evolves in real time, so financial institutions can stop patching and start progressing.”

For years, banking transformation has been framed as a choice between two unsatisfying paths: patch the legacy system or replace it entirely. But in a market that moves in real time, neither approach goes far enough or fast enough.

The institutions that will define the next decade of finance won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones with the clearest execution paths for delivering adaptive products. The solutions that understand financial infrastructure can be a strategic enabler – flexible enough to adapt, intelligent enough to respond, and open enough to scale alongside change.

This is the shift Adaptive Financial Infrastructure makes possible. It’s the financial infrastructure that grows with you, not against you.

CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

Getting the message

Hyper-personalised communication from your bank can be transformative – for it and you. So why are some of them still spamming us? Here, Meniga and Boston Consulting Group advocate for targetted comms

Most of us will have received them – notifications on our banking app that are annoyingly irrelevant.

The travel insurance offer that lands just as you do… on your return home. The cheerful message that ‘you’re eligible for a loan’ within days of taking one out with the very same bank.

Such unsophisticated, impersonal interactions between banks and their customers don’t endear us to them. And if banks are serious about evolving from being merely transactional services providers to becoming your money-savvy best mate, then they need to sharpen up.

A recent survey by Accenture found that although 72 per cent per cent of customers say personalisation influences their choice of bank, only three per cent actually use personalised tools offered by their main provider, leading the authors to conclude that: ‘there’s a clear disconnect between what customers want and what banks think they want’.

“Too often… budgeting tools and automated alerts – think tailored offers or next-best actions – are coming across as impersonal and standardised, missing an opportunity for true connection in their delivery,” they added.

It’s a message echoed by Meniga, a global leader in digital banking

Raj Soni, Chief Executive Officer

at Meniga

Michal

Panowicz, MD and Partner at Boston Consulting Group, London

Egill Ingólfsson, Head of Pre-sales at Meniga

technology, which works with more than 170 banks across more than 35 countries to help them provide their customers with hyper-personalised financial management services.

Meniga, which was founded in Iceland in 2009 but since 2016 has had headquarters in London, created a digital banking engagement playbook for its clients, which consists of three core tenets: turn your data into value; hyper-personalise the banking experience; and harness gamification to build habits.

Stressing the vital importance of doing so, Raj Soni, Meniga’s CEO, says: “The traditional banks need to seriously transform their digital and online banking capabilities, and also capitalise upon the vast amount of user data that they have, and which neobanks do not have, to create super-hyper-personalised dynamic experiences and engagement for customers. That adds real value.”

Citing a personal example, he continues: “A few months ago, I was positively surprised when I received a notification from my bank that I had been spending far too much money on FX and foreign currency-related charges, when I was travelling, using my existing credit and debit cards.

“And I was also positively surprised to get a proposition for a multi-currency credit card, which would allow me

to hold various currencies and use that specific card as I commute across the world for my different business and personal needs.

“This is a perfect example where a bank, knowing me as an individual, and having access to my data, added real and tangible value with a very personalised offer.”

Michal Panowicz, Managing Director and Partner at the London office of Boston Consulting Group, which helps its banking clients drive digital transformation and works with Meniga, would agree with that.

But he doesn’t see it happening nearly often enough – and certainly not in the countries you’d expect.

“The best digitally developed markets are not in the US or the UK – which are financial and technology centres – but in Spain, Turkey, Poland, India. That’s where the banks have really taken it upon themselves to modernise and execute better,” he says.

In Poland, for example, the country’s first digital bank, mBank worked with Meniga to develop a user-friendly app to help its customers maximise their finances using hyper-personalisation.

The app now has 3.6 million active users of which more than two million use it for all their banking needs. It’s clearly a factor in making mBank the fastest-growing in the country.

APAC banking leader UOB, meanwhile, has followed Meniga’s playbook to develop a game that enables customers to build a virtual city as they hit their savings targets. The real-life results were a near 50 per cent rise in monthly users, a 50 per cent reduction in costs per acquisition, and a 60 per cent increase in online transactions.

Egill Ingólfsson, Head of Pre-Sales at Meniga, warns that many legacy banks are missing out on opportunities to sell other products in their portfolios, such as loans, mortgages and savings, because they are not utilising the huge amount of data they hold to get deep insights into their customers’ needs.

“Hyper-personalisation is exactly what is missing from a lot of banks and I think incumbent banks can absolutely do more of it to help customers proactively maximise their finances,” he says.

“This is exactly what Meniga’s platform does. It enables banks to create, manage and deliver hyper-personalised information to the right customer in the right context at exactly the right time, in real time. Banks that use it are getting up to 30 per cent increase in cross-selling and a huge boost to their engagement.”

But there still appears to be a failure to grasp the nettle.

Ingólfsson gives the example of one UK incumbent that recently carried out a trial of the personalisation and sophistication of its digital communications where customers judged to

not sending enough valuable information to the people who need it.

“Truly impactful personalisation digs really deep into behavioural patterns of users’ transactional data, historic, forecast, and real time, from various sources.”

Complex and multilayered technology stacks are no excuse for established banks not to do it, says Panowicz.

“Digital transformation is a loaded term. It can mean so many things. But we like to boil it down to one practical test. Is my mobile banking app a bank in the pocket yet?

“Banks have complex technology landscapes, composed of hundreds of systems and applications. Many of them come from the layers of archaeology and there’s a myth that we need to modernise everything wholesale to make progress. That’s simply not true.

According to both Panowicz and Soni, AI, including generative AI, is transformative in these roles. Panowicz points to Belgium bank KBC, which has created an ‘ecosphere’ of digital solutions, including its hugely popular virtual assistant Kate, which has leveraged AI to become the go-to app for customers.

Turkish bank Garanti BBVA has recently integrated genAI into its virtual assistant Ugi, enabling a more intuitive and personalised experience for users.

“The predominant and highly valuable application [of AI] is in the contact centre of the bank, where we can create a very intelligent, very relevant machine that interacts with us much like a human would,” says Panowicz.

Soni also believes AI could give incumbent banks a distinct advantage over their neo rivals, and he urges them to embrace it.

Legacy banks could deliver great user experiences and engagements that are almost impossible to be replicated by the neos Raj Soni, Meniga

be less financially literate received a simpler dialogue in their banking app and vice versa. But after the trial showed that customer satisfaction barely budged, the bank decided not to pursue it.

“Of course, you must trial a use case before running with it, make sure it fits your customer base and the market that you’re in,” says Ingólfsson. “But make sure that it’s not generic and superficial personalisation, because that’s going to have minimal impact on the customer.

“Another example of where personalisation is not done well is where banks spam irrelevant offers and information that’s not useful to customers, and particularly to customers who don’t want these push notifications and these insights. At the same time, banks are probably

“Legacy technology is a fact of life. The most digitally advanced banks on the planet still run on on-prem core banking systems. However, they have mastered decoupling. The most successful digital transformations, where customers legitimately have the bank in their pocket, have been achieved by focussing on the mobile app and online banking as the transformation. That then pulls through across the technology clusters of the bank, but very surgically, rather than doing everything at once.

“These banks focus on providing modern front-end technology, modernising their omni-channel services layer, adding capabilities like personal financial management, a personalisation stack, and then taking a very pragmatic approach to progressively digitising customer journeys.”

Making your data work harder: Banking apps can use genAI to really personalise the user experience

“When you log into an online banking app, there are two fundamental models,” he explains.

“One is to carry on doing banking using the dashboards that you’re familiar with, but banks could also create a genAI wrap-around where you log into your online banking application in safe and secure mode and simply begin to ask the app the state of your finances – what you’ve spent money on, for instance.

“As more and more people get used to consuming content and finding info and research through AI platforms like DeepSeek and OpenAI, there’s a tendency to expect consumption of different services in the same mode as ChatGPT,” continues Soni.

“And on top of that is what legacy banks can do with all their data around specific customers. They could deliver great user experiences and engagements that are almost impossible to be replicated by the neos who lack the history and the context around that individual.”

Anything to silence those annoying nudges has to be an improvement, right?

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