Smarter Decisions.
Stronger Operations.
THEPAYTECH MAGAZINE
6
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Optimising the payments stream
For Spotify subscribers, how you pay is as important as what you play, which is why the platform works with partners across the world to plug into local rails
8
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Smarter decisions, stronger operations
Rebranding is tricky for a company as established and respected as Smartstream. But with AI broadening the customer base and transforming its relationships with existing clients, CEO Akber Jaffer has decided it’s time for change
10 EVENTS
TradFi versus DeFi: From disruption to definition
Las Vegas thrives on spectacle, so what better city to host Money 20/20 USA, a show renowned for its extravagant imagination and memorable moments, which this year marks a major industry shift
12 PAY TO CARD
The future of borderless payouts
Runa’s new Pay to Card turns the complicated process of remunerating and rewarding workers, partners and customers into a frictionless experience that can add strategic advantage to a business
15 CORPORATE BANKING
At the nexus of trade events
More than 200 banks currently use Finastra’s Trade Finance platform. Now they can also plug into a vast ecosystem of solutions providers to bring the retail banking experience to corporate customers
THEEDITOR’S VIEW
It’s difficult to miss the themes in this edition. They weren’t mined deliberately, but every conversation we’ve had recently seems to have revolved around two key issues: AI and decentralised finance.
AI, particularly generative AI, and its rapid, transformative impact on every aspect of our work and life, is the clear frontrunner. We’re all fickle consumers of it: quick to adopt the bits that bring us benefits, while resentful of a technology that seems to extend the social contract unacceptably far, and – its most strident critics say – could even write us out of existence (or at least any meaningful form of it).
While many vendors believe that resistance is futile, and the history of technology teaches us that we will adopt and adapt, it seems foolish to ignore red flags. The non-profit, non-partisan US thinktank, Pew Research Center, just released its findings from a survey of 25 countries, which showed that people are more concerned than excited about AI’s growing presence in daily life. They might not turn off Alexa tomorrow, but they clearly need reassurance if they are to trust technologies that they do not fully understand.
18 BUSINESS BANKING
Instant connection
The heavy lifting has been done. Now the moment of truth. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer has gone live: what will be the reality for banks and their corporate clients?
It was telling that at the recent Sibos event, many off-the-record conversations revealed senior FS executives were rolling up their sleeves and getting closer to the coding coalface, so they too could get a better understanding. Perhaps there’s a role here for the industry to explain and educate more. Sue Scott, Editor
This issue’s spinetingler quote comes from the Greek entrepreneur and crypto advocate Andreas Antonopoulos.
22 BLOCKCHAIN
Chain reaction
Swift and Chainlink went public on a major collaboration this year to allow institutions to use distributed ledger technology for transactions and smart contracts. Is it a signal that the on-chain market has reached critical mass?
24 CROSS-BORDER
Sell global, pay local
How do you effectively reach out to consumers in emerging markets when you’re sitting on the other side of the world?
You find a provider with feet on the ground
26 PAYMENTS
Passion project
We don’t just want to buy ‘stuff’ any more. We want to experience it. And Mastercard’s vision for an agentic future can help deliver that for consumers
28 AGENTIC BANKING
Humanising AI ebankIT’s new conversational banking assistant could transform consumer experience in the States and create new opportunities for smaller banks and credit unions
30 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
Mission-driven banking
We go inside USAA’s digital transformation to deliver the ultimate service to military personnel and their families
32 COMPLIANCE
Regtech’s best-kept secret?
NOTO360 is a quiet force that’s now reaching into every corner of financial crime prevention. As the regtech marks its 10th anniversary, co-founder Ivan Stefanov looks at what it’s helped clients achieve – and what’s left to do
35 TOKENISATION
Opening the stable door
Dynamic is powering mainstream stablecoin adoption in financial services, one wallet connection at a time
38 SME BANKING
The great rebundling
U.S. Bank is becoming a trusted resource of integrated back-office services for its 1.5 million small business customers, reversing a decade-long banking trend and addressing a real need
41 BRANCH BANKING
Face the truth
Restoring in-branch banking to thousands of UK communities is not just possible – it’s happening, with or without the banks, says Ron Delnevo
Modern payments with peace of mind
SUBSCRIPTIONS
the
Optimising paymen stream
How you pay is as important as what you play for Spotify subscribers, which is why the platform works with partners across the world to plug into local rails
It must be music to the ears of the world’s largest audio streaming service when more than 90 per cent of subscribers say it’s key to their everyday lives.
There are increasing numbers of Spotify streamers plugging in and paying up, all over the world. By July 2025, it had 276 million subscribers and 696 million monthly active users across 184 countries. That represented a 12 per cent year-on-year increase, driven not just by music, but also podcasts, audio books and artists’ merchandise that have all have been successfully added to Spotify’s revenue portfolio.
Its new partnership with OpenAI brings Spotify music and podcast recommendations to ChatGPT, too, helping users to discover and queue new material through conversations, rather than search, making on-demand entertainment even more accessible.
With so many listeners and artists across so many territories, payments – both in and out – play a vital role in Spotify’s business. It recently declared
that it had paid the music industry on which it built its success a record $10billion in 2024, more than any retailer has done in a single year in history.
Sandra Alzetta, Spotify’s Vice Presdient and Global Head of Commerce, says how customers pay is as important as what they play, and it wants to give them as much choice over that as their listening, in whatever country they’re enjoying it.
To achieve this seamlessly requires a ‘laser focus on customer needs’, and those needs vary massively across the globe. “So you can’t do it by yourself. You’re going to be working with a whole network of partners,” says Alzetta.
“The choice of partners is so important. We spend a lot of time scouring the landscape to understand what’s happening, who’s there, who’s the best of breed, choosing carefully, and then making sure that we’re working together, in a true partnership manner, to get the best value.
“Our Spotify payments team is really specialist. We have people who feel
Sandra
Alzetta, VP and Global Head of Commerce at Spotify
passionate about it and totally get the importance of the consumer and how to work well with our partners. Whether they’re in operations, the partnership team, strategy, or product, all of them need to have that desire to be the best in the payments world.”
Spotify’s partnership approach with payment providers started with global behemoths Visa and Mastercard but has evolved to become much more layered and nuanced, driven by customer needs.
For instance, in Latin America, where more than 60 per cent of the population is unbanked and more than 90 per cent do not have a credit card, Spotify has partnered with dLocal, a fintech specialising in cross-border payments for emerging economies, since 2020. Using dLocal’s 360 platform, Spotify’s Premium users can pay through online bank transfers or use cash to purchase vouchers that contain online codes.
In Southeast Asia, the preference is for digital wallets with Spotify using, among others, PayPay in Japan, Momo in Vietnam and Kakao Pay in South Korea.
Onboarding the right payment method can significantly drive adoption, as can being flexible about payment frequency, be it annual, monthly, weekly, or pay-as-you-go.
In India, subscriptions skyrocketed after Spotify enabled the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Dubai, India because you’ve really got to live and breathe those markets. They work very closely with other Spotify colleagues on the ground, as well as our local partners and industry bodies.
“Initially, we used it for pay-as-you-go, single transactions. But, as soon as we could, we switched on autopay for recurring transactions. Now, the vast majority of our volume is over UPI,” says Alzetta. “Our Indian users love it. It’s really helped us to expand our market.
“Over in Brazil, we have Pix for one-time payments with Pix Automatic launching soon. We’re working very closely with Banco do Brasil [to enable that] as part of the Early Adopter Programme, providing them with our feedback as we go along, so that they’re really making sure that they’ve got the right recurring
“Making sure we’ve got the right partners is really important. Making sure we have more than one partner per market is vital. If, for whatever reason, one of our partners’ services isn’t working, we just flip over to the other’s and put all of our volume through there.”
Sounding out the tech
In an era of geopolitical unrest and economic uncertainty, music is a tonic.
“We’re conscious that consumers are under pressure just now,” Alzetta says. “So, having more than 90 per cent of our customers tell us that Spotify is key to their everyday lives is a great position to be in.
report, giving full disclosure of its payment strategy. It underlines that it pays those holding the music publishing rights – record companies and music publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organisations, and collecting societies – not the artists themselves, and urges original creators from the outset to negotiate robust contracts to ensure they receive agreed amounts. As far as Spotify goes, those are calculated using a complex matrix, depending on whether the material is accessed for free over the platform or via a premium service.
As Spotify moves into new regions, the demand to include local music makers and other creatives means it needs to find appropriate local payout services for them, too.
Twelve million artists uploaded at least one track to Spotify in 2024, up from 10 million a year earlier, and the platform’s payouts to
solution. We know that, without question, it’s going to help us expand our market.
“UPI and Pix are two great examples of new ways of payments that our consumers love. But others include M-PESA in Kenya, which is responsible for the vast majority of our volume there. And in Nigeria, we use Verve, the local card payment method. Consumers love that. When we switched it on, it made a big difference to us.
“So it’s a matter of continually looking at what’s happening in our markets to figure out how consumers want to pay and making sure that we’re giving them the choice.”
It is not surprising that Spotify is so keen to keep customers happy. Unlike its streaming rivals YouTube and TikTok, which derive the lion’s share of their incomes from advertising, Spotify pulls in almost 90 per cent of its turnover from subscriptions, with its advertising income actually falling slightly in Q2 2025.
Acknowledging the huge importance of both retaining and growing its subscription base, Alzetta says it is fundamental that the company stays close to the markets it’s operating in.
“Most of my team is based in Europe, but in addition to that, we’ve people in the US,
It's a matter of continually looking at what's happening in our markets to figure out how consumers want to pay, and giving them the choice
“Music makes people feel good. We brought in podcasts and audiobooks, but just now we’re turning our attention back to the heart of Spotify, back to music, to make sure that we're continuing to evolve our offering, and that includes using AI with the AI DJ, AI playlists, Jam [a collaborative listening feature], and offline backup.
“At a local level, we’re looking at market nuances. For example, Indonesia loves K-pop. So we've a K-pop hub for subscribers there.
“We’re constantly building out our offering. So now with audiobooks, it’s possible to buy extra listening hours. It’s possible to add on extra listening hours on a subscription basis. It’s possible to buy listening hours for a sub-account holder. These are all changes to the way the payments work and it’s our job to make sure that we’re continuing to evolve the payments platform so that we’re enabling them. Disaster would be that we invest in new products, new plans, and the payments side says, ‘hey, you can’t do that!’.”
It is well-documented that many artists have been dissatisfied with the returns they receive from their Spotify streams. In response, Spotify began publishing its Loud and Clear annual
the wider music industry topped $10billion in 2024, up by $1billion year-on-year.
The report acknowledges a paradox.
“Streaming has allowed millions to easily share their music globally – that’s an amazing thing. But the sheer volume of uploaders means the fraction [of artists] who find success appears smaller over time,” it says. “The fact remains: thanks to streaming, more artists than ever before are generating royalties at every career stage. More than at any time in music history.”
Those performers are also finding a wider audience. According to the report, the majority see more money coming from abroad than from fans in their home countries.
Alzetta says it’s also in their interests that Spotify’s payments channels are not only super seamless, but super secure.
“More than 60 per cent of our revenue goes to the music industry,” says Alzetta. “So a lot of our focus goes on managing any fraud or abuse. That’s all about making sure that we’ve got the best possible machine learning solutions, again working with partners to keep on top of that.
“We love the fact that people love Spotify, but we need to make sure that if you’re listening to premium services, you’re paying for them.”
When Akber Jaffer took over as CEO of data solutions provider Smartstream in 2023, its reputation as a global financial technology giant among more than 2,000 clients – including the majority of Tier 1 institutions – was already firmly cemented. Understandable, therefore, that the new boss wouldn’t rush to shake things up. Instead, he invested time listening to colleagues, clients, and the market, before starting to chart a bold new strategic course for delivering automation and operational excellence with AI at its core. And he is signalling that intent through a rebrand designed to reflect both Smartstream’s evolution into a more agile, AI-driven partner to its existing financial services clients while raising its profile in other data-driven industries and markets.
There’s a change to the Smartstream domain, refreshed messaging, a new website and a product naming strategy whereby each solution now carries the ‘Smart’ prefix.
We asked Jaffer to talk us through the rationale behind the new visual
identity, with its interlocking links representing an industry shift from the transactional provision of software-as-a-service (SaaS) bolt-ons to relationship-based interconnectivity, and his broader vision for Smartstream as he takes it into a new era.
THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: Tell us about the journey that’s brought you to this rebrand, and what it means for Smartstream’s strategic direction.
AKBER JAFFER: Smartstream is widely recognised as a mission-critical part of our clients’ business operations, unlocking insights from very complex data for them. We wanted to reflect the value we were providing with the right narrative.
The rebrand has been about making sure there’s a clear articulation and understanding of our business, what we stand for, the value we deliver, how we should be perceived and the kind of relationship we want to have with our clients and the relationship they want to have with us.
Akber Jaffer,
Chief Executive Officer at Smartstream
I’ve been CEO for just under two years now, so this change isn’t something that happened straightaway. It’s been percolating in the background and resulted from having conversations internally and talking to customers about the core value of what Smartstream provides. We consulted internally, too, to make sure all views were reflected, which is why it took a little time to complete – and our people feel really good about it. So, the end result you see is a reflection from multiple stakeholders, including our own folks.
It’s also important to recognise we come from a place of having done some really great work with great brands – particularly in the capital markets, financial services and investment management space, both buy side and sell side – as well as on a broader basis with insurance and other corporates.
TPM: So, you’ve obviously taken the time to really understand not just Smartstream but its stakeholders, too. How
Smarter Decisions. Stronger Operations.
Rebranding is tricky for a company as established and respected as Smartstream. But with AI broadening the customer base and transforming its relationships with existing clients, CEO Akber Jaffer has decided it’s time for change
has that period of reflection impacted your view of future priorities?
AJ: There are shifts going on in the market, in terms of how insights are garnered from data, and we’re seeing a marrying of human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). As consumers, we can see the real value of that and, increasingly, business is acknowledging it, too.
That’s certainly the focus of the technology evolution as it stands today. There’s real opportunity for connected, frictionless enterprises where data is connected, clean and capable of being used to not only improve operations, but also decrease costs, get more efficient, move people to higher-value activities and generate more revenue.
This is potentially empowering for Smartstream as we already have real credibility in this space, and we also see the next technology evolution that’s coming as a massive opportunity for our clients and, therefore, for us.
So, we wanted to make sure we made the adjustments in our business strategy and investments to reflect that narrative and then work back from that.
We launched AI Reconciliations, our SaaS product, and major features of that in the middle of last year and it’s really resonating in the market. That’s not the only thing we do – we have a number of services and product offerings – but, ultimately, what ties it all together is fusing that human intelligence with our AI to maximise value for our customers.
TPM: How would you summarise the message behind the new logo and how will you reflect that in tangible activities and in which regions?
AJ: One of the messages we’re trying to get across is how we’re helping our enterprises connect the dots, part of which is taking disparate data, connecting it and providing insight and intelligence from that. We’re investing a lot in research and development to support our proposition.
Another shift is anchoring everything in customer success and what I call post-customer success, because we’re seeing our relationship with them evolve. Where, historically, people used to have solution sets, and enterprises would procure them, now enterprises subscribe to them, which is a commercial model as well as a usage model.
Our very high customer retention rates show we’re delivering for them, but we want to ensure that continues.
For example, North America is obviously a very large market, but I don’t think we were set up perfectly to capture that, so we’ve really re-energised and reformatted the way we look at North America.
We’re investing significantly to maintain the spirit of our business globally by ensuring the solutions customers take from us are continually delivering value for them.
Then, we continue to invest in our existing products – not just in things like Smartstream Air, but others, too, to make sure they’re using the latest technologies, which ensures our clients are able to scale with their customers much more easily, with much more agility and ability to adapt and change.
TPM: New logos can be really powerful in driving growth for companies when they’re correctly aligned to business strategy, Amazon’s ‘smiley arrow’ launch in 2000 being a great example. How does your new logo change or reflect your ambitions?
AJ: It reflects that enormous opportunity I’m talking about. Historically, we’ve really focussed on capital markets and financial services, but we also see wider opportunity in other segments facing the same issues, and our solutions can be applied to those as well.
The rebrand has been about making sure there’s a clear articulation of what we stand for, the value we deliver, and the kind of relationship we want to have with our clients
Our history means we are very referenceable with key brands in the market and the changes we’re making to support the rebrand in terms of geography, technology, product and how we talk about ourselves – form the pillars which will ensure we can really capitalise on that opportunity going forward.
TPM: Two years into the job, are there things you’ve discovered from the various consultations you’ve done that have blown your expectations out of the water?
AJ: Before I joined as CEO, obviously I checked around to see how the business was perceived and, I have to say, Smartstream had a really good reputation in the market – customers would say things like ‘these guys really
understand their business and are able to deliver value for us’.
What constantly amazes me is the deep subject matter expertise we have in the business, because, ultimately, good customer service, customer success and technology improvements come down to having people in the organisation that really understand – that’s what shifts the needle. Also, my management team are deep thinkers and doers, in terms of how we can constantly enhance customer value.
We’re not a new kid on the block, we’ve been serving customers for a long time, which is a testament to our investments in continuous improvement. Years ago, we established a data science, machine learning and innovation lab in Austria, and we’re still making such investments today, which continue to pay dividends.
TPM: AI is the buzz phrase of the moment, with a perception that you sprinkle a bit of AI on something and it turns to gold. Looking at some of your tangible improvements in product delivery, experience and execution, how is this embracing of AI, by individuals and businesses, impacting how you bring products to market?
AJ: There are two aspects to this, and the first relates to how we operate the business. There are technologies and applications we use that provide what I call productivity boosts for our people, so that they can get more things done, to a higher quality, at a faster pace.
But maintaining our customer focus also ensures we focus this on providing a better service with much more specific responses, and we’ve seen good use cases for that.
For customers, we’ve been producing new capabilities within our technology and services that leverage machine learning and AI, and we continue to see customer take-up for these. Now, they do have challenges in terms of ensuring they have all the components to get maximum productivity from these tools, like making sure their data sets are centralised and clean, but they’re gradually overcoming those and we really are seeing some good use cases and feedback.
We’ll see what the next phase of evolution brings for these technologies, but we believe it’s combining our exceptional human expertise with artificial intelligence in our tools, products and services that will ensure we continue to deliver for this and future generations of clients.
TradFi versus DeFi: From disruption to definition
Las Vegas thrives on spectacle, so what better city to host Money20/20 USA, a show renowned for its extravagant imagination and memorable moments, which this year marks a major industry shift
Money20/20 was established in 2011, when the very concept of fintech was new; today, it’s a crucible where the future of finance is forged in real time.
The 2025 show returns to the US under the banner ‘Create the Future’, and this time, it will be offering a live insight into how fintech’s evolution is being shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) and alternative finance (AltFi), real-time rails and payments orchestration.
The Venetian expo complex is once again becoming a ground zero for payments, banking and embedded
finance strategy as thousands of C-suite leaders, founders and regulators convene to hear from leading keynotes, visit themed summits and the supercharged show floor, and translate bold ideas into commercial deals.
This powerful forum has built a reputation as the go-to for gaining the industry inside track, as well as being a recognised ‘save the date’ for major industry announcements. Its guest list is packed with fintech movers and shakers.
Over the years, the razmatazz for which M20/20 has become famous has brought to life the latest industry trends in sometimes bizarre, but always innovative and unforgettable ways.
Last year’s USA event saw attendees demonstrating the bridge between human connection and digital innovation by scanning their badges before connecting with their counterparts physically through high fives, hugs, or handshakes – interactions which were translated into binary code, and turned into a live digital artwork display. Participants earned gold coins redeemable for limited edition booty.
While 2025 will no doubt be equally entertaining, organisers say the
Jessica Blue, Executive Vice President of Money20/20
USA 2025
agenda is configured to push beyond dreamweaving and place greater focus on deal-making – maximising Money20/20’s unique ability to drive the kinds of tangible commercial outcomes that have fuelled industry growth. Its serious underlying purpose will see generative and autonomous AI frame risk, compliance and customer experience debates. Others will explore how open finance and embedded payments are nudging business models toward platforms – with sessions and sponsor showcases heavily themed around those dynamics.
Beyond this ideas-sharing, the now-established Money Awards will once again showcase the best of sector innovation, helping to surface finalists whose work represents the most inspirational use cases. For journalists and dealmakers alike, the show is as much about trendspotting as it is about unveiling innovations with the potential to scale.
The show’s Executive Vice President Jessica Blue describes how Money20/20 USA 2025 will lean into its role as not just as a spotlight, but as a platform for execution.
“What we’re now seeing in financial services is the convergence of DeFi and TradFi, and AI becoming part of what everyone is doing rather just hype around a concept – it’s now reality, and this is one example of why, when it comes to our content this year, it’s about creating conversations on the stages which are actually about defining what the future of money is,” says Blue. “We’re very focussed on having practical insights that people can take away and implement.
“This really is an interesting inflection point in the industry and we feel very strongly that the content we’ve put together reflects that and helps shape it, with the industry leaders we’re featuring on our stages all looking at practical ideas for rolling up sleeves and using AI technology to improve compliance, credit risk, and operational efficiency.”
With more than 350 speakers and 80 AI-themed sessions, technology’s role across almost every vertical – from payments to embedded finance and banking operations – will be considered.
Making the connection
In an era where cryptocurrencies and blockchain are emerging as potential silver bullets for democratising access to finance and enabling real-time global payments, one of the biggest format changes this time is the introduction of The Intersection, a dedicated space for exploring how DeFi finance and traditional banking can not only coexist but collaborate.
“We’ve never before created a stage around a single topic, but this convergence is too important to ignore,” says Blue. Instead of treating DeFi as a sideline or speculative discussion, this stage will ensure it is integrated into the core conversation. With its own lounge, meetups, and networking, Money20/20 will be actively signalling how the divide between TradFi and DeFi is narrowing.
synthetic finance to embedded payments and AI-governed retail banking.
While this year’s format once again looks to take the conversation forward, there has been one constant in Money20/20’s path so far; its focus on the vital role of startups as both barometers and catalysts.
Past shows have launched firms that later secured major capital and influence. Its role as a platform for fledgling businesses to transform into household names, in everything from regulatory solutions to embedded payments infrastructure, by enabling connections, has become a core part of its story.
“Startups are the heartbeat of the ecosystem – 12 from last year have already gone on to raise major funding,” says Blue.
Tips for those to watch at this year’s event include Virtue AI, Tesser (stablecoin rails for banks), and Parcher AI (compliance automation). And, Money20/20 is never just about its official panels; the conversations that take place in between are often where the real magic happens. Some of the most talked-about moments from past shows weren’t planned speeches but spontaneous debates – like the Sunday Night Live moments, where rivalling views from TradFi and fintechs clashed in ways that exposed real tensions and opportunities.
It is also a catalyst for game-changing networking. Parties, meetups, side-events, and street takeovers have always been part of the show, but the 2025 programme promotes this more intentionally by moving industry nights earlier, integrating networking into the show via lounges, and creating off-show-floor entertainment including a Venetian restaurant row street party.
We are at a point where fintech’s capability to effect change is structural, not incremental
2025’s keynote lineup reflects the event’s ability to draw together voices mapping the full arc of financial transformation. Speakers like Michael Saylor, US entrepreneur and former CEO of MicroStrategy, Google Maps creator and computer programmer Bret Taylor, Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange, AI entrepreneur and Anthropic founder Daniela Amodei, Chris Britt, founder of mobile banking app Chime, and Celia Edwards Karam, President of Retail Bank at Capital One, cover everything from decentralised assets and
“These cultural touchstones are critical — they’re where trust gets built, deals get mooted, ideas get shared,” adds Blue.
Money20/20’s global footprint is steadily building as it aims to take its transformative influence into new geographies with their rapidly emerging financial markets. It recently added a successful Riyadh event to its existing European and USA and Asia annual shows. And Blue explains why the Money20/20 concept matters now more than ever
“We are at a point where fintech’s capability to effect change is structural, not incremental. Technologies like AI, stablecoins, DeFi, embedded finance and global payment rails aren’t future possibilities; they’re live business imperatives.
“The crossover between established institutions and insurgent models is no longer
EYE OPENERS
Hot tips for what to look out for in Las Vegas
n The Intersection stage How does DeFi/TradFi collaboration get articulated? Will there be live deal announcements, or at least concrete roadmaps?
n The Emergent Stage Built in the round, it literally gives attendees a 360-degree view of pressing industry themes
n A newly designed Startup Hub Featuring around 20 startups as well as VC funders, the Hub will see Virtue AI, Tesser and Parcher AI among others, not just demo-ing, but being evaluated, funded, or acquired
n AI sessions with use cases Especially ones focussed on risk, compliance, credit modelling and efficiency. Which firms have moved beyond prototypes, and how are incumbents responding?
n Policy and regulation debates Especially around the opportunity – and challenge – of stablecoins, open finance and AI governance
n Networking transformation Look out for new event formats – Industry Night, street parties and curated meetups
n Given the extensive possibilities on offer, Blue advises delegates make full use of the event app (GPS, mapping of booths, bookmarking) to help them plan, divide, conquer and adjust on the go.
just theoretical; it’s being operationalised. Past shows showed policy as background noise; now regulation is centre stage. Whether in Asia, Europe or the US, Money20/20 is where policy meets practice.
“The success of previous Money20/20 events shows that attendees value not just what is said, but how, where and with whom.
“Las Vegas 2025 seems set to be a landmark, not simply for its scale, but for the clarity of its purpose. Create the Future isn’t just the event theme. It’s a statement of where the industry is, where it’s heading, and what it needs to become.”
Runa’s new Pay to Card capability streamlines the process of remunerating and rewarding workers, partners, and customers – eliminating complexity and enabling businesses to deliver funds with speed and precision. The result is a more agile, strategic approach to global payouts.
Legacy payout systems come with a consistent set of hurdles: complex bank details, slow processing times, inconsistent experiences from country to country, and the constant headache of compliance.
For businesses trying to scale globally –whether they’re paying creators, partners, gig workers, or customers – the challenges stack up fast. Business moves at the speed of now, but traditional payouts often do not.
It’s time to think differently about payouts. And expect better. Pay to Card offers a smarter way forward. These increasingly popular payouts allow businesses to tap into the cards people already carry and use daily, making sending funds anywhere in the world as easy as sending an email. They offer payouts without borders. Fast, flexible, and seamless.
The problem with the old model
Traditional cross-border payouts were designed for a different era. They rely on:
n Bank details that few people know off-hand and often can’t easily access How many people have their routing and bank account numbers memorised?
n Local rails that don’t translate globally ACH in the US, BACS in the UK, SEPA in Europe, UPI in India all have different rules and timelines. They’re just a few examples.
n Vague timelines Funds can take days or nearly a week to arrive, leaving recipients in the dark and waiting for their money.
n Hidden fees Currency conversion and intermediary banks often chip away at what recipients actually receive, as can expensive wire transfers.
n Lacklustre support experiences When payouts go wrong, support teams are left dealing with frustrated recipients and often don’t have immediate solutions to appease them. That’s if and when they can be reached at all.
n The recipient doing the heavy lifting Making sure you have the right details, waiting for the funds, or even going into a physical bank branch.
For businesses, this fragmented landscape drives up operational costs and risks. Instead of focussing on growth, they get bogged down managing payout complexity across multiple countries and partners.
Payouts shouldn’t be just a back-office task. Done well, they can become a driver of loyalty, engagement, and revenue. If you pay people how they want to be paid – instantly, securely,
and in a locally relevant way – you strengthen trust and unlock long-term value.
Enter Pay to Card: A simpler way
Pay to Card turns a complicated process into something radically simple. Instead of needing bank details or new accounts, recipients can use a debit or prepaid card they already have. They can also be issued a new prepaid card just for payouts.
Behind the scenes, Pay to Card leverages the robust global networks of Visa and Mastercard, which already reach billions of people in nearly every country. Here’s how it works in practice:
1You initiate the payout From your system or directly from a trusted partner, you set the payout amount.
2Currency conversion is handled automatically If you’re funding in USD but your recipient is in the UK, for instance, conversion happens in the background.
3Funds arrive instantly The recipient sees local currency appear on their debit card, ready to spend immediately.
4You provide transparency Real-time tracking confirms when the payout lands, so you and the recipient are in the know.
The result is a frictionless experience for both sender and recipient. No waiting, no chasing, no complex onboarding.
Why Pay to Card matters for global businesses
Pay to Card offers a tech-enabled strategic advantage for businesses. By removing barriers and delivering funds instantly, organisations can:
n Reach more people, faster If you’re paying a gig worker in Brazil, a content creator in Germany, or a partner in India, recipients can securely load and store information for their preferred payout card from their physical or digital wallet. Plus, you don’t have to collect, manage, and protect sensitive data. All you need as the sender is an email address.
n Cut costs and risk There’s no need to manage multiple banking relationships or worry about failed payments due to missing details.
n Boost engagement and retention Instant, seamless payouts show recipients you value their time, building loyalty and trust.
n Scale with confidence One method works everywhere, eliminating the patchwork of payout systems across different regions.
n Create a local experience globally Using local language to deliver funds in local currency means they’re ready to use right away.
For recipients, the benefit is real money, real fast, delivered straight to the card they already use every day.
Use cases: where Pay to Card shines
Because it’s so flexible, Pay to Card unlocks value across industries and use cases:
n Gig economy and marketplaces
Paying drivers, couriers, or freelancers instantly helps keep your business competitive and workers motivated. You can pay freelancers, influencers and other gig workers without worrying about whether they’re set up on a specific payment platform.
n Employee incentives Companies with a global workforce can deliver bonuses or stipends without the friction of bank wires. This gives you access to global talent without a hefty price tag.
n Customer refunds and rebates Instead of waiting days for a refund, customers see funds land back on their card in real time. This concept also works for rebates that immediately reinforce desired behaviours, or even appeasements when you need to make something right.
n Loyalty programmes and rewards Flexible, spend-anywhere funds beat the limitations of traditional vouchers or closed-loop systems. Want to reward a customer a reward for their loyalty or for making a purchase? Consider it done.
It’s time to think differently about payouts. And expect better
Wherever there’s a need to move money instantly and globally, Pay to Card offers a smarter path.
Pay to Card can be easy with the right partner
While Pay to Card technology is powerful, businesses need more than rails. They also need a partner who makes it seamless to implement and manage. This combination of the right infrastructure and a global payouts platform removes friction at every step.
With a single integration through the Runa API, businesses can embed payouts directly into their workflows and consolidate multiple payout options into one powerful system. Whether domestic or cross-border, funds reach
recipients instantly, turning payouts from a bottleneck to a growth driver. Runa offers:
n Localised funds Currency conversion and compliance are handled in the background. Businesses can fund in USD and Runa will convert automatically, cover encryption, licensing, and cross-border compliance to give businesses peace of mind.
n Transparency and security Every payout is tracked in real time with delivery confirmations. Thanks to Runa Assure, security is embedded at the core, ensuring businesses can move money confidently and in compliance, while recipients get funds without risk.
n Seamless experience for recipients
Recipients don’t need new apps or accounts. With just an email and their existing card, they can access funds instantly. It feels local, even when it’s global.
n Better value Different payout methods can be combined to deliver even more value. For example, receiving a bonus gift card for selecting a preferred payout option.
From transaction to transformation
Payouts are often treated as the last mile of a transaction. But with the right infrastructure, they can become a powerful tool for better performance and user experiences. Faster payouts mean more engaged employees, happier partners, and more loyal customers. Instead of having to wait weeks for a payout or having to go to a physical bank location, people can get their money with a swipe or tap on their smartphone.
Runa makes this possible by turning payouts into something more than a cost centre. Businesses can move money while moving their relationships, reputation, and revenue forward.
Breaking down global barriers
Payouts don’t have to be border-limited anymore. People expect speed, flexibility, and simplicity, whether they’re ordering dinner, streaming content, or getting paid.
Pay to Card is one of the clearest examples of how financial technology can deliver on that expectation for a seamless digital lifestyle. It strips away complexity and gives businesses the ability to meet recipients where they are and how they want.
Global payouts don’t have to be an obstacle or an afterthought. Instead, they can serve up a competitive advantage that helps businesses expand faster, engage better, and lead with confidence.
Power instant FX and multi-currency accounts – built for g aming, money service, and digital asset companies ready to scale without the slog.
CORPORATEBANKING
At the nexus of trade events
More than 200 banks currently use Finastra’s Trade Finance platform. Now they can also plug into a vast ecosystem of solutions providers to bring the retail banking experience to corporate customers
Finastra’s motto is ‘innovating finance together’, and at this year’s Sibos that collaborative principle was very much in evidence.
The company used the event to launch its Trade Innovation Nexus integration layer, which is designed to streamline and accelerate the adoption of its Trade Innovation software.
That promotes greater interoperability between core banking systems and third-party platforms and solutions addressing trade and supply chain workflow automation, making integration management easier and more scalable, and enhancing data and business visibility.
ThePaytechMagazine spoke to Matthieu Andrieu, who oversees those
solutions as Head of Corporate Banking, Solutions Consulting Director. Here’s what he had to say about the macro trends currently being seen in global trade and supply chain finance, how the demand for faster and more transparent trade finance is impacting lending, and some of the main challenges facing the marketplace.
Plus, how Finastra’s Trade Innovation Nexus layer can support both users of its corporate banking platform and its partners.
THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: Can you talk us through some of the macro trends that you’re seeing in global trade and supply chain finance right now?
MATTHIEU ANDRIEU: Documentary trade finance is fully driven by the
Matthieu Andrieu, Head of Corporate Banking, Solution Consulting Director at Finastra
regulation. And we’ve seen lots of changes recently.
Countries such as France, Germany, the US, plus some countries in the Middle East, like Abu Dhabi and Southeast Asia, have newly confirmed that the electronic document, or e-document, is of equal value to the physical document.
There is a shift in business from manual processing of a paper-based document to the electronic document. And it has not only had an impact on the technology, but also on the target operating model for most of the banks worldwide.
Some parts of the world, like Africa and South America, are not as engaged as other countries, but it will come sooner or later there, too.
Rise of the machines: Banks are increasingly using technology to transform the customer journey
TPM: How is the demand for faster, more transparent trade finance impacting lending practices?
MA: Most of the banks, when they consider trade finance or working capital, are thinking about their operational model – the automation of the processing in their back-office systems.
This is not the place where the user experience has been enhanced, as it has in retail banking. So, for instance, mobile banking is not something that has been a key differentiator for the bank when it comes to trade finance or corporate lending.
However, some banks do want to invest in this space, and they want to dramatically change the customer journey. So, we’ve seen demand for chatbots and for generative artificial intelligence, but also for mobile banking, for those kinds of businesses.
TPM: Talk us through some of the key challenges for banks and their partners. Specifically, what does your Trade Innovation platform already have in place and how does that help the banks and partners?
MA: We have more than 200 banks using our trade finance platform, which is called Trade Innovation, and we are engaged daily with those banks.
There are two main challenges that they are facing. One is to follow the regulation and continuously adopt the best practice. For instance, every year you have a new Swift release – with the latest expected in November
Nexus will be used by the banks on top of our corporate banking platform to connect, transact, maintain and build
innovative solutions… It’s dedicated to finance; it’s driven by business – and we do it together
this year – and most of the customers need to migrate from the older MT to the newer MX messaging standards. So, that’s one challenge for the banks, to continuously be up to date, according to those standards.
The other challenge, of course, is in the definition of an ecosystem. In the past, most of the banks trusted one vendor to be their solution provider. Nowadays, the banks need to deal with a large ecosystem, and so the importance of OpenAPI is at the top of their priorities.
TPM: In terms of your product roadmap and innovation, name some of the key milestones or products that you’re looking to use to transform the industry over the next few years. MA: Being a global player, we are seeing different milestones in Asia compared to
Europe or the US. But something which is a fundamental trend is Cloud adoption.
We’ve seen most of the banks, especially in Western countries, asking for Cloud-based solutions. And this is the first step towards moving to managed services.
So, there’s a tremendous opportunity for a software provider like Finastra to become a solutions provider and to manage, maintain and upgrade all those solutions. That’s a different business model, and that’s also a different partnership that we need to agree with the bank. That’s a fundamental trend in corporate banking.
TPM: Talk us through what the new Nexus integration layer can do.
MA: Innovating finance together is our mantra, and so Nexus will be used by the banks on top of our corporate banking platform to connect, transact, maintain and build innovative solutions.
They can use blockchain or AI, machine learning, Cloud-based solutions, or on-premise solutions. This will easily open the door for the banks to launch new products, for instance, but also to adopt a new target operating model to engage with a new fintech company from anywhere in the world.
It’s not limited to specific countries; it’s a global solution. It’s dedicated to finance; it’s driven by business – and we do it together. It’s a three-party agreement between the bank, us at Finastra, and the fintech partners that exist all over the world.
The heavy lifting has been done. Now the moment of truth. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is about to go live. What will be the reality for banks and their corporate clients?
We’re almost a month into the new, always-on world of instant payments in Europe.
Banks can rightly congratulate themselves on having got everything in place in time – the heavy lifting has been significant on the technology front. But it wasn’t until Europe pulled the big switch on SEPA Instant Credit Transfer on October 9 that the true impact on their liquidity and treasury teams could begin to be assessed.
From that date, all banks were mandated to both issue and receive instant payments. Although it’s still too early to say if it will be a catalyst for a revolution or an evolution, we asked Chris Jameson and David Voss of Bank of America’s Global Payments Solutions (GPS) team in EMEA to give their insights into what SEPA Instant payments might mean for their corporate clients who are operating both inside of and with the European bloc.
The background For Jameson, Head of Product Management for GPS EMEA, SEPA Inst marks a ‘hugely important development’ for the banking industry that creates ‘an important change for us and our clients’.
“What we and corporates need are resilience, convenience and security, and the SEPA Instant infrastructure provides all of these things,” he says.
Chris Jameson, Head of
Product Management
for Global Payments Solutions EMEA at Bank of America
David Voss, Head of Payments and Receivables for Global Payments Solutions EMEA at Bank of America
“Up until now, we’ve seen instant payments used in sectors such as ecommerce, where there’s a retail element to the payment flow. Now, we’re going to see that open up to other sectors, with SEPA Instant becoming more mainstream.”
Voss, Head of Payments and Receivables for GPS EMEA, adds: “What the regulation essentially does is make SEPA Instant payments just as accessible as SEPA Credit Transfers. It’s put them on equal terms with classical payment methods.
“While we may not see an overnight avalanche [in increased usage of instant payments], clearly, for the industry, it’s a very important milestone, and we see it as a potential inflection point for instant payments to really grow.
“It’s a call to action for corporate treasuries to think about what an increase in volume of instant payments means for them. From a treasurer’s perspective, we need to be prepared for scenarios that didn’t exist before.”
Corporate treasuries
With the emergence of national real-time payment systems in the EU, starting with the UK in 2008, the European Payments Council developed SEPA Instant to facilitate flows across the economic area.
It was launched in November 2017 but was only available to businesses and consumers whose banks chose to support it – many charged a premium for using it, and some subsequently withdrew. Mandating instant capability, charged at the same price as credit transfers, breathes new life into the framework.
October’s deadline for all EU banks and payment service providers to be able to send instant payments followed January’s deadline for them all to be set up to receive payments. At the
start of 2025, the proportion of credit transfers made via instant payments in the EU was below 20 per cent – so the potential for growth is huge. But a key implication is the need for banks to have an increased liquidity buffer to cope with money being withdrawn from accounts outside traditional office hours. Conversely, businesses can take advantage of faster money flows that arrive around the clock.
Voss says new payment scenarios include ‘large volumes of instant payments that are coming in out-of-hours – it could be receiving payments in patterns that they’re not typically used to seeing, in terms of liquidity, and that may require them to be more flexible to have different approaches to pooling and payments’.
He adds: “In a digital world, speed is key to our clients, their users and end-users. There is an opportunity now for corporates to differentiate themselves by using speed of payment as a way of more actively managing their liquidity line, and, ultimately, building new kinds of client experience.
“So, we think this is potentially a big change for corporates over time, and one that our corporates will need to look at from both a technology and staffing perspective.”
Jameson says new instant payment use-cases could include wage payments to staff or the settlement of invoices between businesses.
But just because payments can be made at any time, he doesn’t believe firms will necessarily switch overnight.
“Despite us being really bullish about instant payments and SEPA Instant, at the outset, many of our clients will continue to be focussed on ‘on time’,” he says. “Based on their own infrastructure and payments landscape, the clients they have and counterparties they need to pay, they’ll be considering what’s best for them.
INSTANT CONNECTION
“Many large companies have run their treasury organisations in a certain way for many years. They will be using batch processing structures, and using instant payments would be a material shift from a process and technology perspective for many corporates.
“Some of the newer companies that have grown in the last 10 years will be digitally native, API native and will be ready to move quickly, and some are already using SEPA Instant, for example, with us, via API.
“But, for other companies, this will require a lot of effort. They will need to evaluate their current processes and infrastructure and consider whether the benefits outweigh the costs of making a change.
“Some will want to move to instant collections. From a working capital perspective, that definitely makes sense. Corporates could collect money faster and perhaps pay money slightly later, so that could be a first step, and it’ll be a gradual process for clients to move along that continuum.
“When you start to make payments 24/7, your treasury team and your accounts payable teams may also need to align their availability accordingly. How do you build out the talent within your corporate treasury organisation that can facilitate that across time zones and 24/7? There’s a lot for clients to think about.”
Jameson also points out that the data richness offered by SEPA Instant will allow for more automation of reconciliation processes, and thereby reduce administrative costs. It could even result in lower prices all round – for both SEPA Credit Transfer payments, which typically clear in one day, and SEPA Instant payments, which cannot cost more than its slower cousin under the regulation.
“A treasury team may be able to leverage SEPA Instant to solve a new challenge or
From a treasurers’ perspective, we need to be prepared for scenarios that didn’t exist before David Voss
opportunity within their business, and doing that would help them justify the technology build and dip their toe in the water from a SEPA Instant perspective,” he suggests. “Then, if there is an opportunity for them to shift some of the core SEPA Credit Transfer activity and move that across, that will come over time.”
Regarding use cases that suit SEPA Instant payments in the near term, Voss and Jameson can draw on what they’ve witnessed in other regions when instant payment systems were rolled out.
Jameson suggests insurers could use it to forward cash to policyholders in the process of making a claim – for example, someone with injuries who needs to pay for care in a foreign hospital. Likewise, emergency payments of social security benefits is another ideal candidate for SEPA Instant.
Voss adds: “Logistics, cash-on-delivery and anything that’s related to movement of goods is a key place to look at. If you look at the finance area, beyond insurance, things like high-value deposits, auto deposits, mortgage deposits. These kinds of use-cases come into play as well.”
CONNECTION
A point of inflection: SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is a game-changer
Fraud and liability
Under the EU Instant Payments Regulation, a SEPA Instant payment must be received, with funds available to the payee and confirmation sent to the payer’s payment service provider, within 10 seconds.
In an effort to mitigate against criminal activity, EU banks must now screen all customers daily against EU sanctions lists. Banks are managing potential fraud threats with a range of screening systems to flag problems and reduce volumes of false positives.
All payment service providers must also facilitate SEPA Instant’s Verification of Payee feature, which cross-checks the payee’s account name and IBAN. If they don’t match, the payer is alerted.
focus on fraud risk. That was certainly seen in Brazil with Pix.”
Instances of ‘lightning kidnappings’, where people were forced, often at gunpoint, to initiate a Pix transfer, soared in Brazil within a year of the payment system’s introduction, and the government was forced to take measures to limit its use.
Real-time payments mean the money goes out of the door in real-time, and that equates to real-time fraud, too.
“In the UK, a 50-50 liability split [between the respective payment service providers involved in an authorised push payment fraud] was brought into play.
“There was a high [liability value] cap, which ultimately came down because that would have been extremely restrictive for some
parties outside the SEPA zone via its One Leg Out Credit (OCT) Instant scheme, which can allow payments from across the globe to arrive in participating EU bank accounts in seconds, 24/7, via an entry-payment service provider within the SEPA zone.
Voss says: “There are clear opportunities for cross-border real-time payments to really take off. That is something that many of us in the industry have been working on for many years, and for which there is a lot of client demand.
“They are looking to manage their liquidity position for all of their trade, including complex supply chains, so this becomes something that is really high value.
“As the SEPA scheme matures, we have to think how we can help move money cross-border in a real-time fashion. As a global bank that has witnessed and participated in many of these schemes in other parts of the world, we realise there remain challenges, but we’re already seeing good examples of collaborations, whether that’s between India and Singapore, or in the Middle East, based on ISO 20022 or other standardisation.
“There are also other initiatives, from Swift, or, in the SEPA space, there’s the OCT Instant initiative, largely used at the moment by banks in Spain and Andorra, but there’s an ongoing consultation about potentially expanding that.”
For Jameson, the fact that SEPA Instant payments feature ISO 20022 messaging standards gives him hope that global connectivity isn’t too far away.
It's a small world: Will regulation see global instant payments become the norm rather than the exception?
Ultimately, much of the responsibility to minimise fraud is carried by payment service providers. But once money is transferred to a payee’s account, it’s gone, and consumers and businesses don’t have the consumer protections offered by a credit card payment, for example.
While Jameson and Voss believe Verification of Payee will go a long way to boost confidence in SEPA Instant payments, they say more will continue to be done at an industry level.
“As a global bank, we’ve benefited from insights from other parts of the world,” says Jameson.
“So, if you think about Brazil and its Pix infrastructure, or India with UPI, where some of these payment systems have grown rapidly, there’s been an increased
smaller PSPs to operate in the market – the liabilities would have been so significant for any payment that they initiated.
“For the EU, Verification of Payee is really being pushed as the main protection tool as we go into the real-time payments era. But I do think there’s more work needed around that liability piece.”
Global instant payments
After decades of navigating labyrinthine global payment systems, the holy grail for instant payments is surely integration that allows money to flow in real-time between continents.
The latest milestone for SEPA Instant Credit Transfer mandates access to the system for all EU bank customers. But more than that, the European Payment Council provides access for
The huge body of work the industry has done around ISO 20022 will be a core foundation to build on for that interoperability we’re all looking for Chris Jameson
He says: “The huge body of work the industry has done around ISO 20022 will be a really firm foundation. It won’t be a silver bullet that ties all of these infrastructures together, but it’s certainly a core foundation to build on for that interoperability that we’re all looking for.
“From an interoperability perspective, the ISO layer underneath SEPA Instant will be a major facilitator. And all of this is tied into what the G20 was trying to achieve by 2027 in terms of faster, cheaper, more resilient cross-border payments which will come about by tying these real-time payment schemes together.”
BLOCKCHAIN
Chaın reaction
Swift and Chainlink went public on a major collaboration this year to allow institutions to use distributed ledger technology for transactions and smart contracts. Is it a signal that the on-chain market has reached critical mass?
Chainlink’s development of blockchain as a credible rail to power global finance has crossed major hurdles this year, as evidenced by the fintech’s presentations at Sibos Frankfurt.
Work with Swift to use its global financial information standards to provide access to, from and between blockchains was big news, showcasing UBS as a first use case with a bank. It’s also pursuing partnerships with major institutions to improve corporate actions data efficiency.
We spoke with Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov and the firm’s President of Capital Markets Fernando Vazquez to discover the significance of these projects and ask where the financial assets industry goes next.
THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: Chainlink had a longstanding collaboration with global messaging service Swift. Can you explain how the two have been working together.
SERGEY NAZAROV: Our work with Swift has been focussed initially on interoperability. There are two types. The first is getting Swift systems, Swift messages, Swift keys to connect to blockchains through Chainlink, so that a Swift message can define what a blockchain transaction
Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink
Fernando Vázquez, President of Capital Markets at Chainlink
should do, what a smart contract should do. For instance, should it create an account? Should it move a stablecoin? Should it use that stablecoin for delivery, versus payment against a tokenised fund, and so on.
“The second category of integration and interoperability is using Swift messaging cross-chain – so, once the Swift message instructs the blockchain to do something. In many cases, it will instruct it to deliver or move something to another chain. For example, a stablecoin transaction starts on one chain, but the stablecoin has to go to another where it is exchanged for another asset. And then the asset will have to come back to the chain where the stablecoin came from. So that requires communication cross-chain, in this case, using the cross-chain interoperability protocol (CCIP).
TPM: Swift has now announced the creation of a blockchain-based shared
ledger alongside 30 global financial institutions. What is Chainlink’s involvement in that, and how significant is it?
SN: There will be a lot of things that a true financial institution-grade chain needs, which is what Swift's going to build, including connectivity to chains and connectivity to data. Chainlink is the most reliable system to provide that because it’s the one that all the institutions right now see as the leader in connectivity among institutions, connectivity to institutional data, and to identity and compliance.
Chainlink establishes standards for blockchain data. It will become an open set of systems and standards that are used by the Swift community to work across digital and traditional finance systems. It doesn’t have to replace the traditional systems, but it will be compatible with them.
FERNANDO VÁZQUEZ: Basically, we are allowing banks to use Swift messages to initiate any type of transaction on-chain, including the movement of tokens.
The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) allows Swift and the embedded banks to grow usage organically – which is why I think there’s going to be massive adoption.
TPM: The UBS use-case showcased at Sibos focussed on a tokenised smart contract for funds, with workflows governed by Chainlink’s Digital Transfer Agent technical standard.
Will funds be the starting point for migration of traditional financial products onto blockchain?
SN: The Digital Transfer Agent Technical Standard is something I think will initially be used widely for tokenised funds. There are other use cases where you need transfer agents, such as equity, but for funds specifically, the transfer agent has a lot of control around what’s going to happen, or not happen, with the fund.
So it’s a good place to start. And there is also a lot of demand and current activity to generate tokenised funds. I think transfer
The issues around corporate actions has to do with cost and errors – in-person intervention is high because data quality doesn’t exist and data fragmentation is a big problem Sergey Nazarov
agency will eventually all be on-chain because all the assets will be on-chain. Whatever a transfer agency does in the TradFi world, it’ll do all of that in the on-chain world, in the DeFi world, because it’ll all migrate to that.
TPM: AI is a big part of your offering to solve problems around corporate actions. Tell us how AI and blockchain complement each other.
SN: The issues around corporate actions have to do with cost and errors – in-person intervention is high because data quality doesn’t exist, and data fragmentation is a big problem. Oracle networks can solve the data validation and fragmentation issues, and the blockchain networks house the final golden record of the corporate action, where it can be shared.
The first step is to verify the corporate action using multiple AI. There needs to be a consensus; the AIs reach a level of agreement, achieved through the Chainlink system. They can verify it from structured data, or unstructured data, such as PDFs, news articles, plain text, and the like.
We were able to make AI more reliable by running multiple models at the same time on the same question. We ran those AIs inside an oracle network, a Chainlink network. So now you don't get the benefit of just one AI model for a query, you get the benefit of three or four or five different AI models.
Corporate actions are key events around equities, funds… all these different things that people want to tokenise on-chain. Without corporate actions being fundamentally solved and without them going on-chain, you’re not going to have the levels of tokenisation that you want to see in public equity funds and other categories that rely on corporate actions.
The use of AI inside oracle networks to verify corporate actions and many other forms of data is going to be very valuable to the digital asset community.
FV: Beyond corporate actions, AI plays a major part in what we do overall. We developed ACE, our Automated Compliance Engine, which is powered by AI for use cases where the complexity is too high to be processed by traditional means. For example, anyone can issue an asset on-chain, but before that, you need to be MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) regulation compliant and when you move an asset from one wallet to another, you need to do the checks, report to the tax authorities, to the central banks.
There’s no one else offering to do that for them, so with ACE, we’re trying to fill a big gap in the market.
TPM: Deutsche Borse has partnered with Chainlink, using your DataLink product, to publish its market data on-chain for the first time. What does that tell us about how far blockchain has come in being accepted by traditional financial institutions?
SN: DataLink is an institutional-grade data oracle product that can be run and owned by the data source and the institution providing the data on-chain. That Deutsche Borse is using it is a sign of the amount of digital asset option there is, and the volume of on-chain contracts and systems that want that data.
So it’s a signal that we’ve reached a certain critical mass of contracts, and there’s enough of a market to justify them putting that data on chain. It’s going to be a continuing trend from an institutional point of view. DataLink is very clearly made for that institutional data source user group.
Basically, we are allowing banks to use Swift messages to initiate any type of transaction on-chain, including the movement of tokens Fernando Vazquez
TPM: As we reach the end of 2025, do you see an increase in interest for blockchain as a solution for the financial industry generally?
SN: We've really seen a new level of interest and commitment from financial institutions and financial market infrastructures to digital assets.
Swift choosing to launch its own chain is a good example, and it’s something we’ll be working on with them very closely to provide the various oracles, bridges, data, identity, and other key things that make a chain successful. Swift also mentioned that it’s going to continue its interoperability work, and that’s basically with us.
I’ve seen a huge amount of interest in stablecoins and in fund tokenisation. And I think we’re at this place where you have the on-chain cash, you have the on-chain asset, and you're starting to see markets form in their early stages. Once those markets form, everyone will start to see the value of blockchain technology.
That value will be very large because you’ll have 24-7, 365 markets, collateral management, automated compliance. You’ll just have huge, huge benefits beyond the fact that you have a tokenised asset.
Sibos 2025 was a really big deal, it positioned everything. So next year’s Sibos is going to be the big one for digital assets.
In an ecosystem where Western economies face sluggish growth, shrinking populations, and tightening consumer spending, merchants are increasingly looking beyond traditional markets for new opportunities.
The economic vitality that once defined Europe and North America is waning, giving way to emerging markets rich in youth, ambition, and expanding middle classes. At the same time, geopolitical tensions and trade barriers – from tariffs to Brexit – have reshaped global commerce, forcing businesses to rethink where and how they grow.
For merchants seeking the next wave of expansion, the question is no longer why explore emerging markets, but how quickly they can seize the opportunity.
It’s no wonder that those who can, are looking elsewhere. The so-called emerging markets, many of which have enjoyed rapid economic growth, are driven by a younger, expanding population that’s increasingly connected to the global marketplace through their smartphones. For merchants, this combination of youth, technology, and rising disposable income represents a compelling opportunity.
And these markets are not just growing and innovating quickly. One of the defining features of many emerging economies is their readiness to adopt new payment methods. In some cases, this innovation is being steered from the top, with governments actively promoting digital payments as a means to modernise economies and expand financial inclusion. In
Carlos Menendez, Chief Operating Officer at dLocal
others, it’s a grassroots revolution, born out of necessity and frustration with limited access to traditional banking. From mobile money in Kenya, to instant payment systems in India and Brazil, new financial rails are transforming the way people shop, save, and move cash. Payment platform dLocal operates very much in this ‘bottom-up’ space, helping global companies operate and accept payments in emerging markets by handling local payment methods, currencies, and regulations. Through a single API, it allows businesses to sell to consumers in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, simplifying cross-border payments, compliance, and payouts.
Founded in 2016, dLocal is a Uruguayan company with offices in London, Madrid, Montevideo,
Sell global, pay local
CROSS-BORDER
How do you effectively reach out to consumers in emerging markets when you’re sitting on the other side of the world? You find a provider with boots on the ground
Filling the basket: dLocal identifies the best payment method in distant markets
Sao Paulo, San Francisco and Shenzhen, and operates in more than 40 countries. Its Chief Operating Officer, Carlos Menendez, explains that whilst it is very much a global enterprise, the solutions it offers are, as its name suggests, centred on understanding local markets at a micro level.
“It’s really about how one becomes local and serves global customers,” he says. “We emphasise collaboration with local regulators, embark on local partnerships and ensuring that the right global merchants appeal to local consumers.
“We effectively figure out not just what networks but also what the local payment methods are, which the majority of the country really holds and how we get that connected to the various merchants’ e-commerce sites so consumers in these markets can buy what they want.
“We have more than 700 different integrations around the world and are constantly adding new ones, based on changing consumer and regulatory behaviours.”
Opening an API door on the world
Emerging markets, however, often have fragmented payment ecosystems with unique regulations, currency controls, and a variety of non-traditional payment methods. dLocal’s single platform API allows its clients to bypass the hassle of setting up local entities and integrating with different payment providers in every country. Put simply, merchants can access distant consumers via the payment methods most relevant to them locally – all through a single mechanism.
“We’ve built this extremely powerful global platform and API where once a merchant connects with us in one market, effectively all other markets become available. So, by maintaining the core of the network the same, we can serve everyone through one door,” explains Menendez. “And we know that we also need the local expertise, so we hire local teams, local regulatory experts, local compliance experts, local payments experts to ensure the nuances of a particular market are adapted and served through that API interface.
“When a merchant comes to us, it’s one contract. They sign on to the global API and then they roll out markets as they want. The critical part of our offering is that we are in these markets where the core merchants are located. So, if you’re in China, we’re serving you from a Chinese team. If you’re in Europe, we’re serving you from a European team, etc. And really, it’s about being close to the customer, understanding their needs,
understanding their culture and how they want to be communicated with, and then we adapt to them so that merchants can focus on their core business.
“Payments are really after the main transaction. And that’s really the value we bring to them. We solve complicated problems and make their life easier so they can sell more.”
Menendez cites Saudi Arabia as an example of the opportunities that exist in the younger, growing economies – what’s often referred to as the ‘global south’. E-commerce revenue in the kingdom is expected to grow at an annual rate of 13.5 per cent through 2027, outpacing the global average. That growth is being fuelled by a tech-savvy population, widespread smartphone use, and a government eager to diversify the economy away from oil.
Stablecoins, says Menendez, offer a powerful bridge to help merchants who are looking to expand into this territory, and overcome long-standing barriers such as high remittance costs, currency volatility, and cross-border payment friction. In September of this year, dLocal joined the Fireblocks Network for Payments, a secure platform that helps large financial institutions and businesses manage and protect their cryptocurrency and other digital assets.
“One of the challenges of cross-border payments – and solving it is actually part of the Saudi Vision for 2030 – is understanding the cost and the time to move money across borders,” says Menendez. “Most merchants are familiar with the one to four working days that Swift can take. Fireblocks and stablecoins provide transfers to get merchants’ money in and out of countries much quicker. And so, we partner with Fireblocks and other companies like the Circle network to facilitate that on-off ramp in local currencies and move the money to merchants.
everyone. There are proven use cases in card networks around tokenisation, buy now, pay later, and fraud protection – features that many Western consumers take for granted. The next frontier lies in extending that same functionality to local payment methods, effectively democratising financial innovation for the rest of the world.
Take Egypt, for instance. Only a small fraction of the population holds international cards, yet the country has become a hotbed of fintech innovation. Local payment leaders such as Fawry – Egypt’s first ‘zebracorn’, valued at over $1billion, and a dLocal integration partner – have been instrumental in transforming the economy from one dominated by cash to one rapidly embracing digital payments.
According to Thunes, more than 11.5 million Egyptians registered for digital payment services within just two years – a testament to how quickly consumers shift habits when the right tools are available. This rapid transition is not only unlocking new growth for local businesses but also creating fertile ground for global merchants seeking to tap into a connected, youthful population eager for modern payment options.
“The closeness of our relationship with someone like Fawry is really what enables us to operate well in the Egyptian market,” says Menendez. “From a tech perspective, we are going deeper on our offering but also building the future that our merchants and consumers are asking for.
Our mission is to broaden the customer base for the global south for large global merchants, and we do it on their terms
“We basically answer the questions that merchants ask. If they would like to go into stablecoin, we have that. If they want to use AI for fraud protection, for better customer service, we have that. And if there’s a new geography they want to open, all they have to do is ask.
“Faster payments mean more liquidity. If you run a business, whether large or small, you’re managing your cash flow. Getting paid faster for the goods you’ve sold limits your credit needs, allows you to better manage your balance sheets and effectively makes for a more efficient operation. So merchants are very interested in stablecoin opportunities.”
Payments are indeed evolving faster than ever, and much of the innovation is being driven by necessity in markets where traditional infrastructure simply doesn’t reach
“We broaden the customer base in the global south for large global merchants, and we do it on their terms. That’s our offering. We will meet their needs in any market, and we’re always looking to the future.
“I’m old enough to remember when stablecoins and fintechs offering instant payments were new. Who knows what the next generation will bring? But I always see that desire for more information in the transaction, quicker access to money, and a passion to explore new things. It’s a very different world. We’re very glad to be part of it and building it along with our customers.”
It’s been a tough few years. A world-changing pandemic, followed by fierce economic volatility, has prompted many people to reassess what’s truly important to them.
And that’s manifested in a trend towards experiential consumption. Rather than stacking up material possessions, consumers are seeking enjoyment, pleasure, or emotional satisfaction from their purchases.
This focus on intentional living is reshaping how banks serve their customers, too. Financial institutions are tapping into consumers’ desire to share unforgettable moments and forge connections with their loved ones.
“Consumers have changed,” says Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President – Core Payments
Brice
van de Walle, Executive Vice President – Core Payments Europe at Mastercard
Europe at Mastercard. “Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, people are interested in trying to live their passions more intensely.”
The payments technology and global card scheme provider is committed to blending these experiences with new AI-led ways to execute payments that prioritise personalisation and convenience.
Curating a compelling collection
The company recently introduced The Mastercard Collection, a suite of carefully curated, elevated benefits aimed at its most affluent cardholders.
It straddles three central pillars: Dining, offering priority reservations at sought-after restaurants and specially crafted menus and experiences; Entertainment, with presale
ticket access and premium seating for in-demand sporting and music events; and Travel, including streamlined airport experiences, such as access to fast-track security lanes and more than 1,350 airport lounges at major international airports across nearly 150 countries, as well as Mastercard-exclusive dining spaces.
Passion project
The Mastercard Collection, which is accessible through a dedicated channel called priceless.com, hones in on what people value most and is informed by Mastercard’s extensive consumer research.
It revealed that three-quarters of cardholders feel at their best when spending time on their passions, including culinary exploration, artistic endeavours, and cultural immersion. It also showed that around two-thirds are becoming more intentional about how they spend their time, focussing on the relationships that matter most. While this shift is reflected across all demographics, it’s especially true among the top 30 per cent of earners, who spend more than twice that
We don’t just want to buy ‘stuff’ any more. We want to experience it. And Mastercard’s vision for an agentic future can help deliver that for consumers
of the average cardholder. For financial institutions, capturing this audience’s attention and building long-term relationships is key.
Further expanding its portfolio for high-spending cardholders, Mastercard has also released the World Legend card – which it refers to as its ‘most prestigious consumer card to date’. Designed for those who want access to the most exceptional and exclusive experiences, World Legend will be available to banks globally and has just debuted to cardholders in the US.
Some voice-activated agents even allow users to shift their investments around while at the wheel of their (soon-to-be driverless) cars. But it’s fair to say Mastercard, and the other major networks, are now betting big on an agentic future for us all.
“Agentic payments are going to be the next big thing,” believes van de Walle. But that raises some equally big questions.
The pivotal role of partnerships Mastercard is busy collaborating with the likes of Microsoft and IBM to scale agentic commerce, as well as to accelerate B2B use cases. This could see AI agents handle sourcing, optimise payment terms, and manage logistics with international suppliers, before completing cross-border purchases using a Mastercard virtual corporate card token.
These new propositions complement issuing banks’ own benefits and rewards programmes, explains van de Walle, and enable them to create more differentiated products that drive loyalty and brand affinity. Through priceless.com and Mastercard’s integrated partner channels, cardholders can browse, book, and enjoy curated experiences.
“We’ve seen from our conversations with issuers that they’re constantly looking for things that can provide more benefits to consumers,” van de Walle adds. “So, we’re helping our banking partners provide specific benefits around the three passions we’ve specifically identified.”
Thanks to developments in AI, finding and paying for such ‘priceless’ experiences is also becoming effortless.
The age of agentic payments McKinsey & Company, among others, has highlighted how customer experience is set to change even more drastically, with every home page and app expected to look very different over the next few years. Each touchpoint, it says, will become conversational, and there may well be a personal AI agent doing most of the talking.
“Over time, the normal website you’re using to purchase your trip may not be the first destination anymore,” says van de Walle. “Consumers will just use their AI agent to look for the best options for a holiday or business trip, and everything will be done automatically, from confirming the recommendation, selecting the hotel, and actually paying – potentially managing chargebacks or complaints, too.”
The high-net-worths of the world have likely already experienced a flavour of this. A number of wealth management firms have already embraced an early form of agentic AI to give their clients the ability to interrogate and execute investment decisions.
“AI relies on a tonne of data, so we will leverage that data but always with consumer consent,” he says. “Consumers remain in the driving seat – they can let us know if they want us to customise their purchasing experience using all the data attached to their card number or not.”
Earlier this year, Mastercard revealed new agentic AI capabilities that enable smarter software to make purchases on behalf of consumers. It own solution, Agent Pay, will deliver more secure, personalised payments experiences to consumers, merchants, and issuers.
Mastercard’s pioneering agentic payments technology is rooted in tokenisation, based on the system it introduced a decade ago, which replaces sensitive card credentials with secure, merchant-specific tokens. As of June 2025, almost half of Mastercard’s e-commerce transactions in Europe were tokenised, but the company wants to go further.
“Tokenisation is simply replacing a card number with a cryptographic number that nobody can crack,” says van de Walle. “It’s not just encrypted at the merchant level or the PSP level, it’s also encrypted along the whole network, from the merchant to the acquirer, all the way to the issuer.
“We’ve seen huge improvements in terms of the approval rate for tokenised transactions because issuers now feel very confident about them. This is why we want to make sure the whole ecosystem is going to be leveraging tokens, and our ambition is that by 2030, all of our online transactions will be tokenised.”
Additionally, the company is working with acquirers and checkout players like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance the tokenisation capabilities they are already using with merchants to deliver safe, transparent agentic payments.
“It’s all about creating an ecosystem,” says van de Walle. “We have merchants who work with PSPs on one hand, and on the other, we have cardholders who work with banks, fintechs, and other issuers.
“At the end of the day, you want to make sure everybody is on the same page, in order to create that ecosystem. You need to talk to everybody – we appreciate we're no one without our partners.”
In 2022, Mastercard added to its suite of services by acquiring Dynamic Yield, a state-of-the-art optimisation platform and decision engine that helps retailers use their data to make personalised recommendations to consumers at speed.
Agentic payments are going to be the next big thing
This hints at what an agentic future actually means. An affluent influencer, for example, perhaps approaching a landmark birthday, will be able to rely on their AI agent to proactively curate the perfect experience, from choosing exclusive seats at an upcoming concert from The Mastercard Collection, to bolting on a premium dining experience, and even drawing on personal data to select the right outfit for the occasion, based on the venue’s ambience and weather forecasts!
With Agent Pay, this approach is extended to allow trusted AI agents to transact without ever exposing real payments data – a critical guardrail in an environment without direct human oversight, which will allow both consumers and businesses to transact with greater confidence.
Informed by their preferences and feedback, the agent can execute all the payments, leaving the customer to enjoy the experience.
“Things will become simpler,” concludes van de Walle. “What we need to ensure, though, is that the principle of excellent user experience sits at the centre of the shift, along with a focus on security.”
And that really will be priceless.
AGENTICBANKING
Humanising AI
ebankIT’s new conversational banking assistant could transform consumer experience in the States and create new opportunities for smaller banks and credit unions
How consumers access financial advice has changed massively – and massively fast – in the AI era, with many turning to ChatGPT for guidance rather than a trusted professional.
With so many now making the ‘digital human’ their first point of call, banks’ own ability to deliver accountable, actionable,
humanised and conversational financial support is becoming a battleground for competitive advantage.
“I think there’s the opportunity for financial institutions to transition from transaction mode to financial insights mode,” says Paul Provenzano, VP of Market Development at digital banking company ebankIT. “That’s how this starts to really add more value.”
ebankIT helps banks and credit unions create personalised experiences and build meaningful relationships with their customers by combining all the institution’s services in a single, omnichannel platform on top of their core systems.
Implementation is quick – some clients have implemented a platform within six months – meaning that customers soon benefit from improved banking services, while financial
Paul Provenzano, VP, Market Development at ebankIT
Pedro Azevedo, chief product
officer
at ebankIT
institutions can future-proof their digital sales by launching new products selected from an ever-growing marketplace of partners.
ebankIT’s latest solution, offered alongside existing tools such as digital onboarding, security and fraud prevention, and marketing and sales, is a conversational banking assistant that uses agentic AI technology, built on Microsoft Azure running ebankIT’s proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP), which together provide enterprise-grade security.
Designed to run alongside conventional chatbots, it offers a more humanised customer experience in line with increasing consumer preference for AI tools that provide fast, summarised answers in natural language, over traditional online searches that often require the user to
navigate multiple links and websites; 68 per cent of users now rely on these platforms for research and information gathering, according to a recent report from Bain & Company
“We’re moving from more of a reactive paradigm, where you’re basically automating things like providing information based on a script, to something that’s a lot more proactive, a lot more engagement-focussed,” explains ebankIT’s Chief Product Officer Pedro Azevedo.
“The transactional banking assistant is integrated into our platform, which means it’s authenticated, it’s secure and can perform actions on your behalf.”
Integrated and secure
While traditional chatbots run on static datasets, ebankIT’s AI Assistant uses data from across the platform, understands context and intent, and delivers bespoke guidance, while adhering to a financial institution’s specific rules and compliance requirements. It can, for instance, respond to voice commands to move money between accounts, or set up recurring billing; identify redundant subscriptions and advise on which to terminate; and, importantly, help consumers identify potential fraud and take action to protect them while the bank investigates.
“Since we’re integrated into the financial institution’s core system, the data that we have access to is dynamic, and because it’s integrated in real time, there’s a lot more financial insight specific to an individual account holder,” Provenzano explains. “So each experience is personalised, based on that customer’s relationship and interaction with their financial institution.”
Our focus as a business is on the community financial institutions that don’t have a war chest of a billion dollars to invest in AI Paul Provenzano
There are multiple benefits for business customers, too. A user can ask it ‘show me our cash flow for the last quarter and highlight any concerning patterns’ and the AI Assistant can provide insights and relevant business products to support them. Larger organisations with multiple account users can also use it quickly and easily to manage access and set restrictions.
ebankIT stresses that the customer remains in control at all times – something which is essential amid ongoing discussion and debate over issues of autonomy and accountability
around, and lack of trust in, agentic AI. Indeed, PwC’s 2025 CEO Survey showed that while 49 per cent of the senior executives polled expected AI to boost their companies profitability, nearly a third reported low trust in deployment of the technology, with another third reporting only moderate trust.
This AI trust gap is also reflected among consumers, and it’s a gap that ebankIT is trying to bridge in a number of ways.
“Trust really is the basis of everything with AI on a number of levels, and certainly for us," says Azevedo. “So it’s important to understand that the ebankIT AI assistant is about instruction rather than execution – we’re always keeping the human in the loop.”
Permission for any action taken within the platform always remains with the user. Take fraud as an example: the AI Assistant can help a user identify fraudulent transactions, prefill any forms required to report it, and point them to where to block their card – but the final action taken relies on the account holder. And if it’s time for the user to speak to a person, the ebankIT platform can seamlessly connect them with the relevant team. Because all the interactions with the AI are retained and auditable on the ebankIT platform – which, in itself, improves accountability – the human customer service adviser can see the original exchange and pick up where it left off.
“What the assistant does is essentially find things that we might otherwise not be able to find so easily on our own, and prepare the entire operation for us – leaving us with just, potentially, a single-click confirmation,” says Azevedo.
The other aspect that is key to helping bridge the trust gap – for both consumers and financial institutions – is that the AI Assistant runs within the existing business and compliance rules as well as guard rails already programmed into ebankIT’s platform.
“Let’s say, excessive amounts are being transacted, or an excessive number of transactions are taking place, or there is any sort of significant deviation from what would be expected with an account,” says Azevedo. “They will eventually run into the guardrails that already exist in the platform to control the possibility of fraud taking place.
“I believe that contributes quite significantly to enhancing trust.”
Because the ebankIT assistant is specifically trained to operate within a financial compliance environment, it is inherently bound by rules that do not apply to other voice-prompted agents over which there have been concerns – some even raised by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
“We get to decide what remains within the agent’s control and where it needs to say, ‘we should be talking to a human instead’,” explains Azevedo. “We have more control than you have using AI as a general tool.”
Speed to market is one of ebankIT’s key benefits as an ‘out of the box’ solution in an industry that’s evolving at often break-neck speed. But Azevedo and Provenzano acknowledge that some of the biggest challenges ahead for vendors could be described as more societal, than technological.
Provenzano expects a longer runway for testing for financial institutions to feel comfortable and competent with AI solutions. Customers, too, will have to be educated on how to use AI as a financial planning tool.
Nevertheless, the ultimate prize offered by agentic AI is more personalised banking experiences and increased financial inclusion, that will benefit consumers and financial institutions alike. Imagine, for instance, you are among the 40 million or so adults in the US who live with dyslexia, or one of around seven million with a vision impairment. Voice-prompted agents could transform your user experience. And any bank that offers it, will be rewarded, says Provenzano.
The transactional banking assistant is integrated into our platform, which means it’s authenticated, it’s secure and can perform actions on your behalf Pedro Azevedo
“It’s created a whole other level of financial management and there’s a formula that shows engagement leads to loyalty and loyalty leads to business opportunity. This is where we see the benefit for financial institutions.”
Indeed, where ebankIT’s greatest power may lie is helping smaller community banking players level up with their bigger rivals. These banks and credit unions, given the trust hygiene in this industry, are between a rock and a hard place – not able to stand on the sidelines, but also anxious not to sully their reputation with an agentic mis-step.
“Our focus is on the community financial institutions that don’t have a war chest of a billion dollars to invest in AI, like the Chases, the BoAs and the Wells Fargos. We are their R&D, their technology partner to help them through this journey,” says Provenzano. “That’s the big difference when you talk about the technologies that ebankIT brings to the table.”
CUSTOMERRELATIONSHIPS
Mission-driven banking
In the world of banking, few institutions carry the weight of purpose quite like USAA (United Services Automobile Association). Founded in 1922 by a group of US Army officers who couldn’t find auto insurance, the San Antonio-based financial services company has grown into a $220billion powerhouse. With more than 14 million members – exclusively military personnel, veterans, and their families – USAA isn’t just a financial services provider. It’s a lifeline for those who serve. And in an era of digital disruption, it’s betting big on technology to deliver not just convenience, but care – well aware of its responsibility towards those giving the ultimate service for their country.
A USA-wide bank, it must be able to deliver on its commitment by
also operating efficiently across international borders, given that many of its members routinely spend periods overseas, sometimes at short notice, leaving their families behind.
“Finances are personal. They can spark joy or anxiety,” says Kristina Tanner, USAA’s Digital Banking Lead. She describes how, ironically perhaps, digital innovation is at the heart of how the bank delivers a human touch.
“Digital banking is even more intimate. You hold that phone six inches from your face, and there are very few things you get that close to in your life!” she says. “That’s why I believe if we get digital banking right, we can make finances easier for people. They can do the tactical stuff quickly, but we can also help them manage their money a little better, and improve their financial security.”
We go inside USAA’s digital transformation to deliver the ultimate service to military personnel and their families
Kristina Tanner, Digital Banking Lead at USAA
In fact, Tanner’s team is obsessed with making every digital interaction count. USAA members – whose close relationship with the bank is fostered also by their direct voting say in the business’s direction – log in more than 22 times a month, and each login is a chance to offer insight, ease anxiety, or improve their financial security.
“We’re member-obsessed,” she says. “Every tap, every scroll, every moment is an opportunity to serve. USAA is known for two things, really: exceptional service and being digital first. Like most people working in the digital space, I love my digital metrics, but what I’m really driven by is that human element of digital banking.”
USAA’s approach to innovation is about getting the basics right, especially for members who might be deployed overseas at a moment’s notice.
“When we first introduced instant account verification, I couldn’t even remember my passwords,” Tanner laughs. “Now, biometrics make it seamless. That’s the kind of friction we’re always trying to eliminate.”
USAA doesn’t aim to be edgy. It aims to be safe, secure, and relentlessly efficient. “We ask: ‘will this delight?’, ‘will it protect?’, ‘will it help someone feel more financially secure?’,” Tanner says. “If the answer’s yes, we build it.
“We’ve been digital for a long time, and we made the transition to better serve our members. It wasn’t about technology for technology’s sake; it was introduced to serve our members better, especially given they’re all over the world.”
And it seems to be working. In 2024, USAA group, which includes banking and insurance services, posted record revenue of $48.6billion and near-record profit of $3.9billion – tripling its earnings from the previous year. Its net worth rose 10 per cent to $32.1billion, too, and total assets hit $220.6billion.
Behind those numbers is a story of resilience. After its first-ever loss in 2022, USAA rebounded by doubling down on member service and operational efficiency. Its insurance business paid out $4.3billion in catastrophe-related claims, handling 439,000 cases with technology that cut settlement time in half.
It focussed on prevention, too, with innovative offerings like the SafePilot driving telematics programme promoting safer driving, and Connected Home, which rewards members for using smart devices for detecting
issues in the home like leaks, designed to help avoid costly repairs and save on insurance. Meanwhile, USAA Perks, which gives members access to discounts on everyday products and services, delivered $1.2billion in savings over five years.
“We really don’t want to get it wrong for folks who are risking their lives for us,” Tanner says. “That motivates me just that much more.”
USAA’s commitment goes far beyond financial services, however. In 2024, it donated $62million to non-profit causes, including $3million for hurricane recovery and $1million to fight food insecurity. Its Recycled Rides programme provided refurbished vehicles to veterans, and employees logged 279,000 volunteer hours. It also invested $25million in suicide prevention initiatives, aiming to save 6,500 lives among active service personnel, veterans and their loved ones, by 2032.
Since 2019, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) put the bank under scrutiny for its AML/KYC and fraud controls, the bank ratcheted up use of financial crime prevention tools. Digital transformation – inspired by agenda-setters both in and outside financial services – is at the heart of its strategy to ensure regulators and members alike have full trust in USAA Bank.
“We’re learning from outside banking,” Tanner says. “People expect the same ease they get from retail or streaming apps. So we’re not just looking at what other banks do, we’re looking at what great digital experiences look like.”
More than 94 per cent of USAA members interact digitally. More than three-quarters of sales happen online. And younger members, Tanner notes, ‘don’t want to call us if they can avoid it’.
For Tanner, the acquisition process is like a first date. “If it’s clunky, they won’t come back,” she says. “But if it’s smooth, and we follow through with great service, maybe we’ll be married and be happy forever.”
Internally, tools like EagleGPT help staff answer questions by analysing more than 20,000 documents at a time. Developers use external AI developer tools to boost coding efficiency and automate data workflows.
Externally, AI powers image processing for insurance claims and supports partnerships with open-source large language models. USAA even trains proprietary models for specialised tasks.
But it’s not just about tech. It’s about trust. Following its regulatory brush past, USAA has its dedicated AI Council evaluate every use case for value, feasibility, and risk. And every model undergoes strict performance checks.
In 2023, it ran extensive generative AI pilots. In 2024, it implemented a dozen new tools. Now, it’s scaling agentic AI to automate low-risk processes, end-to-end.
One of USAA’s most urgent priorities is modernising its fraud and dispute management with the goal to boost efficiency and compliance, and ensure confidence. And with vast data reserves, USAA is turning digital banking into a source of financial wisdom, too.
“We can give members insights they wouldn’t get from a representative,” Tanner says. “It’s like sneaking a vitamin into candy.”
Most people aren’t tracking their finances daily. But if USAA can deliver bite-sized insights – like spending habits or savings opportunities – it can help members become more financially savvy.
“The one thing I’d love to measure,” Tanner says, “is how we actually make people more financially well-off. If their balances are higher, their credit scores are better, and they’re saving for the future, that’s real impact.”
We’re member obsessed. Every tap, every scroll, every moment is an opportunity to serve. We literally listen to member feedback every day
That philosophy drives every digital decision.
“We literally listen to member feedback every day,” Tanner reveals.
“Some changes are small. Some are big. But they all come from the same place: making people feel good.”
This quest has seen USAA deploy 200-plus artificial intelligence (AI) tools across its business, blending machine learning with cutting-edge generative and agentic AI.
USAA knows it can’t always offer the best rates. But it can control how it treats its members.
“That’s what the company has done since long before I worked here,” Tanner says. “And it’s why people stay.”
In a crowded market, service is the ultimate differentiator, she believes.
“People have multiple banks and credit cards,” Tanner says. “But they keep their primary account where they’re treated the best.”
And for USAA, that means leading with empathy, specialist understanding, and bespoke products and services, powered by technology.
COMPLIANCE
NOTO is a quiet force that’s now reaching into every corner of financial crime prevention. As the regtech marks its 10th anniversary, Co-founder Ivan Stefanov looks at what it’s helped clients achieve – and what’s left to do
In 2015, a group of fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) professionals began quietly building in a garage what would become NOTO – 360 Fraud and Compliance, also known simply as NOTO.
Drawing on their extensive combined experience in payments, risk, compliance and fraud detection, the founders set out to create a platform that was data-agnostic, flexible across verticals, and performant in real time – able to serve banks, fintechs, payment processors and e-commerce.
But, at the same time, they also began pushing the arguably more complex and challenging frontiers of financial services to do with cryptocurrency and gaming.
“NOTO was born from our experience in fraud prevention and AML compliance,” recalls one of those founders, CEO Ivan Stefanov. “We were using the same customer and transaction data, just for different purposes, and we asked ‘why not create a single platform that interprets that data for both?’. That’s how NOTO came to be.”
From the beginning, the team focussed on building everything in-house, emphasising low latency (millisecond-scale response), high throughput (thousands of transactions per second), and an architecture that could adapt to individual client requirements, different regulatory regimes and industry nuances.
“Our goal was simple,” Stefanov says. “To unify fraud prevention and AML compliance through one intelligent platform that could evolve with the industry.”
As regulation tightens, digital finance accelerates, new currency and transaction types emerge, and fraud becomes ever more prevalent and sophisticated – all against a volatile macroeconomic and market backdrop – NOTO’s unified approach feels increasingly prescient.
Marking its 10th anniversary this year, the company could never have foreseen just how necessary the leading-edge solutions it offers were going to become.
Stefanov spent his career prior to NOTO in in-house roles where colleagues regarded risk management
Ivan Stefanov, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of NOTO
as the ‘business prevention department’. But the past two decades have seen almost weekly cybersecurity outages suffered by leading market players, growth in instant SEPA payments, increasing mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency transactions for cross-border trade, a broader push towards frictionless customer payments, emergence of ‘pseudo-financial’ players (from retailers to ride providers), and geopolitical events like the UkraineRussia conflict, resulting in extensive worldwide sanctions, not to mention AI being used to bypass financial crime prevention protocols and measures.
It has all altered the perception of risk and placed managing it very much front-of-mind for any organisation dealing in financial transactions.
“Regulation is tightening, financial products and payment rails are becoming instant and remote, and risk is increasing,” Stefanov says.
“That combination drives demand for regtech solutions like NOTO. The financial world is now instant. Compliance and fraud prevention need to operate at the same speed.”
The developments of recent years have placed NOTO, with its real-time intelligence capabilities, in a market sweetspot it could hardly have anticipated at the outset. Between 2023 and 2025, it began forging partnerships that built both its technical capacity and its market credibility. Major partnerships, such as those with LexisNexis and Creditinfo, are considered critical to the industry.
Another example, in 2025, was i-gaming operator EGT Digital’s integration of NOTO’s fraud and AML (FRAML) platform to consolidate its compliance workflows. The collaboration showcased NOTO’s ability to deliver real-time analytics, insight driven by machine learning, and multi-layered security in sectors with complex, high-risk exposure.
“What sets NOTO – 360 Fraud and Compliance apart is what’s in the box – an enterprise financial crime prevention platform with every critical component connected through a single API,” notes Stefanov. “Implementation is simple, but the flexibility it offers is huge. Clients can bring their own data, build custom rules and deploy models that reflect their unique risks – all without waiting on their internal IT teams.
“Our platform gives compliance and fraud experts the tools to apply their knowledge in real time, not wait for someone else’s roadmap.”
Striking the right balance
NOTO has also had a creditable go at cracking the longstanding conundrum of balancing the protections necessary for financial crime prevention, with ensuring seamless customer experience – achieved with a delicate blend of precision and proportion.
Stefanov explains: “Fraud prevention works best as a multi-layered funnel across the whole customer journey – from onboarding to logins and transfers. Using data orchestration, you can be accurate without creating friction.
“You can’t solve every problem in one stage of the customer journey. The key is flexibility, multiple filters and constant measurement.”
With most firms now very much awake to the high cost – in regulatory sanctions, downtime, reputational damage and lost customers – of not placing their risk-prevention systems front and centre of their business strategies, NOTO has developed a crystal-clear vision of the gaps many need to fill to eradicate any blind spots.
“Without data and accurate metrics, you can’t know how well you’re really doing,” Stefanov says, adding that sticking-plaster approaches and cost-saving quick fixes will no longer cut it in today’s high-risk operating environment.
“Most blind spots come from technological limitations – fragmented systems, incomplete data, and compromises made during implementation,” Stefanov continues. “The success of any regtech project depends on the implementation phase. Rushing it or trimming corners almost always means weaker results.”
From experience, NOTO can quickly spot the exposures firms have, which could cost them dearly in remediation, lost business and regulatory sanctions if not rectified.
“The biggest red flag is when an organisation focusses only on cost and underinvests in compliance and fraud prevention,” he warns. “The price of inaction is always higher – in fines, losses, and reputational damage. Technology alone can’t fix compliance gaps if it’s poorly implemented or chosen in a rush. Cutting corners creates the illusion of progress but leaves firms exposed.”
With this in mind, NOTO’s approach with new clients is to undertake a no-compromise, root-and-branch review of their compliance and fraud detection processes and systems. It acts as a critical friend, highlighting the actions they need to take to withstand financial crime and ensure regulatory readiness, then developing an action-focussed project plan which picks them off in priority order.
What sets us apart is what’s in the box –an enterprise financial crime prevention platform with every critical component connected through a single API
This measured, engineering-first philosophy to creating bespoke solutions fitted to individual client needs explains the reputation NOTO has built for reliability, and its growing market adoption.
Financially and operationally, the firm has been bootstrapped and organically built, rather than heavily externally funded. It has achieved consistent growth, profitability and a steadily expanding tech stack, with investments in Cloud infrastructure, marketing automation and global business development helping to ensure revenue of around $7million in 2024.
Unsurprisingly, controlled application of AI is one of the levers the company has pulled to help it deliver the speed and agility its clients need with its capability for rapid data analysis.
“AI and machine learning are integral to our roadmap,” says Stefanov, “but we’re careful
to separate hype from reality. It’s about using AI where it makes sense – improving accuracy and productivity without removing expert judgment. Agentic features can enhance productivity for investigation teams by automating repetitive steps while keeping full human oversight.
“Fraudsters are often the earliest adopters of new tech. It’s our job to keep up – and to make sure institutions can react with the same speed.”
A calm, capable force
NOTO’s belief in the importance of preventative risk management has seen it also invest heavily in industry education, innovation and thought leadership, organising RegTech Unleashed events in Europe and Latin America. And it has expanded its business development and customer success teams to support a growing client base that now spans four continents.
For Stefanov, however, success isn’t just about market share, it comes from having meaningful impact.
“Success means our clients can manage fraud and compliance with one intelligent solution – fewer tools, less complexity, faster insight,” he says. “Ultimately, the goal is to make compliance a business enabler, not a blocker, to let clients focus on growth while staying secure and compliant.”
Looking ahead, NOTO sees opportunity in the convergence of data orchestration, AI, and decentralised finance (DeFi).
“Complexity will grow, and so will the need for intelligent, integrated solutions,” says Stefanov. “Looking back to 10 years ago, no one could have predicted how far regtech would come. The next 10 will transform it again – probably faster than any of us expect.”
From a garage in Europe to a global client base spanning fintech, banking, crypto, and gaming, NOTO has established its reputation quietly by delivering speed, accuracy, and trust – and the opportunities to build on that foundation are nothing less than mind-boggling.
In an era when regulation tightens by the day to plug risk holes few could have anticipated, and fraudsters move faster than ever, fuelled by the same enlightened technologies, NOTO’s philosophy of unified intelligence, transparent data, organisation-centred solutions and practical innovation may be exactly what financial institutions need.
A calm, capable force working behind the scenes to keep the system honest and safe.
ebankIT’s AI Agent is reshaping digital banking with intelligent, multilingual, and customer-driven journeys, powered by Azure OpenAI and Speech.
Opening the stable door
TOKENISATION
Dynamic is powering mainstream stablecoin adoption in financial services, one wallet connection at a time
Cryptocurrency is no longer viewed as a fringe experiment or ‘Wild West’ territory for speculators with money to burn, but rather as a long-wished-for enabler of instant global settlement that could democratise access to finance.
Amid this shift, Dynamic, a wallet provider for fintechs and crypto, has become one of the key players shaping how stablecoins and self-custody wallets enter the mainstream.
It hasn’t launched a flashy exchange or speculative token. But it is building the invisible infrastructure that makes wallet-based identity, authentication and crypto-based payments work –safely, seamlessly and at scale.
Founded in 2021 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Itai Turbahn and Yoni Goldberg, California-based Dynamic began as a Web3 identity toolkit, helping developers onboard users via
crypto wallets. But as stablecoins like USDC and USDT exploded in usage – powering everything from cross-border payroll to on-chain treasury management – Dynamic saw a bigger opportunity: to make stablecoin integration as simple as connecting to a Stripe or Plaid API.
“If you look at Venmo or PayPal, they spent more than a decade building the infrastructure they rely on today,” says Turbahn. “Developers can now build those experiences in days or weeks, not years.”
Dynamic’s mission is to abstract away the complexity of blockchain rails using its clever translation technology to convert a variety of crypto assets into usable multidenominational fiat currency in super-quick time, so efficiently that users don’t even realise it’s happening.
“Any currency, any coin, any chain – we take care of all that for businesses,” says Turbahn. “It’s a deceptively simple promise. Our clients are consumer-facing brands. They focus on what customers see, while we handle the hard stuff behind the scenes.”
For a global payroll company, that could mean paying employees in Argentina or Brazil in five seconds instead of five days, and letting them
Itai Turbahn, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Dynamic
earn yield the moment they receive it. The same plumbing can support digital banks, gaming apps or cross-border marketplaces – anywhere money moves.
Stablecoins as programmable money
The rise of stablecoins as a more trusted form of cryptocurrency has been a game-changer. In its 2025 Stablecoin Playbook, Dynamic argues that stablecoins have a role to play as more than faster, cheaper fiat substitutes – they’re programmable, composable, globally accessible money.
And Dynamic has built such a level of sophistication around its wallet infrastructure that it can now combine it with all the accoutrements users expect from traditional bank accounts.
“Through us, developers get not just the infrastructure,” says Turbahn, “but the layers on top that make it easy to build a complete experience. We don’t just give clients the wallet – we give them the code to earn yield, issue a debit card and make transactions.”
This evolution led to Stablecoin Accounts v2, Dynamic’s latest product suite, which bundles compliant wallets with software development kits, know-your-customer hooks, and integrated user flows.
“Visit five sites using Dynamic and you’ll see five different user experiences,” notes Turbahn. “That flexibility makes it mainstream.
“It’s not just about building the rails; it’s about standardising the developer experience, so they can focus on creating the customer journey – moving money in or out – without worrying whether the infrastructure can support it.”
Dynamic’s growth mirrors the rise of infrastructure companies like Amazon Web Services, Plaid and Stripe, which turned complex systems into easy-to-use APIs.
“Our win is when crypto companies like Kraken or Ondo can build in days, not years. We’re an invisible enabler,” he adds. “The infrastructure powering the next generation of finance.”
As the crypto ecosystem matures, security is non-negotiable. Dynamic’s unique answer lies in multi-party computation (MPC), a cryptographic approach that splits a private key across multiple parties.
“A wallet is a private key, a secret only you know,” Turbahn explains. “The best way to keep that secret safe is if it doesn’t exist at all.”
With MPC, the secret never exists in one place; only when two or more parties communicate can a transaction occur. “If I get hacked,” he says, “the secret isn’t there to steal. You can’t lose what doesn’t exist.”
Regulation: from friction to fuel Crypto’s relationship with regulation has long been fraught, but for Dynamic, the emerging era of compliance oversight isn’t a constraint – it’s an advantage.
“Regulation is a friend,” says Turbahn. “It’s clarity in the market, setting the rules so people can innovate within them. Regulatory clarity and compliance are critical enablers of growth. The more clarity you have, the more big financial companies enter, the more innovation follows.”
years, it’ll just be an integral aspect of finance. Like the worldwide web, crypto will be accepted as a tool.”
Dynamic’s long-term measure of success reflects this vision: “When I open my phone, what percentage of apps have Dynamic or a crypto wallet built in?” he asks.
He’ll know it’s landed, when the next Revolut or SoFi is built crypto-first. “It’ll be weird if your app doesn’t have crypto in it,” he says, “just like it’d be strange today if it didn’t use the internet.”
Democratising global access
If regulation drives adoption in developed markets, necessity drives it elsewhere.
“The biggest step forward is happening outside the US,” Turbahn observes. “There’s a saying: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s especially true for finance.”
Today we talk about crypto. In three years, it’ll just be an integral aspect of finance. Like the worldwide web, crypto will be accepted as a tool
means faster activity in the market and faster growth. A dollar that changes hands more quickly drives more economic activity. Finance is the oil that powers the wider economy. If we get that right, the potential is enormous.”
In his view, stablecoin rails could become a macroeconomic accelerant and they should be seen as having a major upside by regulators.
Finance, once a walled garden of incumbent vested interests and legacy systems, is now in the wild and moving at pace.
“We’re in the business of enabling future innovation,” Turbahn says. “And it’s cool to be a small part of that.”
As stablecoins gain traction as a default settlement layer, Dynamic’s role as a neutral, chain-agnostic bridge will only deepen. With support for Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Bitcoin, Base and Sui, the company lets developers build once and serve users on any network.
He points to emerging markets where volatile currencies, limited banking infrastructure and global commerce make stablecoins a no-brainer.
The EU’s MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) framework and the UK’s planned stablecoin legislation – imposing rules such as full reserve backing, where each coin must be backed by a real asset of equal value – are viewed as catalysts rather than obstacles.
Dynamic’s infrastructure directly integrates with know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud prevention software, allowing fintechs to focus on innovation without regulatory risk. “It’s about building rails the right way from the start,” he adds.
Ask Turbahn what the world will look like three years from now, and he doesn’t hesitate. “Today we talk about crypto,” he says. “In three
“In Nigeria, Pakistan and Brazil, you’ll see global-first neobanks emerge that couldn’t have existed before,” he predicts. “It’s very democratising. A user in Argentina can now enjoy access to the same financial systems as a US local.”
So, for Turbahn, crypto’s real benefit lies in financial equality. “Innovation now means giving everyone access to the same opportunities advanced markets take for granted. By enabling crypto, regulators are evening out the playing field. They’re granting access to opportunities people couldn’t reach before.”
The implications of faster, programmable money extend beyond payments, too.
“If I can send someone money in five seconds instead of five days, and at a cost of 0.1 per cent instead of two per cent, that’s innovation,” Turbahn says. “Faster movement of money
It’s the kind of architecture that could make the ‘multi-chain future’ real, and help deliver on the original promise of crypto: to create a new form of money that moves at the speed of the internet.
The
future is already here
The wallet revolution isn’t coming, it’s unfolding in real time. Across fintechs, neobanks and global payment providers, stablecoin adoption is shifting from pilots to production infrastructure.
And, like the best enablers, Dynamic’s role is in the background – powering experiences users love, without them ever knowing it’s there.
“Our success,” Turbahn says, “is if every developer knows about Dynamic – but no end user does. They’re just enjoying experiences that work seamlessly.”
It’s a reminder that the future of finance won’t arrive in a headline. It will do so via the code quietly connecting the world’s wallets, one transaction at a time.
The great rebundling
U.S. Bank is becoming a trusted resource of integrated back-office services for its 1.5 million small business customers, reversing a decade-long banking trend and addressing a real need
Much of the past decade’s digital progress in financial services has been achieved through the so-called ‘unbundling’ of banks, with non-banks satisfying customers’ fast-evolving service needs, by overriding the limitations of legacy systems and offering nimble – and often substantially cheaper – solutions.
It was perhaps inevitable that incumbents would seek to reinstate their proprietary advantage by ‘rebundling’ such services within their own estate – sometimes even subsuming the competitors through buy-outs/buy-ins or partnerships to do it.
One of the most fought-over segments by fintechs has been small
and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who, for years, got a raw deal from banks. In the States, U.S. Bank is reversing that.
Many of its fellow banks have struggled to support SMBs due to the imbalance between cost-of-provision and revenue potential. But U.S. Bank is finding new ways to service this segment cost-effectively, utilising digital advances like artificial intelligence to its, and their, advantage.
For three years, the bank, which serves around 1.5 million such enterprises with up to $25million turnover in the States, has sought SMB owners’ views via its annual small business survey. Its most recent results, gathered just as new economic and trade policy was being introduced, were published this Spring.
Shruti Patel heads up U.S. Bank's business banking arm and says respondents’ calls for help to future-proof their businesses through tech and ensure growth amidst significant macroeconomic stressors, have been getting louder.
The bank is using that feedback to directly inform its technology strategy. It’s giving SMBs access to
Shruti Patel Chief Product Officer for Business Banking at U.S. Bank
tools to help run their back-office functions more efficiently.
By engaging in integrations, acquisitions and partnerships with fintechs it’s helping them up their game in light of the new economic playbook. That includes everything from new products and technologies to enhanced support from its frontline sales team, offering both hardware solutions and plug-in functionality that businesses can access via a single U.S. Bank online banking hub.
Patel says: “We’ve certainly seen an increasing reliance on digital tools over the past decade. This year’s survey showed a 15 percentage point jump from last year in terms of how much small businesses are relying on digital tools to run their back office, whether for workflow automation or cash flow management.
“More than 50 per cent of our respondents told us they are already using and deploying genAI tools, or plan to do so, over the next 12 months. Most of these businesses are using budget-friendly genAI solutions with a cost of less than $50 per month for uses that include content and marketing strategies, and back office efficiency.”
But they need help navigating the right path – and who better than banks like this one, with its longstanding legacy of trust, to do that?
“Most of our small business owners wear multiple hats. They are running their operations, focussed on consumer spending, bringing production costs down and bottom-line profitability up. So, they are struggling to keep pace with how quickly genAI technology is changing, in terms of learning about it and deploying it,” says Patel.
“Our survey has shown small business owners are increasingly overwhelmed by the number of software solutions now in the marketplace. It’s almost mental gymnastics to calculate the cost and how these solutions come together, so they’re relying more and more on their banks to provide integrated products across banking, payments and software.
“Our more notable investments include embedded payroll and accounts payables and receivables, as well as spend management capabilities. We’re trying to bundle these and bring them to market as one holistic solution for our small businesses.”
So, by focussing on their pain points, U.S. Bank is positioning itself as a transformation gateway.
“We are taking a multifaceted approach,” says Patel. “We want to continue to invest in our own infrastructure, data layers, and the technology systems needed to deploy genAI at scale and with speed.
“In parallel, we are looking at use cases across the bank, such as smart assistants to help our bankers with product recommendations, as well as small business-facing tools to help them navigate our software solutions more seamlessly.
“We’re also using genAI to help our customer services support teams utilise data transcription and synthesisation when someone calls us, to increase our response speed and efficiency.”
The bank’s Connected Partnership Network support platform is building out a marketplace of solutions from partners, including cash management and treasury solution providers, who integrate with U.S. Bank APIs.
Similarly, businesses can see which platforms are certified to easily plug into Elavon, U.S. Bank’s merchant processing business which also operates in Europe. WorksWith Elavon is a searchable, digital platform designed to help businesses find integrated software and payment solutions compatible with Elavon's payment processing services.
Meanwhile, the bank’s free Business Resources Central support hub, created with the help of small business training and solutions provider Next Street, complements the technology with educational courses on topics such as accessing capital, business continuity planning and how to prepare to seek financing.
“We also recently launched our Business Essentials, best-in-class premium checking account coupled with merchant and payment acceptance capabilities,” says Patel. “It’s a no-monthly-maintenance-fee account offering SMBs unlimited digital transactions.
“When they sign up for our payments capabilities, we also give them a free card reader, fraud prevention tools, with same-day availability of funds, and the ability to integrate a business’s accounting and budget management software
well as improving our online banking offering, as this is still the primary way that a lot of small businesses transact,” says Patel.
The Connected Partnership Network of fintech services facilitates such innovations, and it continues to grow as U.S. Bank collaborates with hundreds of fintechs every year.
Upbeat and determined
Patel describes the overall mood among business owners participating in its latest survey, as being relatively upbeat. But, above all, they are determined. They recognise the need to remain fighting fit – with technology being a key enabler, she says.
“Small businesses have viewed their businesses as very successful over the last 12 months, and, generally speaking, are optimistic that future growth will remain strong. However… macro-environment challenges such as tariffs were very top of mind [in the survey], followed by access to working capital and inflation increasing cost to their businesses. There were also concerns around consumer spending and whether that will remain strong.”
The report acknowledges that this adds up to a ‘pivotal moment for small business owners, who are navigating a rapidly evolving landscape’. They are responding to these by focussing on ‘streamlining operations, adopting new technologies, and making deliberate decisions about the future’, it said.
Eighty-three per cent said that using modern tools and technologies is a major success factor, while a similar number said they need more innovative tools to make their job easier and/or they were consolidating their digital tools to streamline their workflows.
Small business owners are overwhelmed by the number of software solutions in the marketplace… so they’re relying on their banks to provide integrated products
In this context, there is clearly a prime opportunity for banks to claim space as most trusted suppliers of key services, embedded into SMBs’ accounts.
“And all this is within a simple application and single onboarding event.”
Bento, added to US Bank’s suite in 2021, completes the circle by pairing this payments capability with banking services like spend tracking and card transaction controls, using its accounts receivable software solutions to help SMBs track and control spend.
“We’re investing in our online digital capabilities, making our app seamless for money movement and electronic transfers as
U.S. Bank is helping lead the way on a ‘great rebundling’ of services that had been lost to fintech players. And Patel makes it clear it intends to stay right out front of that.
“We’ve always kept a keen eye on the marketplace to see who’s doing a fantastic job with new innovations,” she says. “And so, as we think about some of the needs of our small business owners, whether this is embedded payroll, embedded accounts, payables, or receivable solutions, we're going to continue to look at partnerships with fintechs.”
The right fit: SMBs are looking to U.S. Bank for digital solutions
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BRANCHBANKING
Facethetruth!
Restoring in-branch banking to thousands of UK communities is not just possible – it’s happening, with or without the banks, says Ron Delnevo
Among the speakers at a financial services event I chaired earlier this year was a senior member of staff from a major UK bank. During his presentation, he remarked that nostalgia should be avoided in financial services.
A few months later, I attended the brilliant play Make It Happen, which fully exposed the disastrous reign at Royal Bank of Scotland of CEO Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin.
It only took Goodwin 10 years to destroy a bank that had been part of the fabric of Scotland since 1727. He is also credited by some as having played a significant role in the world banking collapse of 2008.
The audience was on its feet at the end of the play, roaring, as Goodwin was deposed from his throne at the Palace of Gogarburn, the bank’s global headquarters. How fitting that Gogarburn was built on the former site of a hospital for the mentally unwell.
Talking to people after the show, what came across was how the Scots in the audience wanted their bank back –as it was before Goodwin and his dismal top management team destroyed it.
That experience confirmed to me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with nostalgia, when it simply reflects the public wanting something that has been stolen from them returned.
UK branch banking has largely been ‘stolen’ from the British public, particularly in the last decade.
Once upon a time – actually, as recently as the 1980s – there was only one kind of UK banking and that was face-to-face in every community.
In 1950, there were 10,000 bank and building society branches for 50.4 million people. At their peak, in 1986, there were 21,643 branches, covering a population of 56.7 million.
In 36 years, the population of the UK increased by 12.5 per cent, whilst the number of branches exploded by 116 per cent. Why? Partly because, in the 1950s, the vast majority of UK workers were paid weekly in cash, which meant they rarely went to bank branches. However, from 1960, wages began to be paid directly into bank accounts. Workers were forced to go to branches to get their cash, and those deposits also facilitated a massive increase in bank lending, encouraged by the end of rationing in 1954 and a marked increase in advertising, including via the newly-created ITV.
Wages did not increase significantly to fund this demand, but debt did. Two of the biggest areas of credit were for cars and housing. And how were the finances of such purchases – and many others – negotiated? Mostly via face-to-face visits to bank or building society branches.
Ron Delnevo,
Chair of the Payment Choice Alliance
Whether it was to open an account, withdraw or deposit cash, obtain a personal loan, negotiate a mortgage, or make any banking arrangement for a business startup, in the 1980s, a visit to the bank or building society was both necessary and expected.
A branch manager was a local person of stature and authority, with a significant discretion to take decisions to assist people and businesses in the local community.
So what happened to face-to-face banking? A good place to start is the 1986 Building Societies Act, which provided an easy route for demutualisation.
In 1986, there were 161 building societies in the UK, with more than 6,500 branches. Today, there are 42 building societies, with around 1,300 branches. Every building society that demutualised has GONE, except when retained as a brand by one of the Big Five UK banks.
This decimation was definitely NOT implemented to satisfy the wishes of the British public.
How do I know? Because in 2025, there are 26 million building society members, more than at any time in the 250-year history of the UK mutual movement. And both they and the societies that serve them, value face-to-face contact.
The growth of the UK’s biggest building society – Nationwide –illustrates what can be achieved by a financial services organisation that genuinely gives the British public what they want.
Nationwide had seven million members in 1986. Having avoided demutualisation by a few thousand votes in 1997, it had more than 16 million members by 2025. With Nationwide’s acquisition of Virgin Money in 2024, it increased its total customers to around 24 million.
Within two years, based on current growth, Nationwide will become the biggest building society and bank in the UK, measured by customer numbers, overtaking the likes of Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds Bank Group.
Nationwide has committed to keeping all of its more than 600 branches open until at least 2028, providing community financial services countrywide. A mutual, with a stable branch network, delivering what its customers want.
The UK banks have been trying since 1986 to get rid of face-to-face banking – not to give customers what they want, but to earn even fatter profits by diminishing service standards.
It was in 1997 that Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) became the first UK bank to launch internet banking services. In 1997, RBS had more than 600 UK branches and added a further 600 in 2000, when it acquired NatWest Bank. Out of that 1,200 total, fewer than 500 will remain by the end of this year.
recent years, still has more than 11,500 branches across the country.
Perhaps one result of the consultation could be to revive the 2020 Labour manifesto pledge to launch a 3,000-branch Post Office bank, offering a more comprehensive range of financial services than the Post Office currently offers, including current accounts.
At the very least, most commentators agree that the Post Office branch network must be safeguarded to meet, at a minimum, the basic financial needs of the public and businesses in thousands of communities around the UK that don’t have a bank.
In 1997, Nationwide became the first building society to launch internet banking services. In 1997, it had 150 branches. Today it has more than 600. Is any more proof required that the launch of internet banking was not the driving force behind branch closures?
Nationwide is giving its customers what they want, which is the choice of using both branches and the internet. The UK banks have suited themselves. Period.
There has been numerous research done by the likes of Accenture, Deloitte and PwC, which show that many financial services customers still want face-to-face contact, especially for more complex transactions.
A User Testing survey in 2023 found that 83 per cent of respondents preferred traditional banks, largely due to a preference for speaking face-to-face. So how can their wishes be met?
Certainly not by urging the Big Five UK banks to keep branches open, because that’s been going on for at least two decades. Their strategy for what remains of the branch network is to serve only those communities with more than 60,000 residents.
But I think there are several reasons to be optimistic that face-to-face banking will be restored more broadly.
Firstly, the UK Government is currently engaged in a public consultation on the future of the Post Office, which, despite losses over
It’s good to talk: Customers continue to value personal interaction
Nationwide is giving its customers what they want, which is the choice of using both branches and the internet
Then there are banking hubs. These are meant to stabilise community financial services provision where the last bank branch has been closed. However, though the UK has lost around two bank branches every day since 2017 – around 7,000 closures – so far, only 350 banking hubs have been promised by 2029.
Harriett Baldwin, the Conservative MP for West Worcestershire, in a debate on bank branch closures held in the House of Commons in June 2025, called for a banking hub to be provided in every community that loses its last bank branch. And, according to a YouGov survey, 98 per cent of MPs agree with her.
It would mean providing between 1,200 and 1,500 hubs, mostly covering communities with fewer than 50,000 residents. The UK
Government response to this is still awaited.
The expansion of the building society branch network continues to provide reason for hope, too. And these new branches are increasingly using innovations, including opportunities provided by open banking, to deliver even better services.
And, finally, there are new organisations, which are planning to repopulate many high streets with their own branches that go beyond single brand services. It seems likely that these market entrants will concentrate on communities of between 40,000 and 60,000 residents, and offer more comprehensive access to financial services than banking hubs or Post Offices.
One example of these new entrants is banxlocal, due to open its first branches in the latter part of 2025. Its mission is to become the next new ‘bank’ on the high street, but as a non-bank player.
There are more than 1,500 financial services providers registered with the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). Banxlocal plans to provide many of them with a high street presence, giving the public access to multiple banks and services in a single shared location and allowing them to seamlessly switch from branch services to digital and digital to branch services, under one roof. This will allow many of those providers to extend their reach and market share.
The banxlocal model is sustainable via a fair revenue share with PRA-registered partners, across multiple services and revenue streams, including retail savings, investments, lending and insurance. Its aim, ultimately, is to serve 400-plus UK communities and that will include cash services.
Kevin Smith, CEO and Founder of banxlocal, has spent around 30 years in UK retail banking.
“For the last 18 years, I’ve worked as an outsourced branch agent for a UK challenger bank,” he says. “That’s given me a unique insight into the demand for face-to-face branch services. And the narrative the Big Five banks have created to justify branch closures has painted a false picture. Tens of millions of British adults want branch access and definitely prefer to have their financial services needs met face-to-face.”
So, what do we conclude? That, between a reimagined Post Office, expansion of building society branches, banking hubs, and innovators such as banxlocal, there are multiple opportunities to deliver the face-to-face community financial services that the British public wants. And do it profitably.
