The FIntech Magazine Issue 37

THE LURE OF LATAM

STARTUPS IN PARADISE: THE FINTECH ISLANDS WHERE

Why Nium and PPRO both headed south

RAISING THE B

aaS

Fifth Third’s blueprint for embedded success

AGENTIC PLAYBOOKS

FOUNDERS GO TO FORGE THE FUTURE

Top-tier banks reveal their strategies

THE ‘OTHER’ AI Is Angst and Indecision crushing your CFO?

THE FINTECHMAGAZINE

6

SME SERVICES

A tech tonic for CFOs

Pleo’s new report reveals just how much stress finance leaders are under, a lot of it driven by too many tools – and never the ones they need! So how can the platform help?

8 CORE MODENISATION

From tomorrow to ‘now’

As legacy systems drag on profitability, and fintech challengers reshape expectations, Temenos redefines modernisation, putting banks back in control of their future, as William Moroney explains

12 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A healthy approach to AI

RBI’s Renato Rocha Souza takes us on a deep dive into the bank’s business-centred approach to AI adoption, and ponders the dangers of the ‘culture war’ between developers

14 SPEED & COMPLIANCE

The AI balancing act

Data transparency and transaction security are two sides of the same coin. By bringing together specialists in each and leveraging AI across a single platform, Vyntra amplifies their powers 8

16

SECURITY

The next-gen CISO

In the escalating war against cybercrime, defence is the best offence – but that doesn’t mean it’s passive, says ING's Debbie Janeczek

19 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Making global local

A new licence in Brazil has strengthened Nium’s position as one of the most comprehensive infrastructure services powering cross-border payments

6

THEEDITOR’S VIEW

If you’re reading this hot-off-the-press issue at our Fintech Awards in London, firstly: what ARE you doing? Go party!

Secondly, we hope the Awards are a welcome distraction from worrying about what’s going on down the road at No. 11 Downing Street right now.

Is the Chancellor burning the midnight oil, revising her much-trailed plans to plug the fiscal black hole with a bung of stealth taxes? And, when she opens the battered budget box (that’s the state of her fiscal plans, not the box itself, which is fairly new), will entrepreneurs get a hammering?

There’s been talk that, even if they run for the UK exit, there’ll be an HMRC inspector at the door, demanding a farewell fee. But, if you are thinking of relocating, where would you go? Our cover feature on Fintech Islands explores some possible locations.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of this issue is dominated by AI – also known as Angst and Indecision in the CFO’s office, according to business spend management platform, Pleo.

Its report reveals that financial leaders are facing an overwhelming number of critical business decisions that are made harder by technology, not easier.

As we rush towards peak AI, it's worth pausing to read Pleo’s advice on page 6 about making savvy choices.

So that’s it for 2025. Go hang out with some real people and have fun.

See you next year... unless, of course, you're rowing furiously for a smaller island!

Sue Scott, Editor

This issue's spinetingler is, appropriately, a joke generated by ChatGPT.

22

FINTECH ISLANDS

Start-ups in Paradise

Seemingly, small jurisdictions have a disproportionately large interest in fintech founders. If living and working on an island appeals to you, perhaps it’s time to set sail

26

FINTECH ISLANDS

Lift-off in Barbados

As the Caribbean island charts a real-time path, Payment Spayce is already looking at the next frontier

28 CROSS-BORDER

Check, check… and check!

Having launched its own IPR-compliant Verification of Payee service with added-value features, Italy’s financial utility provider CBI is ready to ‘revolutionise’ B2C transactions with fast, seamless and cost-efficient Request To Pay

30 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Agents of change

While Citi’s 4,000 human AI Champions are driving a new operational era at the bank, its new platform is poised for an agentic upgrade

32 A2A PAYMENTS

A tough gig

The fast-changing nature of work in the US is demanding new, real-time financial solutions that reflect a much more unpredictable household income. Dwolla and Ualet are providing one alternative, using A2A rails

36

LATIN AMERICA

Crossings and corridors

How PPRO’s Therese Hudak sees the next frontier for US to LATAM payments

40 MIDDLE EAST

A dawning realisation

Local banks in the Middle East are dependable and profitable – the backbone of the financial services system. But the market is changing, and its culturally specific demands create particular challenges for any modernisation programme. So how should they go about it?

44 EMBEDDED FINANCE

Follow the yellow brick code BBVA was determined to find its own way across the new financial landscape by embracing open banking early and going into co-opetition with challengers. Carmela Gómez describes how it’s now pushing further

46

BANKING AS A SERVICE

Time to step up

With a storied history of payment innovation, Ohio-based Fifth Third Bank believes it’s providing a blueprint for others to follow with the embedded payments business, Newline

48

CROSS-BORDER

Setting African payment flows free Freemarket is working alongside Axiym and Fincra on improving cross-border payments in what is potentially one of the biggest wealthcreating regions in the world. But technology is just one part of the solution. The other is trust

A TECH TONIC FOR CFOs

Pleo’s new report reveals just how much stress finance leaders are under, a lot of it driven by great expectations created by too many tools! So how can the platform help?

Who’s the most stressed-out individual in your C-suite right now? According to a recent survey of 2,650 financial executives and decision makers across Europe, it’s probably your CFO. And the sleepless nights, days of gut-clenching anxiety and round-the-clock indecision are taking their toll – not just on the officeholder, but also on the organisation, impacting its bottom line performance and team morale.

The irony is, in an age of being constantly told intelligent, labour-saving technology can improve our output and liberate us to be our best selves, many of the most important people in the room are, in fact, suffering tech shame. They’re struggling to realise the elevated expectations placed on them as a consequence of all these tools. And that, not surprisingly, is leading to a collapse of confidence. It’s a vicious and punishing cycle. Søren Westh Lonning feels their pain. He’s the CFO of Pleo, the fintech behind the report, The Power Of Better Business Decisions, and his peers have been telling him privately what the report makes public: ‘we’re in decision-making crisis’.

“What I hear a lot is that the data availability is growing exponentially, as is the ability to record and track

so many more metrics,” he says. “But turning that into insights that give you clarity of where to go as a business doesn’t match the data growth. There are higher expectations that you will be able to make informed decisions and faster decisions, but you can’t.”

The Danish unicorn that built its success on being a pure-play expense management platform, has recently evolved to become more of a much-needed tech tonic for CFOs.Because, while their role has been transformed from number cruncher to strategic influencer in less than a working lifetime, they often don’t have the corresponding insight into the business to make crucial decisions that never used to be part of their job spec. Top of that list is (increasingly AI-driven) tech investment – which 32 per cent cited in the report as being the most difficult call they’re asked to make. And for good reason.

A report by Gartner in May 2025 revealed that 72 per cent of organisations are only breaking even or are losing money on their AI investments.

Taking the strain: New solutions can relieve some of the pain for CFOs

“For every AI tool organisations buy, they should anticipate 10 hidden costs plus the transition costs of training and change management,” said Gartner, adding, “If organisations don’t get the technical capabilities right, value returns will be fragile and prone to failure.“ No pressure, then, CFOs!

The honesty with which thousands of finance leaders responded to Pleo’s polite inquiries about their state of mind and management, indicates just how vulnerable they are feeling in the role. Nearly half felt stressed; around a third were losing sleep; a similar number admitted to suffering anxiety; and a quarter owned up to indecision.

That last should set alarm bells ringing, because their naturally analytical, numerically predisposed natures then led them to make some stark observations. There was a direct line, they said, between poor financial decisions and lack of business growth (29 per cent), loss of revenue (28 per cent) and cashflow problems (24 per cent).

With brave self-awareness, they also admitted decision freeze had led to missed business opportunities (23 per cent), decreased business efficiency (22 per cent), and many felt bad about how their performance was affecting their teams, with 18 per cent pointing to high levels of employee frustration.

So, what’s to be done about it?

Well, Pleo’s respondents were clear on that, too: better communication and information exchange across their organisations, with improved collaboration, real-time insights and visibility of the data, as well as something to boost their own professional self-confidence.

The fintech has responded – with some clever artificially intelligent tools, yes, but also, respecting the candour with which finance leaders shared their deepest fears, an honest caveat.

“You have to be mindful of where a tool can make a real difference to you,” says Lonning. “That level of intention is critical. It’s difficult to say you should have ‘X’ number of digital solutions, but what you should look for is tools that can do multiple things and cut across departmental functions.

“So, keep in mind when you select a tool how well it integrates, because

when these solutions flow seamlessly together, it makes things so much easier for the user. That’s high on our radar, too – Pleo’s solutions integrate well with HR and ERP systems, for instance.”

The fintech, which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary, can confidently claim to give the reliable insights CFOs crave, thanks to the critical mass of data it processes across 40,000 SMEs in 16 European countries. That’s not only helped it design a new, intelligent cash management solution, but it will also allow clients on its higher-tier plans to benchmark their performance against similar organisations, giving strategic context to a CFO’s advice.

The cash management tool, currently in Beta mode with select customers, is the latest, powerful addition to Pleo’s intuitive platform that already gives employees smart company cards, automates expense reports, and provides real-time tracking of all company spending.

Data availability is growing exponentially as is the ability to record and track so many more metrics. But turning that into insights that give you clarity of where to go as a business doesn’t match that growth

“Cash management is more about managing the organisation’s funds and their availability,” says Lonning. “Even if you are operating in multiple countries with different banks, it allows you to automatically connect them in a single platform and provides a view of all the money a business has in one cockpit.”

It addresses one of CFOs’ key asks: for confidence and control.

“These are sensitive figures that treasury management doesn’t outsource to anyone, so automating them helps the most senior people in the finance team,” says Lonning. “They can create rules to automatically transfer funds from one account to

another to take advantage of higher interest rates, for example. In effect, it’s optimising fund management.

“We’re excited to see how much time it’s saving CFOs and how it’s helping support their decision-making,”

Another key area creating strain for finance leaders is a simpler one for Pleo to solve – because it’s embedded in its DNA. While every organisation is different – and Pleo’s customer base is hugely diverse – its simplified approach to spend management is based on integrated, seamless flows, plugging HR into finance teams, and giving instant, real-time visibility of every expense and invoice.

“The way we can help with collaboration across the organisation (or lack of it!) is related to people using the same source of information,” says Lonning.

“Many companies struggle with departments producing slightly different reports in a slightly different way. It’s a complicated area, but we try to make sure people operate on the same data source and follow the same rules for document making. And we’re continuing to bring even more innovation to address that need.”

While Pleo is working to solve current finance leaders’ frustrations, the good news is that Lonning believes the next-gen CFO won’t have anywhere near the same level of stress to deal with.

“Younger finance leaders are more savvy when it comes to understanding the tools, data and neural technology,” he says. “The profile and background of these leaders has shifted, too. I meet more and more CFOs who have not followed the classic audit background. They have a naturally strategic mindset… which is related to technology and AI.

“That’s not to downplay the traditional skillset of the CFO – you need to have that in your toolkit, or a strong team that covers the bases. You cannot replace a strong understanding of what’s going on under the hood – the data that’s being processed. But the overall balance [between these two skill sets] has changed.”

The CFOs today are making decisions that the CFOs of tomorrow will inherit. With Pleo, there’s a stronger chance they’ll be the right ones.

Søren Westh Lonning, Chief Financial Officer at Pleo

CORE MODERNISATION

From tomorrow to ‘now!’

As legacy systems drag on profitability, and fintech challengers reshape expectations, Temenos redefines modernisation, putting banks back in control of their future. Will Moroney explains how

Three decades after the industry first began talking about modernisation, banks are finally doing it, and doing it fast.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a promise on the horizon but the accelerant in the engine. The ‘tomorrow’ approach has given way to a ‘now’ culture, and Temenos finds itself in the middle of what Will Moroney describes as a ‘perfect storm’ of transformation: the pressure to modernise – again.

Back in 1997, when Moroney, now Chief Revenue Officer at Temenos, first entered the game, it was Y2K that spurred the urgency to renew. “Then came digitisation, then big data,” he recalls. “Now, AI is what’s pushing the requirement to modernise.”

But this time, the pressure isn’t just technological, it’s financial, too. Legacy systems are now an active drag on profit.

According to recent figures, banks in the UK now spend an estimated £3.3billion each year on maintaining outdated core systems – roughly a quarter of their total IT budgets. And across global institutions,

Will

Moroney,

Chief Revenue Officer at Temenos

transformation costs are rising while returns are flattening.

The industry’s compound annual revenue growth sits around four per cent, while non-interest income has fallen nearly 20 per cent per asset over the past five years, according to The True Cost Of Legacy Systems: A Deeper Dive Into Banking IT Modernisation report from Digital Bank Expert

At the same time, fintechs are eating into banks’ income potential and their customer relationships. The result, says Moroney, which they could arguably have seen coming, is ‘modernisation under pressure’.

“We’re hearing it everywhere,” he explains. “Banking leaders must show they can work with AI, not just talk about it. That means modernisation under pressure. It means modernisation that delivers impact now.”

AI readiness: the new starting line

For all the noise about chatbots and digital assistants, the real story in banking AI is happening behind the scenes – in data management, infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.

“There’s definitely an appetite for understanding what AI brings to banking technology,” Moroney says. “But, crucially, there’s also a growing understanding that it’s not just about using AI in the customer layer. That might only be 10 or 15 per cent of the capability. The rest is internal – fixing errors, cleaning data and reducing false positives when protecting against financial crime.”

The hard truth, he adds, is that most banks aren’t ready.

“Once they see what AI can do, they realise they don’t have the data structure, the infrastructure, or the regulatory clarity to support it. AI readiness has become the first big topic in every client conversation.”

This readiness gap comes at a time when technology spending has never

been higher. Yet revenue is falling: despite average tech investment growing by nearly nine per cent a year, bank productivity has declined by around 0.3 per cent annually since 2010, according to The Financial Brand’s analysis, which references figures from Boston Consulting and McKinsey.

The industry is still weighed down by compliance complexity and legacy debt. This is why, Moroney says, ‘banks can’t afford to wait for perfect conditions anymore. Artificial Intelligence is exposing every inefficiency they’ve tolerated for too long’.

At this year’s Temenos Community Forum (TCF) in Madrid, banks, regulators and technology partners debated not just AI’s potential, but how to introduce it responsibly.

As Santander’s José Manuel de la Chica put it at the time: “We’ve moved from deterministic to probabilistic systems. The agent is the new API, but there must always be a human in control.”

is of the essence: Banks must face the reality that slow modernisation means sluggish profitability

Banks can’t afford to wait for perfect conditions anymore. AI is exposing every inefficiency they’ve tolerated for too long Will Moroney

No patience left for legacy

If patience was once a banking virtue, it’s now a luxury few can afford. After nearly three decades of talk about core modernisation, executives are understandably losing interest in the idea of five-year journeys and want to see what can change this quarter.

“There’s more of an interest in ‘how can I have an immediate impact in one of my business lines, in the next six months?’,” says Moroney. “And ‘can we look at a minimum viable product that delivers real results, and then build from there?’. The market’s just not waiting anymore.”

The numbers bear him out, too. The KPMG study, State Of The Banks, from earlier this year, suggested UK banks’ return on equity

will drop from roughly 13 per cent in 2023 to just eight per cent by 2027 – equivalent to £11billion in lost annual profit. Meanwhile, new digital challengers and embedded-finance players are siphoning deposits and transaction revenue at record pace.

This demand for immediate, measurable value is also reshaping the vendor-client relationship. Banks want partners that can deliver in fast, iterative bursts, and vendors who will share accountability for outcomes.

Temenos’ response has been to re-engineer its own organisation around the full customer lifecycle – uniting sales, delivery, customer success, and partner management under one CRO-led structure.

Time

“When we started that transformation, the goal was simple,” Moroney says. “Put the customer at the centre of everything we do, from first touchpoint to renewal.”

Modernisation for the age of AI

At TCF 2025, Temenos showcased what it calls ‘modernisation with immediate impact’. By that, it means modular architectures, Cloud-native components and AI-assisted delivery tools that cut months from project timelines. In the first half of 2025 alone, Temenos supported more than 150 go-lives with clients globally – a figure the company sees as proof of its ability to execute at scale.

Barb Morgan, Temenos’ Chief Product & Technology Officer, described the company’s product philosophy shift succinctly: “Build less, but smarter. Focus on what really makes the dial creep.”

That approach is driving a whole host of new collaborative initiatives, including

a Design Partner Programme, inviting banks to co-create products and prototypes that solve immediate pain points.

And AI isn’t just something Temenos enables for clients; it’s also using it internally to accelerate its own delivery. From analysing legacy code to automating testing cycles, AI is speeding up execution and, crucially, freeing people up to focus on higher-value work.

From vendor to ecosystem partner

Perhaps the biggest change is not in technology but in mindset. Banks no longer want a single vendor to ‘do everything’. They instead want ecosystems – open frameworks where specialised partners collaborate.

“Instead of looking for one big partner that will do everything, banks are asking ‘how do we build an ecosystem?’,” says Moroney.

“That’s where we fit in – proven technology, domain expertise and a hybrid delivery model that brings the right people together.”

It’s an idea rooted in the philosophy of Temenos founder George Koukis, who once said: “Profitability is the consequence of happy clients.” That ethos – that great technology must serve human needs and trusted relationships – still defines the company’s culture. Or, as one TCF speaker, Dr Jonnie Penn of Cambridge University, reminded TCF 25 delegates: “Fortune will favour the collaborators.”

The era of immediate impact

The future that Temenos envisions is one where banking transformation happens continuously, not cyclically. AI has become the catalyst for that, exposing the limits of legacy systems, but also offering the tools to finally transcend them. For the first time in 30 years, the technology exists to do in months what once took years – and the economic reality means banks can’t delay.

“Modernisation used to be about preparing for tomorrow,” Moroney reflects. “Now it’s about surviving today.”

How Temenos Payments is powering the ‘now’ economy

Nowhere is the Temenos philosophy of ‘modernisation with immediate impact’ more visible than in its payments division.

Under Business Line Director, Mick Fennell, the company is reshaping the payments landscape for banks and non-banks alike – from start-ups chasing market entry to incumbents weighed down by legacy debt.

“The volumes keep climbing, up seven per cent globally every year, and the diversity of payments is exploding,” Fennell says. “Our customers are processing instant, cross-border and batch payments across different clearing systems, all under tightening regulation. They need a single, seamless way to manage that complexity.”

Temenos’ answer is its Money Movement and Management platform, a pre-integrated environment for payments, accounts, risk, and treasury. Built on the Temenos Banking Platform, it offers deep functionality across more than 100 markets, deployable in the Cloud, on-premise, or as Temenos software-as-a-service (SaaS). It’s designed to cut

time-to-market dramatically, whether replacing outdated systems or enabling fintech-speed innovation.

“We talk a lot about being seamless,” Fennell says. “You can’t have a seamless experience without integrated platforms. Customers expect low latency, instant execution and immediate feedback – and that means accounts and payments have to work together in real time.”

AI runs through this platform like ‘soaked fruit through a Christmas cake’, as Fennell

The volumes keep climbing, up seven per cent globally every year, and the diversity of payments is exploding Mick Fennell

puts it. Temenos has infused AI models throughout the stack, reducing fraud false positives from six to under two per cent; automating payment repairs and embedding co-pilots powered by Microsoft and NVIDIA to help users create products faster through natural-language commands.

It’s all part of what Fennell calls the ‘attention-economy of payments’, an age where both banks and their customers demand instant outcomes.

“We’re helping institutions industrialise and modernise their capabilities,” he says. “There’s no patience left for legacy debates — it’s about delivering impact now.”

Power instant FX and multi-currency accounts – built for g aming, money service, and digital asset companies ready to scale without the slog.

ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE

A healthy approach to AI

Chief information officers agree that all their organisations’ IT work will involve some level of artificial intelligence by 2030, according to a poll by US consultancy Gartner. But 72 per cent of them also admitted that their existing AI investments were losing money for their organisations, or were, at best, breaking even.

RBI’s Renato Rocha Souza takes us on a deep dive of the bank’s business-centred approach to AI adoption… and ponders on the dangers of the ‘culture war’ between developers

important, but staff need to be able to envision how AI can be used so we can embed it in the core business.”

Its strategy has been to ensure the technology can be used ‘top down’ to revolutionise organisational processes, and also from the ‘bottom up’ to boost staff efficiency and productivity.

Souza says: “Our AI Ambassadors have a responsibility to promote reverse mentoring with the business’s leaders. We are upscaling leaders because there are so many layers of understanding needed to implement AI, and to foresee potential consequences.

This has led to the emergence of another strain of AI – Angst and Indecision among senior executives, which is having a trickle-down effect on teams. So, how can banks ensure they capitalise on the technology’s promise without becoming overwhelmed by the constant hype and noise?

Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) took steps to avoid AI Type 2 by implementing a roadmap that ensures AI Type 1’s use is strictly businessand not technology-driven.

Renato Rocha Souza, Director of RBI’s AI Centre of Excellence, believes large doses of humility and realism are required to avoid wasting time and money.

He admits: “A five-year horizon is too long, it’s hard to predict what will happen – we don’t know if we will have artificial general intelligence by then. So, from the beginning we’ve been focussed on people, mindset and culture. Of course, the technology is

Souza says RBI began its AI journey in 2018, and the examination of generative AI started three years ago. While his AI Centre of Excellence leads the development of AI use cases and drives the bank’s technological transformation, an AI Committee works to ensure compliance with regulations such as the EU AI Act, and strategic alignment across the organisation’s various divisions, which span 23 countries with a particular focus on central and eastern Europe.

A use-case group was formed to highlight areas for implementation and provide ideas on how solutions would work. And to ensure staff at all levels were aware of AI’s potential and the need to be open to its adoption, RBI introduced an AI Pioneer programme, which began with 200 staff members across divisions who allocated 20 per cent of their time to AI.

The programme progressed, and now RBI has what it calls ‘AI Ambassadors’ in every department. All staff are trained in using AI, and, crucially, in using it responsibly.

“We are embedding AI within RBI based on business priorities, not technological priorities. If your managers cannot understand how far they can go in embedding AI in their processes, they risk just playing with nice and exciting tools without having a proper goal.”

Watching the watchmen

AI use cases are assessed and prioritised with what Souza describes as a matrix that considers revenue expectations, regulatory constraints and the technology available.

He admits that the speed of technological development means it’s ‘not unusual’ for objectives to change as more powerful solutions emerge.

“AI models are evaluated in three ways, and the first is by considering the model providers,” he says. “Use cases are developed over the layer of IT platforms. We check for model compliance, model bias and ethics. We agree service level and non-disclosure agreements with providers, and we only use the technologies that are approved by our platform teams.

Renato Rocha Souza, Director of the AI Centre of Excellence at Raiffeisen Bank International

Man vs machine: As technology improves, humans must remain at the heart of AI transformation

“Next, we have the AI Committee, which is made up of data scientists and other experts, who must approve every use case. Then we have internal audits. Model governance systems track each algorithm deployed in each model. That’s our third layer in this ‘many eyes inspection and evaluation’ of the models.

“No models are run without human oversight, so there’s constant supervision over performance and results of models, so we can check for biassed results, for example.”

Souza adds that to assess a project’s success, financial KPIs are important but not the only measure. “For instance, the AI Pioneers’ objective was to upskill the workforce, and it’s hard to attach financial KPIs to that,” he says. “But you can measure other things, like productivity, satisfaction and retention. So we connect our artificial intelligence KPIs to people as well.”

The bank works with a range of providers, such as OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and the Databricks Lakehouse platform, with solutions typically created in-house.

He doesn’t mince his words, arguing that differences across jurisdictions and platforms amount to a ‘culture war’, and a failure to appreciate the impact of inherent biases means such factors will affect a bank’s own AI models.

“We know models are biassed because they follow the data that they were trained on,” he says. “We see differences in how the US regulates AI, and the emphasis in China, for example. So we must take care not to outsource creative aspects, because the more we outsource decisions, the more we delegate them to AI.

“If you’re using Grok, for example, you buy into certain decisions that are acceptable to Grok. Likewise, if you’re using models based on OpenAI, or Gemini.

“At RBI, we’re not changing the future of our business, but we are changing our future business with AI. We believe it’s important for us to plan the AI transformation with people at the centre. We can automate, but in the future, when agents outweigh employees, humans must remain in the pilot seat and AI in the co-pilot seat, and not vice versa.

“There’s a huge discussion around the consequences of AI adoption that goes far beyond our business processes, though.”

Souza admits the deployment of AI to run low-knowledge, data-intensive tasks will disrupt a whole layer of junior positions, and businesses will inevitably prioritise the hiring and cultivation of ‘senior and high

In the future, when agents outweight employees, humans must remain in the pilot seat and AI in the co-pilot seat, not vice a versa

“Internally, our solutions are containerised because we have a pre-occupation to avoid critical mission systems becoming vendor-locked,” he explains. “That doesn’t prevent us from developing use cases with fintechs, but we evaluate and provide oversight of models from third parties.

“A model we’re considering right now is an AI agent that takes collections for sales teams. So, if a customer owes something to the bank, they can negotiate with an agent instead of a person. With customer-facing models, we must be extremely careful to prevent hallucinations and bias. Because we are governed by the EU AI Act, there must be human oversight, so human input is a given for use cases.”

Acknowledging bias

Souza stresses that caution is required when choosing AI platforms to underpin services, since platforms are shaped by governmental regulations and the societal norms from which they draw data.

expertise professionals’. Ultimately, some organisations will one day be run entirely autonomously by agents, although he believes that it won’t happen overnight.

“We’re going to get there, but not as fast as some might wish,” he says. “We’ll have a smooth progression by implementing low-risk, high data-intensive agents, or level-one agents, then two, three, four and five until we have more complex, high-risk use cases that will always demand human oversight.

“Looking at society in general, what consequences will this deep dependence on AI models have on our lives? What geopolitical effects will result if we depend on the models of one particular provider?

“We must understand that we are deciding our future without ultimately knowing what kind of decisions are being taken by the technology we adopt. This is the silent battle that is going on.”

SPEED&COMPLIANCE

The AI balancing act

Data transparency and transaction security are two sides of the same coin.

By

bringing together specialists in each and leveraging AI across a single platform, Vyntra has amplified their powers

In an era where payments move at the speed of light and fraudsters are never far behind, banks face a defining challenge: how to keep transactions fast, frictionless… and safe.

That delicate balance between efficiency and security is precisely where Vyntra, a new fintech born from the merger of Belgium’s Intix and Switzerland’s NetGuardians, aims to make its presence felt.

Formed in June 2025 and backed by Summa Equity, Vyntra unites two specialist companies that were already pursuing the same vision from different perspectives – Intix, providing deep visibility into payment flows, and NetGuardians, deploying advanced AI to detect and prevent fraud.

Together, they promise to give banks a single, intelligent platform that can monitor, analyse, and protect every transaction in real time – without slowing it down.

“We are forming Vyntra to solve a very unique problem for banks,” says

Joel Winteregg, Chief Executive Officer at Vyntra

Alexandre Guidou, Associate Director for Europe at Vyntra

Antoine Cuypers, Director of Strategic Alliances and Key Accounts at Vyntra

its CEO Joel Winteregg. “They need to find the right balance between payment risk and payment security. Our mission is to provide tools that enable speed monitoring of payments – what we call transaction observability – and risk reduction through AI fraud prevention.

“We have joined those two solutions together to really deliver a one-stop shop for banks.”

Both firms had been (and in their new form, continue to be) part of the Summa Equity portfolio – Intix since 2022, NetGuardians since 2024 – and the synergies between them were clear.

Intix built its reputation helping financial institutions gain real-time visibility over transaction data, enabling compliance teams and operations specialists to trace payments instantly and identify anomalies.

NetGuardians, meanwhile, focussed on AI-driven fraud detection. Its technology applied behavioural analytics and machine learning to distinguish legitimate transactions from suspicious ones, thus reducing false positives and saving banks time and money.

By combining these capabilities under one roof, Vyntra becomes a transaction-intelligence platform that ‘unites data observability with predictive analytics’, effectively blending the worlds of compliance, operational resilience, and fraud prevention.

“Customers today are ready to sacrifice a little bit of speed on their payments to ensure there is less risk,” Winteregg says, referencing The Hidden Tension In Every Payment, a recent Vyntra study of 1,000 banking customers worldwide.

“That tells us we are moving in the right direction – banks need to deliver speed and safety together.”

At the heart of Vyntra’s proposition is the idea that trust comes from transparency. If banks can monitor every step of a transaction’s lifecycle, not just technically, but from a business perspective, they can spot issues early, communicate better with customers, and prevent problems before they escalate.

“It’s all about the customer experience,” says Antoine Cuypers, Director of Strategic Alliances and Key Accounts at Vyntra. “Speed has become a commodity. If a transaction is processed on time, no one notices. But if something goes wrong, customers will certainly let you know.

“That’s where visibility makes a real difference, ensuring transactions remain frictionless across their lifecycle.

“Transaction observability gives financial institutions a single version of the truth across departments. You’re able to monitor in real time the health of your flows from a business perspective, not simply a technical one.”

For banks, real-time observability isn’t only about customer satisfaction, it’s about resilience. Payment interruptions or fraud incidents can cause reputational damage and regulatory headaches, not to mention lost revenue.

Winteregg says Vyntra’s software helps banks monitor the resilience of payments to avoid outages or blackouts, while also safeguarding transactions against fraud and money-laundering schemes.

“We want to help banks to be proactive,” he explains. “We bring them

the software suites – AI fraud prevention, money-laundering detection, and transaction observability – that solve the two biggest issues for a head of payments: ensuring payments flow smoothly and securely.”

Social engineering attacks have exploded in recent years, as criminals exploit human trust as well as technical vulnerabilities. Vyntra is on that battlefront, offering specific tools to detect and prevent various types of fraud, including Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams and phishing.

“Scams are a worldwide disease,” says Winteregg. “We’ve all received those messages claiming to be from our bank, urging us to act fast. Customers believe they’re sending money to a trusted source – sometimes even to someone famous. It’s happening everywhere.

“Detecting such scams is difficult because, technically, the customer initiates the payment.

No single bank will solve this alone. By sharing data on fraudulent activities through community scoring, banks can become more powerful together Joel Winteregg

The challenge is to have tools powerful enough, like ours, to detect that and to convince the customer that they are doing something strange.”

He believes customer education is a key part of the story, and so too is collaboration.

“No single bank will solve this alone. By sharing data on fraudulent activities through community scoring, banks can become more powerful together. That’s how we prevent fraud on a global scale,” he says.

Within Vyntra, AI is the driver; the intelligence that learns from billions of transactions and

continuously adapts to new threats. Alexandre Guidou, Associate Director at Vyntra, says the company focusses on the most pressing types of financial crime: scams, account takeovers, and money-laundering techniques such as ‘smurfing,’ where criminals break large sums into smaller deposits to avoid detection.

“For these scenarios, we take a proactive approach,” Guidou explains. “We learn the usual habits of customers and detect suspicious behaviour in real time. AI allows us to generate new layers of due diligence at the customer level, dynamically and continuously.

“And as fraudsters evolve quickly, we use two approaches to stay ahead. First, we leverage what banks know best – their customers. We learn from their behaviour and compare them with peers to assess risk.

“Second, we ingest third-party data from the market, such as suspicious beneficiaries

Transaction observability gives financial institutions a single version of the truth across

departments

Antoine Cuypers

reported by other institutions, and orchestrate that information to boost our fraud-detection performance. It’s about combining internal insight with external intelligence.”

Cuypers argues that secure data-sharing between partners will become a cornerstone of modern payment resilience. “In areas like cross-border payments or remittances, every participant is performing similar compliance checks,” he notes. “If we can reuse the richness of ISO 20022 standards and pass validated data securely along the chain, we’ll save everyone a lot of hassle and cost. Collaboration will be essential.”

That vision aligns with the broader industry trend known as FRAML – the convergence of fraud and anti-money-laundering systems into one cohesive framework. By combining detection capabilities and sharing data across functions, banks can uncover patterns that isolated teams might miss.

“The current challenge for banks is to break the silos,” says Guidou. “At both the analytical and operational levels, fraud prevention and compliance need to learn from each other. Using AI, we can make that collaboration seamless.”

Vyntra’s launch comes at a pivotal time. Financial institutions are under pressure from regulators and customers alike to strengthen defences without compromising user experience. The company already serves more than 130 institutions in more than 60 countries, supported by a workforce of around 150 people, spanning 25 nationalities.

The current challenge for banks is to break the silos.

At both the analytical and operational level, fraud prevention and compliance need to learn from each other Alexandre Guidou

For Winteregg, that illustrates how universal the problem has become.

“Every bank, everywhere, is facing the same dilemma,” he says. “How do we make payments fast, resilient, and secure?

Vyntra brings those worlds together.

“As a company, we are at the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re moving forward to bring that new balanced approach to create a single point of management for risk, efficiency and trust in payments, all at the speed that consumers demand.”

Speed or security?: Faster payments don’t have to be at the expense of safety

In the escalating war against cybercrime, defence is the best offence – but that doesn’t mean it’s passive

The next-gen CISO

When a major bank appoints an ex-military intelligence expert as its new global information security officer, it’s surely a sign that cybercrime has evolved into full-blown cybercombat.

The bad news is, it’s a war without end. The threat landscape is evolving faster than the industry can come up with defences to stop it. The good news is that, if they’re smart, they can dodge the bullets indefinitely.

That’s precisely how Debbie Janeczek, who started her career in US naval intelligence before moving into US Cyber Command, intends to keep ING Bank and its customers safe. In her own words, ‘you can’t possibly fill all the holes’ when the attack surface is as large as the world’s financial system, pin-pricked with millions of vulnerabilities.

“So [as an industry] we have moved from ‘stop and block’ to filling the gaps, security by design, and making sure that we can react quickly, mitigate fast, and contain the threat so that the business can keep going,” she says.

The skill is in knowing where the next assault will come from and having countermeasures already in place to deflect it. While a recent survey by CFO.com revealed that 85 per cent of cybersecurity professionals attribute

the increase in cyberattacks to generative AI used against them – and that’s bad enough – Janeczek is thinking several steps ahead to what could be a defining moment in cyber warfare.

While quantum computer systems can’t yet break current encryption methods, cybercriminals are already harvesting sensitive data to store for when they can – and experts predict that this alarming reality could be within the next 10 years. It reinforces Janeczek’s urgent call for businesses to act now, not later.

“Large organisations like ING have cryptography embedded in everything that we do. So we have to prepare now,” she says. “And that means knowing where your cryptography is. If you don’t, you don’t know how to make sure it’s quantum safe.

“Companies need to start with an inventory. Once you have that, you need to prioritise it. And you have to know what the quantum safe algorithms are, which ones you need to implement first, then you have to do testing. It’s an evolution, because things will change.

“At the same time, you have to look at what your vendors are doing. We have a lot of dependence on third parties, so we have to make sure they’re on the journey to being quantum safe, too.”

Debbie Janeczek, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at ING

ING, as part of its forward-looking strategy, has already initiated preparations by working closely with research consortiums on the future of quantum-safe algorithms, such as those published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). However, as Janeczek emphasises, cybersecurity isn’t just about technology; it’s also about people and process.

“From my intelligence background, I know you can’t make decisions without the right information,” she says.

“So threat intelligence is one of the foundations of any security programme – having a team that is collecting intelligence from vendors in the dark web, working with the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center and local governments, looking at other companies when they are impacted.

“And not just providing information, but interpreting what it means to the company – where in its ecosystem it is vulnerable and what mitigation is available. Higher level strategic reports like this help the business make better decisions. Our security teams must be equipped with more than technical skills.”

Since taking up her role at ING earlier this year, Janeczek has addressed

CISO

the transformation of cybersecurity from a technical exercise into a core component of business resilience.

“ING Bank takes it very seriously; our CEO is involved in a security forum himself,” she says. “Traditionally, the CISO’s role was very technical; it was about what tools we were going to use. It has moved to being a risk executive role. But it needs to move to the next level – what I like to call the next-generation CISO, where you’re a value creator for the company – because cybersecurity is no longer just a cost centre, it’s a business enabler. We must understand the strategic implications of what’s at stake.”

Rise of the fraudsters

According to the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report, the attacks facing organisations today are not only more sophisticated, but also more frequent and increasingly costly.

Ransomware remains the most financially devastating form of cybercrime. In 2024, more than 50 per cent of organisations globally reported being victims of a ransomware attack.

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platforms, which allow even low-skilled criminals to launch highly effective attacks, have surged by 50 per cent in the last year. The average ransom demand reached a staggering $4.5million in 2024, and, even more disturbingly, the technique of ‘double extortion’ – where attackers steal and threaten to release sensitive data – has risen by 150 per cent.

As Janeczek emphasises, banks are part of critical infrastructure – one of the pillars that must be protected in a national crisis. So cybersecurity isn’t just about defending the organisation; it’s about actively participating in global efforts to disrupt cybercriminal networks. ING collaborates at all levels with external organisations.

Jethro Cornelissen, ING’s Global Anti-Fraud Officer, demonstrates this commitment. When he’s not defending ING from fraud, Cornelissen leads a global task force tackling cybercrime through the Cybercrime Atlas initiative, a World Economic Forum-hosted project.

In one of the largest cybercrime takedowns ever seen in Africa, Cornelissen described in a recent company blog how his team helped disrupt an online fraud network that spanned 18 countries, recovering nearly $100million in stolen assets. This collaborative operation, known as Operation Serengeti 2.0, highlights the importance of cross-border collaboration.

“Criminals are smart, especially in social engineering. A bank can’t win that fight alone,” wrote Cornelissen. “But collaboration across borders and industries makes a real difference.”

At the same time, the regulatory landscape is also undergoing significant changes. In Europe, the introduction of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has had a transformative impact on how financial institutions like ING manage third-party risk. DORA drives continuous monitoring and assessment of third-party vendors, shifting responsibility from a compliance task to a board-level responsibility.

“It’s not just simply about answering a questionnaire once; it’s about ongoing vigilance,” Janeczek notes.

Cybersecurity shouldn’t be an afterthought. It has to be part of the DNA of the business

“DORA brings a framework to third-party risk management, and it has driven us to implement continuous monitoring and on-site assessments of our most critical vendors,” she adds. “And we have to engage with them closely to get early warnings, such as breaches that might affect us.”

Understanding and adapting to the evolving TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) of cybercriminals is crucial. This is why ING’s cyber threat management strategy is deeply informed by continuous threat intelligence and collaboration with other financial institutions.

By combining its internal expertise with partnerships like FS-ISAC and with the World Economic Forum’s Cybercrime Atlas, ING is actively working to disrupt the very infrastructure cybercriminals rely on. Cornelissen’s teams are tackling online fraud through cross-border collaboration, alongside ING’s internal cybersecurity efforts, highlighting the critical role of teamwork in combating cybercrime at scale.

The CrowdStrike report underscores the increasing use of AI by attackers to enhance their tactics. Phishing, for instance, has become more personalised and harder to detect, with AI-powered tools helping criminals craft convincing messages manipulate employees’ trust. More than 60 per cent of breaches in 2024 were attributed to phishing and social engineering, and this trend is expected to grow.

However, while cybercriminals weaponise AI for offence, the industry is leveraging it for defence. “We’re looking at how AI can help us to respond faster, identify threats in real time, and even automate lower-level tasks to free up analysts for more complex investigations,” says Janeczek.

Next-generation endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, which are increasingly incorporating AI, allow businesses to automatically isolate and mitigate threats before they can spread across networks. Also, according to the CrowdStrike report, businesses that have implemented such systems have seen a marked reduction in the time it takes to neutralise an attack.

Safety in numbers

Janeczek returns time and again to the importance of aligning cybersecurity strategies with broader business goals.

“We need to embed security from the ground up,” she explains. “Cybersecurity shouldn’t be an afterthought. It has to be part of the DNA of the business.”

Organisations that are proactive in security and threat intelligence – sharing insights with industry peers and participating in collaborative defence initiatives – have been shown to be far more resilient to attack. In fact, companies that shared threat intelligence experienced 40 per cent fewer successful phishing attacks than those that didn’t, according to CrowdStrike.

Whilst the threat landscape is evolving fast, Janeczek isn’t downhearted, because she knows businesses can be agile, adaptable, and well-prepared for what’s on the horizon.

It’s clear that the only real defence is proactive preparation.

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CROSS-BORDER

Joining the dots: Brazil’s payments landscape is rapidly evolving, with a shift from traditional to digital methods

Making local global

A new licence in Brazil has strengthened Nium’s position as one of the most

comprehensive infrastructure services powering cross-border payments

When Nium was granted its licence to operate as a payment institution in Brazil, it was a milestone that followed years of work in the country.

The authorisation by the Central Bank of Brazil in October 2025 means Nium can now onboard and serve its Brazilian customers directly, alongside its partnerships with intermediaries.

The move underlines the firm’s unwavering commitment to a region that is witnessing a huge shift from cash to real-time digital payments through national systems such as Pix, QR codes and Boleto barcode payments, which provide financial inclusion for the unbanked.

But Nium’s global success hasn’t just been based on chasing what’s new. It has taken a pragmatic approach to build a network for cross-border payments using whatever works – witnessed in late 2024 when it leveraged Swift messaging as a method for banks to connect with its system.

“I call us a real-time payments infrastructure, not a payments company – I don’t even like to refer

to us as a PSP [payment services provider],” says Nium Chief Payments Officer Alexandra Johnson.

“We are that interoperable infrastructure to move money in real time securely, quickly, seamlessly. And for us to do that, we need the tech and regulatory infrastructure to be able to support any payment method that comes to the fore – be that stablecoins, the real-time payment schemes we’re already connected to, or whatever the future may bring.”

Nium was founded in Singapore in 2014 to create a fast and transparent alternative to the correspondent banking system. Initially with a focus on the travel industry, which still makes up a significant proportion of its clients, it’s now a £50billion company operating a cross-border payments platform with users in banking, payroll, other platforms and marketplaces. And it offers them complete spend management solutions, virtual cards, and white-label payout systems.

Today, it describes itself as ‘the global infrastructure for real-time payments’, covering 190 countries and territories,

Alexandra Johnson, Chief Payments Officer at Nium

around 100 real-time markets, and is regulated in 35 countries.

Nium’s network has been constructed by creating links with national payment systems that were built for specific use cases but which didn’t interconnect.

In this way, it acts as a bridge between markets, but also between old and new. In many cases, it leverages old infrastructure, sometimes decades-old, and innovates on top of that to facilitate real-time money flows with visibility for sender and receiver.

Brazil beckons

Latin America was a natural destination for Nium, given the efforts of governments in the region to shrink the shadow economy through financial digitisation.

The launch in October of Colombia’s low-value, real-time payments rail Bre-B follows the success of Pix in Brazil and Mexico’s SPEI and CoDi systems for moving funds between bank accounts.

The speed and low cost of these systems support the growth of e-commerce and gig platforms, which typically operate on low margins.

FINTECH

Nium already had a presence in Brazil through clients who use its rails to move money across borders. Many operated in the foreign exchange space. They include Oz Cambio, which offers a cross-border platform aimed at SMEs to facilitate import-export operations (typically Brazilian importers doing business with Chinese sellers), payment for workers such as IT staff employed from abroad, and companies with international payrolls.

Frustrated by the costs and speed of existing systems, Oz partnered with Nium in 2023, and it now offers a white-label, cross-border mass payments platform. Using Nium’s rails, Oz can settle payments in Brazil using methods such as Pix, the TED system for high-value payments, credit/debit cards or Boleto. Meanwhile, Frente Corretora de Câmbio joined forces with Nium because the fintech

Singapore-based global bank DBS to its cross-border payment platform via Swift.

A Swift victory

Nium developed the Swift solution after recognising that financial institutions would be attracted to a system that leveraged the Swift messaging protocol they had already adopted.

Johnson says: “Nearly all financial institutions are already connected to Swift, so in our minds, we want to meet our customers where they are. I am a former banker, so I can tell you firsthand that getting the resources prioritised to integrate with a new partner takes time just to get to a roadmap.

“So, banks use their existing connections and get access to the real-time seamless rails that we have connectivity to. They send us that Swift message just as if they’re sending a wire,

Reaching

they are’

was one of the few companies in 2019 that could integrate with the RippleNet blockchain system – a method of moving money that appealed to many of Frente’s influencer, investment broker and travel agency clients. Foreign exchange broker Treviso used Nium to scale its business via the use of digital services and now offers current account credit, using local corridors as a means of payment.

Nium says winning a licence to operate in Brazil will ‘streamline operations’ and ‘reduces reliance on intermediaries, offering greater efficiency in the market’. It is also seeking a foreign exchange licence to strengthen its position in a country that Nium CEO Prajit Nanu describes as ‘not just a market for us it’s a critical node in our global infrastructure, a strategic hub for our growth’.

Beyond Latin America, Nium achieved a major business win in September when it announced a deal to connect

Worldpay is among Nium’s clients and chose to use Nium as it is ‘one of the only solutions on the market that allows us to verify account ownership in real-time across multiple markets, saving us costs associated with reconciling misdirected payments’.

Johnson says: “You can be absolutely certain about who you’re sending [the payment] to, but now we’re thinking about how we continue to evolve that. What are the other behavioural nodes, behavioural markers that we can look at within a transaction, or within the activity on an account?

“We’re at this inflection point. It’s not just about the payment anymore. And it’s not just about the last mile. Value-added services become key in creating a pleasing, customer-facing, end-to-end payment experience. It’s making sure you have strong compliance tools that end up being a moat for your business.

“It means fraud prevention tools, foreign exchange. All of these components are coming together in an integrated, singular payment solution.”

Johnson says the business acts as an aggregator for its customers. And she foresees that this aggregation, with the continued development of tech and regulatory infrastructure, will enable Nium to stay ahead of its competition.

She says: “The way we operate is to create a system we can continue to build upon to create that global interoperability as more of these efficient payment mechanisms come into the ecosystem.

Nearly all financial institutions are already connected to Swift… so, banks send us that Swift message just as if they’re sending a wire, and we map that to the local payment scheme

and we map that to the formatting of the local payment scheme, which is real-time payments in several markets. It allows our customers better, faster access to these tools while they figure out where they are on their API journey.”

Adding value

Johnson adds that a focus on value-added services is another cornerstone of Nium’s competitive advantage, as it builds its globe-spanning, cross-border payment platform.

Fraud protection is a key area, and the firm last year launched Nium Verify, whereby the identity of the account receiving payment can be verified in real time in 50 markets.

“We don’t see this as something that will disrupt our business; if anything, it will bolster our business.

“It’s not just the integration of different payment mechanisms, but bringing together all the different capabilities involved in a payment: the pay-in, the data, compliance, and so on. And then look at the new payment types as they emerge – real-time payments, wallets, stablecoins, agentic payments, and whatever comes next.

“Working with partners, as in the case involving Swift, means we’re ready to create that interoperable system, be at the forefront of new payment capabilities and be ready when our customers need them.”

out: Nium utilises Swift to ‘meet customers where

Not so remote:

Small jurisdictions seem to have a disproportionately large interest in fintech founders. If living and working on an island appeals to you, perhaps it’s time to set sail

FINTECHISLANDS

Startups in Paradise: Island Fintech

‘Home to myths, fairies and, one day, unicorns’ is how Digital Isle of Man, an executive agency of the Manx government, positions this tiny financial services hub – on a historic, strategically important piece of land, equidistant between the UK and Ireland

Flying into the windswept Ronaldsway Airport on a twin-prop Loganair plane, munching complementary Tunnock’s chocolate wafer bars, it doesn’t feel like you’re entering an international money metropolis. But, having taken a conscious decision in the 1980s to shift from a then-faltering economy,

based on tourism, fishing and agriculture, to one powered by data – and specifically financial data – the Isle of Man has indeed made a remarkable (if well-camouflaged) shift. It’s one of a handful of independent isles that have pinned their future to a fintech mast – floating ecosystems with regulatory and

fiscal frameworks that encourage outside-the-box thinking. That has led –perhaps inevitably – to some being sanctioned by the international community for a lack of compliance, while even those that work hard to be on the right side of global regulators have struggled to overcome a reputation for opaqueness. ‘Offshore’ has become a shorthand for ‘off limits’.

Increasingly, though, these territories are tempting entrepreneurs to forge their destiny there, not as outliers but as pioneers of a new financial system. That’s particularly, but not exclusively, in the areas of digital assets, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Many of the new generation of island fintechs are also related to wealth management and life insurance, sectors that have tended to gravitate towards sympathetic island tax regimes and are now creating strong demand for back-office and regulatory tools: onboarding, KYC, workflow automation and reporting solutions.

While the Isle of Man shuns the descriptor ‘tax haven’, the still growing number of family offices, and the discrete presence of more than 70 licensed trust and corporate service providers is a tell-tale sign that extreme wealth is not only welcomed but protected here.

It would be foolish to turn capital away today, especially as there is likely to be a lot more of it looking for a home as high earners continue to leave the UK in record numbers. But, like many other jurisdictions whose appeal was once their anonymity, the Isle of Man is now actively courting attention with groundbreaking initiatives such as its new Digital Asset Foundations, international partnerships, recruiting high-profile fintechs, and advertising itself as a well-equipped nursery for digital startups.

It’s generally recognised as a respectable place to do business, governed by a globally-aligned regulatory framework. But the presence of edge technologies, and some high-risk sectors, such as eGaming has caused many of its fellow islands to double down on oversight, which, in turn, is creating new opportunities for regtechs.

Take Malta. A shock greylisting in 2021 by the Financial Action Task Force, which had concerns about the robustness of Malta's anti-money laundering regime, dented investor confidence in the short term and raised the spectre of correspondent banks de-risking. But the long-term consequence has been to build back better. And that created an innovation gap that fintechs filled.

Binderr, which coincidentally won the Isle of Man Innovation Challenge this year, has been

instrumental in helping the Malta Business Registry (MBR) redesign itself as a gatekeeper for the country’s financial integrity and ensure the country adheres to AML standards going forward.

Moving from a paper-based to digital system has not only reduced onboarding time for those who want to do business in Malta, but it has also allowed the Registry to integrate APIs for corporate service providers (CSPs). Through Binderr, a platform that matches businesses expanding overseas with CSPs and banks, entrepreneurs can now complete their registry on Malta remotely, and in just a few days.

In fact, the MBR has gone further than the minimum that EU regulators required for company mobility. It’s leveraged digital systems to support the relocation of both EU and non-EU native businesses, including those from the UK.

Binderr Co-founder, CEO and serial entrepreneur Jacob Appel, originally from Denmark, now considers Malta his home. And it has plenty in its favour. English is the language

The Isle of Man is now courting attention with groundbreaking initiatives, international partnerships, recruiting high-profile fintechs, and advertising itself as a well-equipped nursery for digital startups

of business; the Malta Startup Residence Programme offers a way in for non-EU entrepreneurs and their families; corporate tax can effectively be as low as five per cent, thanks to a shareholder refund system; there are also deep government wells of startup cash, including grants, loans and investment. And Malta’s location in the Med’ not only makes it a comfortable base to live and work, but also a good launchpad for breaking into EU markets on its doorstep, the Middle East and North Africa. Five-year-old Binderr now has clients in Malta, wider Europe, the UAE and UK. Trophy-seekers came from more than 20 countries for the most recent Isle of Man Innovation Challenge – several from Malta, Guernsey and Singapore, the last of which signed a Memorandum of Understanding on AI development with the Isle of Man last year.

Lyle Wraxall, who leads Digital Isle of Man, an executive agency of the Manx government, describes Singapore as its ‘big brother’ when it comes to AI innovation, helping the Isle of Man inform plans for a new National Office for AI Development and Regulation, which is slated to begin work in January 2026.

Singapore itself is the tech island to which others aspire. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has a legendary track record of offering extensive support for fintechs who challenge the status quo, including substantial funding and grants through the FSTI scheme for innovation and experimentation.

The startup/scaleup ecosystem is so crowded with opportunity – Enterprise Singapore, Elevandi, Singapore Fintech Association, incubator Tenity, the API Exchange, Startup SG and a raft of big-hitting FIs with their own established innovation hubs – that sometimes it’s hard for entrepreneurs to decide what to turn down.

Regulatory sandboxes in Singapore allow safe, rapid testing and deployment, while robust IP protection and a mature ecosystem attracts huge wadges of investment from VCs and global financial institutions.

You can also get yourself certified as a bona fide fintech, which gives newcomers credibility when approaching larger clients in particular.

Singapore has already worked well for Staple AI, a trust platform established six years ago and now operating across 58 countries. It helps companies capture and interpret unstructured data in 300 languages and uses fully auditable AI to keep them compliant with standards in real time, including the EU AI Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, and ISOs in multiple jurisdictions.

“Some of the grants and funding available [in Singapore] is contingent on fintech companies doing a project with a financial institution… so, proofs of concepts delivered to banks or FIs. In that sense, there’s kind of an incentive to make these connections,” says CEO Ben Stein, who relocated to the island to take up a regular job in financial services, through which he was introduced to a VC and incubator programme called Entrepreneur First (Singapore). That’s ultimately where he met his co-founder – and the rest is history.

Networking on and between the islands has time and again proven to be the best path to growth. Many Isle of Man Innovation Challenge attendees were there to tap into the ecosystem, and to find commercial partnerships among the FS companies that drive more than a third of the island’s economy and account for around one-third of all employment.

FINTECH

Extending hands across the seas also helps build a sense of belonging to a special island race of innovators. Wraxall believes the fintech islands can not only add value by working together, but also be bell weathers for wider change – safe petri dishes for experimentation.

“Because we are a small island, we have the freedom to try new things,” he says. What it chooses to explore is uniquely influenced by both its infrastructure and its environment. The island boasts six Tier 3 data centres and it’s just completing a major fibre network rollout. But while that’s an advantage when positioning yourself as a digital financial hub, it creates a problem if you’re also the world’s only UNESCO Biosphere Nation, recognised for its unique landscape, culture, and commitment to sustainability.

Because it’s a small island we have the freedom to try new things

Lyle Wraxall, Digital Isle of Man

Wraxall admits there’s a contradiction at the heart of the island’s strategic goals, but that’s the beauty of being an innovation super cluster: you can fix it. it’s already attracting players whose core offer is reconciling the digital world’s demand for galactic quantities of energy with protecting the planet, offering itself as a living lab for companies such as Earthscope, which aims to put Nature in the boardroom, and Zumo, a green cryptowallet.

“As a nation, the island is incredibly proud of its Biosphere status,” says Wraxall, a former banker who gave up the bright lights of New York to relocate his family, so they could enjoy a better quality of life. “There’s a real commitment and desire to do the right thing.”

With a land mass of less than 572sq km the Isle of Man is almost 10 times the size of another UK crown dependency that has carved a unique place among the fintech islands.

The founders of RuleWise, which helps firms automate compliance tasks, manage risk, and adapt to evolving regulations across multiple jurisdictions, chose to base its operations in Guernsey for a combination of reasons.

“Guernsey was a natural fit,” says Co-founder Mort Mirghawameddin. “The tax environment is helpful for a growing company, but what really made the difference was the regulatory approach.

“Guernsey, along with the other Channel Islands, has recognised the importance of AI and is putting it at the centre of its innovation strategy. [And] Guernsey’s financial sector already has deep expertise in banking, funds, Insurance, fiduciary and wealth management, so many of our potential users were here from day one.

“Being close to both clients and the regulator meant the island was an ideal test bed for our proof of concept. We were able to meet people in person, iterate quickly and refine RuleWise, based on direct feedback, which accelerated our development far more than working from a larger city would have.

“The lifestyle aspect also plays a role. The island offers a balanced pace of life, (very) short commutes and a strong sense of community, which helps with retaining experienced people long term.

“There are a few obvious challenges. Travel requires more planning and is very expensive, especially for last-minute meetings in London or elsewhere. The tech talent pool on-island is naturally smaller, so we often have to recruit globally and work in a partly remote model.

Guernsey was a natural fit. The tax environment is helpful for a growing company, but what really made a difference was the regulatory approach

Mort Mirghawameddin, RuleWise

“In addition, the ecosystem isn’t as dense as a major city, so networking is more intentional than spontaneous. And costs, such as property, can also be higher.”

So, could RuleWise have launched in London or even Paris?

“It could have, but it would not have been the same,” says Mirghawameddin.

“Larger cities have bigger talent pools and easier access to events, but they also come with higher overheads and more complex regulatory pathways.”

Spotlight on the Isle of Man: Pros and Cons of island life

Taxation

Like many smaller jurisdictions, the Isle of Man is famous for its favourable tax regime. Most businesses benefit from zero per cent corporation tax, there is no capital gains tax, and founders pocket more of their hard-earned wealth, thanks to low personal tax taxes.

Financial incentives

The government rolls out a red carpet for founders with a generous Financial Assistance Scheme for capital and operating items for both startups and relocating businesses. And there’s more cash available for relocating employees or hiring graduates. It’s worth noting that the island is now a year into an ambitious programme to train and upskill the entire community in AI, building a network of specialists, and supporting local businesses to adopt the technology.

Regulation

The Isle of Man takes a ‘technology-agnostic’ approach – the activity is regulated, not the tech. It developed regulations around the use of distributed ledger technology and crypto as far back as 2015, and has a Blockchain Office to support businesses, and a government-backed blockchain sandbox. The government has just announced that it’s planning a National Office for AI

Development and Regulation to co-ordinate AI activity, manage risks and set direction.

But it’s also about to tighten regulations and enforcement around eGaming, following a rocky few months for the sector.

Local infrastructure & ecosystem

The finance industry accounts for 50 per cent of the Isle of Man’s GDP and it’s the second biggest employer. And if you’re a DLT-based business, there’s a positive buzz. Around 30 blockchain projects have emerged over the past 10 years, including CoinCorner, Unikrn and Qadre. It has six Tier 3, ISO-accredited data centres connected to the mainland by five high bandwidth subsea cables with ‘self-healing technology’ that ensures any fault doesn’t interrupt service. And you’re unlikely to go offline: the island’s gas and green fuel sources generate 200 per cent of peak electricity.

LIFT-OFF IN BARBADOS

As the Caribbean island charts a real-time path, Payment Spayce is already looking at the next frontier

When the name Payment Spayce first began circulating, observers might have expected some kind of space-tech experiment. The reality is something far more grounded, yet no less forward-looking.

Recently rebranded, the US payment services provider is anchoring itself in the Caribbean’s emerging fintech ecosystem just as the island’s regulatory, infrastructural and reputational stars begin to align. Because Barbados, long known for its picture-postcard beaches and conservative banking sector, is quietly becoming one of the region’s most intriguing fintech testbeds.

The Central Bank of Barbados and the Financial Services Commission (FSC) have spent the past five years methodically modernising their oversight frameworks, separating regulatory functions from government, and opening pathways for digital innovators through a sandbox regime that was first launched in 2018.

Jonathan Brathwaite, Chief Legal Officer and Marilyn Brathwaite, Chief of Staff at Spayce Technologies Inc

It’s a measured, deliberate evolution – one that reflects both lessons learned and ambitions renewed.

The FSC’s latest annual report, pointedly titled Navigating Change: A Regulatory Odyssey, signals a more confident stance: independent, future-facing, and increasingly open to collaboration with private innovators like Payment Spayce.

From compliance burden to compliance advantage

In fintech, timing is everything, and Payment Spayce is ready to take advantage of a moment when Barbados’ institutional foundations are catching up with its entrepreneurial appetite.

The island’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring marked a turning point in 2024, restoring international confidence and giving local firms a clearer runway to engage global partners.

At the same time, the Central Bank’s partnership with global financial technology provider Montran to deliver BiMPay, a national instant payments platform capable of sub-10-second transactions, is setting the stage for a cash-light economy by 2026. And in September this year, the Central Bank issued a new regulatory framework for payment service providers.

Within this ecosystem, Payment Spayce believes it stands out for its regulatory discipline and organic growth model.

“We’ve built our stack in-house over 20 years, without venture capital or private equity funding,” explains Jonathan Brathwaite, Chief Legal Officer at Payment Spayce’s parent, Spayce Technologies Inc. “That gives us agility – our wallet, gateway and card infrastructure have all been designed with compliance in mind, from the ground up. As regulations evolve, we can adapt in real time.”

That adaptability is proving central to the company’s value proposition, which is closely aligned with two of the world’s biggest card schemes. Spayce’s digital wallet integrates directly with Visa in the United States and Mastercard in Canada, offering both digital and physical cards tailored to each market.

Rather than view regulation as an obstacle, the company sees it as a differentiator. It recently announced a partnership with Israel-based AI-powered financial crime compliance solutions provider ThetaRay, which uses advanced AI-driven transaction monitoring to strengthen anti-money laundering and fraud detection, without sacrificing transaction speed – a key consideration for markets still under scrutiny for financial transparency.

The Barbados advantage

What makes Barbados an ideal proving ground for a company like Payment Spayce?

Stability, says Marilyn Brathwaite, Chief of Staff at Spayce Technologies Inc.

“Barbados has had a stable banking sector for more than half a century,” she notes. “Fintech is the natural next step – bringing the financial system into the 21st century while creating new career opportunities for young professionals. The legislation is in place, the infrastructure is growing, and the talent is here.”

One of the early fintech entrants in the Barbadian market, the company has leaned heavily on that local strength.

Barbados has had a stable banking sector for more than half a century.

Fintech is the natural next step

Marilyn Brathwaite, Spayce Technologies Inc.

“We’ve been able to find great people from banks and private institutions who understand risk, regulation, and service,” adds Brathwaite. “We’re blending that traditional banking discipline with new technology.”

That blending of old and new extends to the broader ecosystem. The Fintech Islands conference (FiX25), held in Bridgetown earlier this year, showcased Barbados as a bridge between the Caribbean, North America and Africa – a regional nexus for digital finance.

Speakers highlighted not just innovation but also credibility. The island’s regulators, once seen as overly cautious, are now praised for being predictably thorough.

Barbados’ transformation is also reshaping regional dynamics. With neighbouring markets

such as Jamaica, the Bahamas and Trinidad exploring central bank digital currencies and open-banking pilots, the Caribbean is becoming a test bed for cross-border interoperability.

Barbados’ appeal lies in its combination of credibility and agility – its regulatory independence, strong banking heritage, and investor-friendly tax incentives have positioned it as a jurisdiction where global fintechs can experiment without excessive red tape.

For Payment Spayce, that blend of pragmatism and progress offers an ideal foundation: a small but connected island, ready to prove that innovation need not come at the expense of oversight.

Wearables,

wallets, and what comes next

As Payment Spayce refines its wallet proposition, it is already eyeing the next frontier: wearables.

“The wearable payments market is growing at around 40 per cent annually,” says Brathwaite. “We see opportunities to integrate our technology into devices that are part of everyday life, whether that’s fitness trackers, rings or smart watches. The goal is frictionless, compliant and context-aware payments.”

The company’s dual-market approach –Barbados as operational base, North America as commercial backbone – creates a unique testing environment. It can trial products in a small, regulated market before scaling them into the US and Canada, where its card partnerships already provide direct channels to consumers.

And timing again appears to favour the firm.

The forthcoming US Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which seeks to delineate oversight of digital assets between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), could reshape the compliance contours of cross-border digital finance.

Spayce’s homegrown technology stack, tuned for flexibility, allows it to adjust faster than firms reliant on third-party vendors.

The FSC’s Regulatory Odyssey report highlights a shift from reactive rulemaking to proactive capacity building. That independence – separating supervision from ministerial control – has given Barbados credibility among institutional investors wary of political interference. Meanwhile, BiMPay’s impending rollout represents more than just a national payments upgrade; it’s a statement of intent.

For the first time, Barbadians will have an instant payments system designed locally, governed transparently, and open to private sector participation.

Payment Spayce’s leadership believes that collaboration between fintechs, traditional banks and regulators will define the island’s next decade and beyond.

“Cross-training is key,” says Marilyn Brathwaite. “We’ve built an ecosystem where people in Barbados can work interchangeably with teams in North America or Europe. That makes us globally competitive.”

Signals from the market

The ecosystem’s evolution is being felt beyond financial corridors. Uber’s recent entry into Barbados, for instance, is expected to accelerate the shift toward digital payments and merchant digitisation. As ride-hailing and food delivery platforms gain traction, consumers’ expectations around cashless convenience will rise – a tide that lifts all fintech boats.

And Payment Spayce, with its hybrid of domestic presence and international connectivity, is well-positioned to capture that momentum. Its compliance-led, partnership-rich model could help make Barbados a credible export base for financial innovation rather than just a tax-efficient HQ.

Countdown to lift off

Success for Payment Spayce, and for Barbados’ fintech sector more broadly, is likely to hinge on three converging factors. Firstly, the execution of BiMPay, where seamless rollout, merchant acceptance and public confidence will determine whether instant payments become ubiquitous.

Then there is the dependence on further regulatory clarity in North America. The Clarity Act and parallel Canadian updates will dictate wallet architecture and token handling standards. And to become truly jet-propelled, cross-border credibility and reliability will be vital. Partnerships like the one with ThetaRay must prove that compliance technology can scale without stifling speed or user experience.

The goal is frictionless, compliant and context-aware payments Jonathan Brathwaite, Spayce Technologies Inc.

If those elements come together, Barbados could find itself transformed from a peripheral player into a pivotal fintech hub. Its journey has been more marathon than moonshot, much like Payment Spayce’s own.

And while the island might not be reaching for the stars just yet, its fintech sector, led by firms like Payment Spayce, is certainly entering a higher sphere.

The payments landscape is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the push for ever-faster, safer and more efficient financial transactions – especially cross-border.

One of the most impactful recent developments in this space has been the European Union’s Instant Payment Regulation (IPR), which, since October, has mandated that banks and payment service providers (PSPs) within Europe be capable of issuing and receiving instant payments in a compliant manner.

This regulation marked a critical step towards enhancing the efficiency and security of payments within the Single European Payments Area (SEPA). It will also directly impact other states that have special arrangements with it, including Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, Monaco and the UK.

Alongside instant credit transfers, IPR introduces several other obligations, including Verification of Payee (VoP), equal charges for all payment types,

and stringent sanctions-screening rules. These changes, while essential, present considerable challenges for PSPs, particularly when it comes to technological readiness and regulatory compliance.

CBI, Italy’s key financial industry utility, has played a pivotal role in helping local and pan-European institutions navigate these new demands. With a vast network that comes from serving more than 400 financial institutions, CBI is at the forefront of providing solutions to help them comply with IPR – not only that, but turn compliance into a commercial advantage.

Notably, CBI has developed the Name Check platform, which offers a centralised mechanism for VoP, enabling PSPs to check that payments are directed to the correct beneficiary. This functionality reduces the time and costs of regulatory adaptation and provides enhanced protection against fraud, a crucial requirement for achieving instant payment compliance.

Pilar Fragalà, Chief Commercial Officer at CBI

CBI is also leading the development of Request to Pay (RTP), a service designed to bridge gaps in payment infrastructure, ensuring seamless communication between PSPs and financial institutions across borders. Through this, CBI is also playing a key role in open banking and open finance innovations that will shape the future of European payments.

By leveraging existing infrastructures, CBI is addressing the challenge of integrating less advanced payment systems, helping to unlock the full potential of the IPR. These significant efforts position CBI as a crucial enabler of the European payments revolution, supporting institutions in their digital transformation, while fostering a secure, interconnected financial ecosystem.

We spoke to the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Pilar Fragalà, to discover how its B2B2C approach to developing infrastructure, innovative services and digital ecosystems is playing out.

Check, check… and check!

CROSS-BORDER

Having launched its own IPR-compliant Verification of Payee service with added-value features, Italy’s financial utility provider CBI is ready to ‘revolutionise’ B2C transactions with fast, seamless and cost-efficient Request To Pay

THE FINTECH MAGAZINE: CBI clearly covers a lot of bases when it comes to payments. Now we are just the other side of the October deadline for the mandatory implementation of VoP, how prepared has the Italian banking ecosystem been for this shift, and what role is CBI playing in supporting compliance with that, specifically?

PILAR FRAGALÀ: Our ecosystem players have been actively working to prepare for this deadline and, while the transition certainly presents both technical and operational challenges, the sector has made significant progress to ensure compliance within the required time frame.

As a key player in Italy’s financial infrastructure, CBI is playing a central role in supporting this shift. It is providing a standard design and interoperable solution to enable seamless VoP implementation across the Italian market.

CBI is also trying to facilitate collaboration between banks and PSPs, offering technical guidance. Thanks to this, Italy is well-positioned to meet the regulatory expectations and enhance the fight against fraud and misdirected payments.

TFM: How would you say your solution is different from others in the market, in terms of scalability and reliability for financial institutions in Italy and across Europe?

PF: CBI’s VoP solution isn’t just a compliant service; it’s strategically designed to deliver interoperability, scalability and operational excellence for financial institutions. It offers neutral governance with European reach within a plug-and-play architecture, making it a highly reliable and forward-looking solution for the evolving digital payment landscape.

Our verification-based solution stands out due to its centralised, interoperable and future-proof approach, designed to assure both regulatory compliance and long-term value for financial institutions. It offers what is essentially a centralised infrastructure with wide market reach, made possible because of our well-established CBI Globe platform, which has already been adopted by more than 400 PSPs in Italy. These existing networks offer immediate scalability and lower the implementation barrier for participants.

With real-time, high-accuracy matching between name and IBAN (international bank account number), the VoP system performs as a real-time IBAN name check, recording either an exact match, partial match, or no match.

In addition to that, it’s our European interoperability which further differentiates us, because we have signed a strategic agreement, enabling cross-border VoP services across several EU countries and also the UK. This positions CBI as a pan-European hub for VoP, which is unique in the Italian and broader EU market.

We have also developed value-added services. Being a system-wide solution, CBI VoP enables the transmission of additional anti-fraud information to the payer, leveraging the information held by participants’ PSPs, such as the commercial trade name or reports on IBANs involved in banking fraud. Then we also have a modular and API-driven architecture, a trusted industry consortium model.

It’s not just about helping to execute the payments, though. We also fully support our clients with customer communication and onboarding. Beyond the technology, we support our partners with ready-to-use communication material, customised to enable PSPs to engage with their customers. And we provide dedicated onboarding support for clients’ internal technical teams, including documentation and webinars.

TFM: RTP is really starting to take off as an alternative, faster and lower-cost payment solution that can help overcome some of the complexities surrounding cross-border transactions, in particular. CBI has been active in driving innovation around RTP, so what do you see as the possibilities here, and how does RTP fit into the broader suite of your services?

PF: CBI’s RTP enables PSPs to offer businesses an advanced system for managing digital collection. With RTP, the PSP allows the sending of payment requests, which are delivered to end-users through their own banking or mobile app, ensuring a simple and fast user experience.

Our solution is designed to integrate with PagoPA [an electronic payments system, available throughout Italy for transactions with Italian public administration bodies] and other European schemes, providing PSPs with an interoperable model that’s capable of improving the management of financial flow and optimising the corporate collection process.

online communication and payment of bills issued by companies for things like electricity, water, insurance and utilities, as well as PagoPA payment notices issued by public administrations for taxes and duties, etc.

The PagoPA use case can be seen as a starting point to channel investment into RTP in Italy, but at the same time, there is great interest on the part of banks in developing further use cases for RTP through wider partnerships with other players in the private sector that can ensure greater interoperability.

In October, we successfully concluded the testing phase with one of the major banking groups at European level. Building on this momentum, I would like to extend an invitation to all European RTP service providers to join us in launching a cross-border pilot, inspired by the model we previously implemented for VoP.

TFM: Of course, it is arguably consumers and merchants who stand to benefit most from the growing availability of RTP solutions, thanks to the increased ease and lower costs that they can bring. How is CBI supporting user experience and adoption for both consumers and merchants in the RTP space? PF: CBI RTP is definitely gaining traction as a value-added service that complements instant payments by enabling structured, user-friendly payment requests.

CBI’s VoP solution isn’t just a compliant service, it’s strategically designed to deliver interoperability, scalability and operational excellence

This is particularly relevant in sectors like utilities, insurance and e-commerce, where payment certainty and reconciliation are very critical. This is where, as I mentioned, we are working with a major banking group on developing a use case that’s currently in its proof-of-concept phase. Involving PagoPA, which is a standard-designed electronic payment system, the first release of this new offering is imminent. In terms of the consumer and merchant reaction to the rise of RTP, the technology is very relevant in sectors like utilities, insurance and e-commerce, because they really need faster and more secure payments. Therefore, I think RTP will be revolutionary in this market.

The CBI service suitable for integration with payment notices is called CBILL. This allows

In the corporate sector, it’s not so easy to introduce innovation, and the use case we’re about to release into production will help the first users see the importance of this service and the difference it could make.

ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE

AGENTS OF CHANGE

While Citi’s 2,000 human AI Champions are driving a new operational era at the bank, its Citi Stylus Workspaces platform is poised for an agentic upgrade

Jane Fraser’s tenure as Citi Chief Executive has coincided with a huge push to integrate AI across the global bank.

Almost all of the firm’s 240,000 staff can now call on AI tools to boost productivity, and in June, a group email encouraged them to ‘jump in and start exploring’.

Citi spent almost $12billion on technology in total in 2024, but its the bank’s suite of AI tools that grabs the headlines. They include intelligent call handling systems, compliance and AML monitoring solutions, models for market movement prediction, and a platform that creates investment strategies for wealth management clients.

In Fraser’s own words, ‘the future is agentic’, and Citi has begun rolling out next-level systems that can suggest workflows for tasks, then carry them out.

The CEO joined Citi in 2002 during its wild acquisitional phase ahead of the credit crunch. For years after the economic crash of 2008, the group was considered too big, too complex, and held back by dislocation caused by silo working. Then came a series of operational and regulatory failings that compelled a rethink.

Alongside decommissioning legacy IT systems and removing a senior tier of management, AI has played a core part in Fraser’s turnaround of the business, which has this year enjoyed sustained share price growth after 16 years of flatlining.

With AI technology cutting processing time, improving cash forecasting accuracy, and cutting false positive AML checks within some areas of wealth management, the success of these applications is driving adoption elsewhere. Citi’s Chief Information Officer, Jonathan Lofthouse, believes AI development is now surging.

“We’re in a new, exciting generative AI phase where we’re able to apply large language models (LLMs) to a whole new set of use cases,” he says. “We’re realistic about the speed that we should go to ensure systems are safe. Looking at how good the LLMs have become, though, who knows what’s going to be possible even one year from now?”

In June, a management restructure underlined Citi’s intent by putting its Head of Technology and Business Enablement and Chief Operating Officer in charge of a global AI rollout. Around 4,000 staff have been designated

‘AI Champions’, and accelerator training courses keep workers up to date. In October, around 175,000 staff were given training in how to write effective AI prompts to ensure they were making the most of the tools on offer. It’s both a top-down and a bottom-up strategy, while the tools themselves are deployed horizontally and vertically, says Lofthouse.

Covering all angles with AI

Horizontal tools are used across departments to boost productivity and cohesion among staff; vertical tools are for use cases tailored to specific clients and the teams that serve them.

Among the horizontal tools is Citi Assist, a resource that finds answers to worker queries around the bank’s policies in areas such as human resources, risk, compliance and finance. Following feedback from users, it was subsequently integrated into the bank’s Microsoft Teams applications.

Another is Citi Stylus Workspaces, which can summarise data such as audio files or documents and is used across the business – from Fraser herself to coders and customer service staff. Lofthouse explains that Citi Stylus Workspaces is a retrieval-augmented generation platform,

Celebrating the convergence: Citi is harnessing the power of AI to modernise its systems

which is connected to an LLM with an external knowledge base. That means it can retrieve both information from within Citi’s own communication channels and file storage systems as well as from public-facing websites.

The Citi Stylus Workspaces genAI system connects to around 100 business applications and data repositories (such as Slack, Jira, Teams and GitHub) where it crawls and indexes the data to deliver solutions that fit Citi’s specific needs.

“Traditionally, Citi Stylus Workspaces would give you an answer using LLMs. You were able to upload documents and reason about those documents and ask questions,” Lofthouse says.

“We then connected the Citi Stylus Workspaces platform to many of our internal systems – some simple things such as our global directory, and platforms such as Jira [the project management tool] and the data corpuses that we have within our engineering teams.

“We’re looking to integrate that platform with more systems, because the more integration we do, the more powerful Citi Stylus Workspaces

becomes, and the more it’s going to help our colleagues make things run markedly faster.”

The bank recently revealed that Citi Stylus Workspaces now features an agent model, which Lofthouse says will be the ‘next big thing’.

“As well as being able to ask questions, you’ll be able to give that agent a higher task to do,” he adds. “It will show you a work plan for your task, then reason about the answer it gives you.

“Citi Stylus Workspaces is now a work planner that, once you’ve approved [the proposal] as an end user, it will then go away and complete an entire task.”

Some might suggest that this higher level of automation increases the potential for mistakes, but Lofthouse says that – at this stage – humans remain very much ‘in the loop’.

He says: “We have a lot of governance internally, whether that’s around which processes we add AI to, the models we’re using in the underlying technology, or ensuring we’re thinking about things like cross-border data.

We’re realistic about the speed that we should go to ensure systems

are safe.

But looking

at how good the LLMs have

become, who knows what’s going to be possible?

“Many of our tools will cite the underlying data used by Citi Assist, for example, which is restricted to a specifically curated data corpus that we’ve curated for that assistant and not public domain data from the internet.”

The vertical use case

In late August, Citi revealed the launch of two AI platforms for its US wealth management teams – AskWealth and Advisor Insights – with global rollouts planned for early next year.

AskWealth is a genAI-powered conversational assistant that provides service teams, advisers and managers with instant answers to client questions about their portfolios and the wider market. Advisor Insights is a tailored dashboard that updates Citi Wealth

bankers and advisers with news and data about market movements, portfolios and events.

Both aim to free up staff members’ time, so they can focus on client relationships rather than simply gathering information.

Elsewhere, Citi uses LLM technology to manage customer calls, guide colleagues, and analyse conversations after a caller has hung up.

Lofthouse says instead of a caller navigating options via their keypad, the bank’s interactive voice response (IVR) system assesses, then delivers the information the caller requires, or, if necessary, puts them through to a customer service worker.

“Clients speak to our IVR platform and go straight to the piece that they need – which then reduces our call handling time and improves client experience,” he says. “When someone does need to speak to one of our agents, the LLM will continue listening to help our agents find the right pieces of our servicing platform to quickly drive them to the thing the client wants. And after the call, our agents get a call summary.

“We find the platform’s summary has better data quality, so we’re able to run better analytics over why our clients call us. It reduces the time our agents spend on administration so they can spend more time with our clients. We think this massively improves the client experience.”

Lofthouse refuses to be drawn on how AI in the wider world might develop. But he is optimistic about the technology’s ability to turbocharge the bank’s processes.

“The LLMs provided by the hyperscalers [Cloud-based infrastructure platforms such as Google] are going to unleash a whole new world of possibilities for our use cases,” he says.

“The world is moving very fast, and we’ll continue to have guardrails and checks. But this is an exciting time when we think about the possibilities for modernising our systems.

“Whether that’s giving our clients chatbots, better voice-to-text capabilities on our IVR platforms, or better capabilities in terms of the information we deliver to clients, we think AI can be relevant in all of those spaces.”

Jonathan Lofthouse, Chief Information Officer at Citi

A2APAYMENTS

A TOUGH GIG

The fast-changing nature of work in the US is demanding new, real-time financial solutions that reflect a much more unpredictable income. Dwolla and Ualett are working together to provide one alternative, using A2A rails

Irregular earnings, the struggle of living pay cheque to pay cheque, and difficulty accessing credit are just some of the harsh realities facing freelancers and gig workers on a weekly, if not daily, basis in the US.

While more than a third of Americans freelance (recent estimates suggest between 59 million and 64 million people), this section of the workforce remains underserved by financial products that are stuck in the past when it comes to dealing with different work patterns and sources of income. Financial exclusion for freelancers and the self-employed is a reality. And it’s only likely to get worse as the gig economy grows, with one report forecasting that nearly half of American workers, some 87 million people, will be freelancing by 2027.

It might not be the sole source of income for many, but for those who do rely on it, the unpredictable nature of a freelance cash flow makes instant access to funds even more important. Denying it to these workers also highlights a major inequality between communities in the US. According to a Pew Research Center report, 30 per cent of Hispanic adults and 20 per cent of Black adults have worked on a digital labour platform, compared to only 12 per cent of White adults.

Levelling up needs a new financial fix. The good news is that both infrastructure and payment providers now have the ability to address it by working together. Take Ualett, a Delaware-based app that provides

Glaser, Chief Executive Officer at Dwolla

Jay Millard, Chief Revenue Officer at Ualett

accessible, real-time financial tools and cash advances of up to $3,000 to gig workers, freelancers, independent contractors and micro businesses who are often overlooked or cold-shouldered by traditional providers.

Pushing the speed limit

The main way that Ualett’s platform currently supports independent workers is by acting as a digital ‘liquidity box’, enabling them to apply for cash advances quickly and easily by verifying earnings in real time, as and when they need them – something that can be invaluable when you have an irregular income or an erratic cash flow.

It doesn’t run credit checks, there’s a flat fee instead of interest, and a remittance schedule – all of which can support a gig worker looking for cash in an emergency. And it does it by verifying income from supported platforms.

A timely solution

Say you’re a rideshare driver and your tyre blows late one busy Friday night. You literally can’t afford to wait three days for your bank to open to ask for credit. You need to get that repaired as soon as possible.

In the Ualett app, you could apply for a cash advance and receive a decision within minutes, resolve the issue and get back on the road. In scenarios like this, Ualett is not only providing an immediate solution to a liquidity crunch but it also allows the worker to keep working and continue to earn a living. Speed is of the essence – both in taking a credit decision, and in

moving that money to the worker who needs it.

“Through our mobile app, they’re able to keep working and stay productive, thanks to the fast money movement we enable for them,” says Ualett’s Chief Revenue Officer Jay Millard.

“You first have to make it easy for the customer to access the advance, but then you need a great partner that connects you to the faster payment rails to get that money into their bank account right away.”

That ‘great partner’ for Ualett is pay-by-bank platform, Dwolla. The Iowa-based white-label payment platform enables businesses to securely move money directly between bank accounts and has been championing account-to-account (A2A) payments throughout its decade and a half in the fintech business.

Dwolla’s A2A solution enables its clients to leverage traditional Automated Clearing House (ACH) rails and instant transfers for better efficiency and security, while also giving them real-time visibility into their payment flows. It’s an all-round improvement to the user experience.

Echoing Millard’s comments about the importance of timely solutions, Dwolla CEO Dave Glaser says: “We’re leveraging real-time payments to make sure that the gig workers can access the money in the way and the timeliness that they need – whether it’s to support their families, to make repairs to their automobiles, or just to pay the rent.”

Dave

The freelance conundrum: Payment services haven’t kept pace with the gig economy

FINTECH

Quick solutions are important because, despite leading the way on digital payment services such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Wallet, the US payments system arguably has lagged behind other markets when it comes to real-time account-to-account payments.

Traditionally, the US had two ACH operators – the Clearing House, which was privately owned by major banks, and the Federal Reserve’s ACH, known as FedACH. Glaser has previously described both as an early form of open banking.

Faster payments are allowing us to do things that we could never do before in the US... The more banks that participate in real-time payments, the more opportunities for business to reach more customers Dave Glaser, Dwolla

But the benefits of what we now commonly know as open banking took their time to trickle down to consumers. When Dwolla launched in 2010, it was one of the earliest champions of A2A payments but the market has become more crowded since.

In 2017, the Clearing House launched the Real Time Payments (RTP) network for its member banks. Then in 2023, the Fed launched FedNow, an alternative instant payment infrastructure for US financial institutions. Other major players now on the scene include Visa’s A2A transfer service, Visa Direct –competition which has helped drive the market.

Plus, as the standard of the tech, as well as the competition, has got higher, so have customer expectations of having easy, frictionless and quick user experiences. In this regard, Ualett credits the payment rails that Dwolla provides it with ‘under the cover’ as being key to a seamless service for its clients.

“We have tens of thousands of small businesses, sole proprietors, gig workers, independent contractors, and they have bank coverage all across the country. Whether they’re with big or small banks, they just need to receive their advances seamlessly and quickly, but the complexity is behind the scenes,” says Millard.

Dwolla’s role in solving that is unsung, but crucial. “If we’re doing our job right, we’re like an umpire in a game – the customer doesn’t know what’s happening. Dwolla helps us keep that under the cover.”

Better together

Beyond cash advances, Ualett works with an ecosystem of partners to give its users access to other related financial services suited to their needs.

Last year, it partnered with leading virtual insurance agent Insurify so Ualett users can benefit from personalised automobile quotes from multiple insurance providers, all without leaving the app. This enables them to compare and select insurance policies from top insurers in real time, ensuring they get the best coverage at competitive rates without leaving the Ualett ecosystem.

Such partnerships, including that with Dwolla, should help put Ualett ahead of the competition as real-time payment networks rapidly reshape business models

task to get adoption from all banks. But now that FedNow and RTP are live, we see businesses are feeling more comfortable in implementing the solutions.”

This evolution will continue and accelerate, he adds, with more real-time payment methods being added to the networks.

“Things like debit cards, stablecoins, other ways to move money across borders. All of those will be intelligently orchestrated by companies like Dwolla, for the innovators like Ualett, who are trying to give their business customers the best experience they can.”

The other major factor driving change is the sheer amount of data available to those innovating financial services for Gen Z in a way the suited and booted bankers of the Baby Boomers’ generation could never have imagined.

and customer expectations in the US – even if the market is still catching up a bit.

“Faster, immediate payments are allowing us to do things that we could never do before in the US,” explains Dwolla’s Glaser. “Businesses can decide if a slower payment or a really fast payment is important.

“They can choose payments based on the cost and the risk associated with those. So innovators of all types get to build according to their payment rails and the way their business works.”

Widening the net

Real-time, A2A payments in the US are still in the foothills of adoptions. There’s a mountain to climb says, Glaser.

“But the more banks that participate in the network of real-time payments and FedNow, the more opportunities for business [like Ualett] to reach more consumers.

“We have more than 10,000 financial institutions in the US, so it’s quite a daunting

The expectation is ‘I need to have money available now’ and our job is to provide that for a gig worker

Jay Millard, Ualett

“In addition to the transaction itself, there’s so much more rich data available that enables Ualett to use the information we receive and be able to design better solutions for the different types of gig workers that we have,” says Millard.

The generational divide between this new workforce and the previous – about 15 per cent Gen Z, 45 per cent Millennials, 27 per cent Gen X, and nine per cent Baby Boomers – aligns with the biggest mobile money users. In an era where you can order pretty much anything with a few taps on your smartphone, why wouldn’t they expect the same immediacy when it comes to finance?

“They’re going to continue to expect immediate solutions,” says Millard. “Our job is to provide that solution for a gig worker.”

Working the problem: Freelancers want payments to fit around their lifestyles

CROSSINGS CORRIDORS

How PPRO’s Therese Hudak sees the next frontier for US to LATAM payments

When Therese Hudak talks about payments in LATAM, she does so with the conviction of someone who has watched an entire continent’s financial DNA reprogram itself in real time. She is Vice President, Commercial Americas at PPRO, the local payments platform which enables merchants and payment service providers to access local payment methods worldwide. This role means Hudak has had a front-row seat to watch the drama unfold in one of the most complex and dynamic corridors in global commerce

– the digital trade route connecting the United States to Latin America.

“It’s an incredibly diverse market,” she says. “No two countries in Latin America look the same when it comes to payments – not culturally, not technologically, and certainly not in regulation. For US merchants, that’s both the challenge and the opportunity.”

PPRO’s new Almanac Corridor Series: US→LATAM – designed to act as a data-rich ‘how-to’ guide for businesses looking to expand into the region –quantifies that opportunity in eyecatching terms. E-commerce volumes

across the top six Latin American markets are projected to hit $870billion by 2026, with cross-border trade between the US and LATAM already exceeding $440billion in goods exports. Yet beneath those headline numbers lies a patchwork of payment ecosystems, each shaped by local policy, consumer preference and digital innovation.

Geography defined by complexity The US to LATAM payments corridor is unlike any other. As Hudak explains: “For every country that’s opening up with real-time payment infrastructure

Therese Hudak, Vice President, Commercial Americas at PPRO

or new digital wallet ecosystems, there’s another where cash still dominates or where regulation adds friction. To succeed, merchants have to localise, not just translate, checkout pages.”

She adds: “When we speak to US merchants looking south, we often find that they underestimate just how localised the payment experience must be. It’s not about switching on a global processor and hoping for the best; it’s about connecting to the rails that local consumers already trust.”

According to the PPRO Almanac, 87 per cent of Latin America’s population is now online, but nearly half of Mexico’s adults, for example, remain unbanked. Across the region, credit cards account for just 42 per cent of e-commerce payments, while bank transfers (led by the Brazilian government’s phenomenally successful real-time service Pix and Mexico’s SPEI) and digital wallets like the region-wide Mercado Pago are rapidly overtaking them.

PPRO’s research finds that one-in-five consumers in Latin America will abandon a purchase if their preferred local payment method isn’t offered. “That’s the defining difference between this market and, say, Europe or North America,” says Hudak. “Here, local means everything. Payment is cultural.”

Governments and central banks are not just enabling, they’re driving the evolution of payments as policy tools.

“Government-backed infrastructure has been one of the biggest accelerators,” Hudak notes. “When central banks launch instant payment systems or push financial inclusion, they’re effectively setting the pace for private-sector innovation.”

Government-fuelled transformation Few regions illustrate the interplay between politics, technology and commerce as vividly as Latin America. From Brazil’s state-backed Pix network to Mexico’s SPEI interbank system and Colombia’s digital-identity integration, the public sector has become a prime mover in payments modernisation.

“LATAM is the story of governments using payments to drive inclusion,” says Hudak. “In Brazil, Pix has brought tens of millions of people into the financial system. These systems aren’t just financial tools, they’re social infrastructure.“

“Local payments aren’t niche anymore; they’re the mainstream rails of commerce. If you’re not offering them, you’re closing the door on entire customer segments.”

According to the Almanac, cash-based systems such as OXXO Pay in Mexico and Boleto Bancário in Brazil still account for seven-to-eight per cent of online purchases, a reminder that digital doesn’t always mean cashless. Meanwhile, BNPL is modernising Latin America’s traditional culture of instalment payments, offering consumers credit access without bank cards.

Brazil: Pix and the power of inclusion

Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, epitomises how public policy can ignite payment innovation. With a GDP exceeding $2.1trillion and a population of 213 million, it’s the region’s financial bellwether.

Trade winds and tariff clouds

For all the progress in digital commerce, the macro-economic context remains volatile. The re-imposition of tariffs under US President Donald Trump’s new trade regime has reshaped commercial dynamics across the hemisphere.

In a recent Yahoo!

Finance interview, Sergio Diaz-Granados, President of CAF, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, suggested the impact ‘has been less than expected’, thanks to well-established trade networks and the deep cultural ties linking US and Latin American markets. Yet uncertainty persists.

PPRO’s Almanac data underscores this: Pix now represents 45 per cent of all payments in Brazil and is projected to overtake credit cards as the leading e-commerce method by 2030. SPEI, used by six-in-10 Mexicans, processes more than three million transactions daily, while digital wallets make up 10 per cent of e-commerce transactions region-wide, led by Mercado Pago’s 60 million users.

“Consumers in Latin America expect seamless, mobile-first payment experiences,” Hudak says. “But they also want trust and, in many cases, trust still comes from the methods and brands they know locally.”

Here, local means everything. Payment is cultural… If you’re not offering [local payments], you’re closing the door on entire customer segments

“Tariffs always have knock-on effects,” Hudak explains. “They influence the cost of goods, logistics planning, and the payment preferences of consumers who feel inflationary pressure. When the macro environment shifts, payment behaviour shifts at the same time.”

Across Latin America, those behavioural shifts are being channelled through technology.

LATAM’s eclectic payments palette

In the PPRO Almanac, local payment methods are grouped into five categories: bank transfers, buy now, pay later (BNPL), local cards, digital wallets and cash-based options – each reflecting a different stage of financial inclusion.

“When US merchants approach LATAM, the instinct is to think globally, in terms of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal,” Hudak says. “But those only get them part of the way. To convert at scale, they need local rails like Pix, SPEI, [cash-based] OXXO Pay and Boleto, and Naranja X. That’s where PPRO’s platform makes the difference.

Since its 2020 launch, Pix has transformed the Brazilian payments landscape, accounting for 41 per cent of e-commerce payments today and projected to reach 58 per cent by 2030. The forthcoming Pix Automático, rolling out from mid-2025, enables recurring payments for 60 million uncarded consumers – a milestone Hudak calls ‘a giant leap for inclusion’.

“Pix is more than a payment method,” she says. “It’s a state-backed ecosystem that’s changing how businesses operate and how consumers interact with money. It’s built inclusion into the core of commerce.”

Pix is more than a payment method… It’s built inclusion into the core of commerce

Brazil’s card market remains robust. Mastercard and Visa together handle nearly 88 per cent of transactions, but domestic networks like Elo (12 per cent) ensure local flavour endures.

From PPRO’s perspective, US merchants entering Brazil must adopt a local-first strategy, processing payments domestically to avoid high foreign exchange (FX) rates and maximise approval.

“Cross-border card transactions can see decline rates 10-to-15 points higher than local ones,” Hudak warns. “That’s lost revenue organisations can’t afford.”

“BNPL is resonating because it’s familiar,” Hudak says. “Consumers here have always paid in instalments, BNPL just digitises that habit.”

The PPRO story

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in London, PPRO enables payment service providers, banks, and enterprises to digitise their payments by integrating and offering local payment methods around the world. It operates across more than 100 markets, connecting merchants to regional payment ecosystems through a single, unified platform. The company’s mission is to simplify global commerce by removing cross-border payment friction, improving conversion rates, and helping businesses reach new customers

Mexico: Bridging the cash gap

Mexico’s payments story is one of contrasts. With a GDP of $1.85trillion and 132 million people, it boasts the second-largest e-commerce market in the region. Yet 48 per cent of adults remain unbanked.

Here, OXXO Pay plays an outsized role. Operated through a network of more than 20,000 convenience stores, it allows online shoppers to complete transactions with cash, generating half of Mexico’s total cash-based e-commerce volume.

culture,” Hudak says. “If providers want reach, they can’t ignore OXXO.”

She adds: “At the same time, you’re seeing a younger generation leapfrog straight to wallets and instant payments. It’s not about linear growth, it’s two tracks moving at once.”

Digital wallets already account for 28 per cent of e-commerce payments, and Mexico’s SPEI continues to expand as a real-time transfer alternative. By 2030, PPRO expects digital wallets to reach 38 per cent share, overtaking credit cards (30 per cent).

“Mexico is fascinating because it blends digital sophistication with deep-rooted cash

Argentina: Inflation drives innovation

If Brazil showcases policy-led inclusion and Mexico demonstrates hybrid evolution, Argentina is the laboratory for payment innovation under pressure.

With inflation still in triple digits, Argentine consumers have turned to digital wallets and credit-based solutions to preserve purchasing power. PPRO projects that by 2030, nearly half (49 per cent) of e-commerce transactions will run through digital wallets, up from 35 per cent today.

“Argentina proves that payments evolve fastest where the need is greatest,” Hudak says. “Wallets like Mercado Pago and

Naranja X are not just convenience tools; they’re a means of survival.

“What’s exciting is that out of this volatility comes creativity. Argentine fintechs are some of the most inventive in the world because they’ve had to be.”

Recent government reforms easing import restrictions and liberalising currency controls are also improving the outlook for cross-border merchants. Yet volatility remains a fact of life.

“The key is agility,” Hudak adds. “Merchants that can adapt pricing, currency and payment acceptance quickly will win consumer trust – and keep it.”

Argentina proves that payments evolve fastest where the need is greatest… Wallets are not just convenience tools; they’re a means of survival

through seamless access to the payment methods people actually use and trust.

Across Latin America, that payments story increasingly converges with the rise of super apps – digital ecosystems that merge payments, lending, shopping and more. Nubank, Rappi, Mercado Pago and PicPay now compete not just for transactions but for consumer loyalty.

“These platforms are redefining financial behaviour,” says Hudak. “They’ve built trust in markets where traditional banks often haven’t. That trust is the currency of digital growth.”

The PPRO Almanac points to a coming wave of tokenised, one-click checkout experiences, biometric authentication and embedded payment flows. For US merchants, this means localisation isn’t only about method, it’s about experience.

“Latin American consumers expect the same convenience as shoppers in the US or Europe,” Hudak says, “but delivered through the local apps and payment rails they already use.”

PPRO clearly believes that local is the new global. In the conclusion to its Almanac, one line stands out: “Local payments should no longer be seen as alternative payment methods but as the foundation of a merchant’s international growth strategy.”

Hudak echoes the sentiment: “Payments used to be the last mile of commerce. Now they’re the first consideration. In Latin America, if you don’t speak the language of local payments, you’re not really in the market. The opportunity here is huge, but it rewards respect. If you take the time to understand how people pay and why, the region will open up to you.”

Retail remains Mexico’s dominant online vertical, responsible for 75 per cent of all e-commerce, and global players are taking note. TikTok Shop launched there in early 2025, betting on the country’s 78 per cent mobile-commerce share.

Mexico is fascinating because it blends digital sophistication with deep-rooted cash culture… It’s not about linear growth, it’s

two tracks moving at once

“For US merchants, Mexico is the logical entry point into Latin America,” Hudak advises. “It’s close, culturally connected, and the infrastructure for local payments is maturing fast. But localisation is non-negotiable.”

Payments politics: Navigating the tariff era

Global Finance Magazine recently described LATAM economies as facing ‘their greatest disruption in a generation’.

Brazil, hit with tariffs of up to 50 per cent on exports to the US, has seen trade reroute towards China and the Gulf states. Venezuela remains sanctioned but growing in pockets. Peru and Chile are diversifying toward Asia. Against that backdrop, payments modernisation offers stability where politics can’t.

“Trade may fluctuate, but payments need to flow,” Hudak notes. “That’s why reliable local infrastructure matters. Merchants can’t control tariffs, but they can control how effectively they transact.”

Local banks in the Middle East are dependable and profitable – the backbone of the financial services system. But the market is changing and its culturally specific demands create particular challenges for any modernisation programme. So how should they go about it?

Financial modernisation tops the agenda in much of the Middle East, providing opportunities for fintechs to form partnerships with the region’s banks.

Policies such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 seek to diversify the economy beyond oil and serve the needs of a young population by focussing on digital technologies; meanwhile, the UAE’s Vision 31 gives the region a roadmap for social, economic and investment change.

But are banks ready? And could cultural and traditional barriers thwart progress?

Core banking platform provider Tuum and consultancy Publicis Sapient are both experts in the region and have collaborated on modernisation programmes for clients there.

Milestones for Tuum this year include being chosen to power the digital Uptex Bank in Oman and entering a strategic partnership with AI-driven financial services enabler Abwab.ai to deliver a lending solution for SMEs.

Public Sapient is a partner of the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence, known as HUMAIN, part of the Public Investment Fund,

Aand provides solutions across Saudi Arabia and the wider region.

We asked Tuum’s Chief Revenue Officer, Miljan Stamenkovic and Rohit Mathew, MENA Head of Financial Services at Publicis Sapient, to share their opinions.

The Fintech Magazine: What does progressive modernisation mean for banks in the Middle East?

Rohit Mathew: We have cities in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council area, made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE] which are becoming global financial services hubs.

Some of the regulators in the region are really flag bearers. They have been pushing the whole digital agenda.

In Saudi Arabia, it’s a relatively young population, digitally savvy, with high internet and smartphone penetration. So, there’s an absolute focus in terms of customer experience because customer preferences are changing.

From a traditional bank’s perspective, their legacy systems were just not built to change an application on the fly or to integrate with the broader ecosystem of players. So that puts a lot of pressure on traditional banks in this region, in terms of how they move to a customer-first model, with personalisation, ease of experience and an omnichannel approach.

The business, operating model and the tech and infrastructure models need to come together for banks. And you can’t have a discussion without talking about AI.

The discussions I’m having with banks here in the region, everybody’s doing something on AI. But what I always tell them is it’s not about use cases anymore, it’s about how you

prioritise. How you create a proof of concept. How you find the business value. How you scale – and that comes back to modern infrastructure.

The same thing will be true for digital banks. While they have the advantage of modern, light core, Cloud-native solutions, they have work to do. For example, how do they get their customers on the deposit side, on the lending side, across the entire value chain of banking?

TFM: Many banks in the region are just beginning their Cloud journey. What’s the smartest way to get started?

Miljan Stamenkovic: Ten years ago, if I’d suggested a bank hosted its main workloads in the Cloud, the answer would have been no. It was risky to even mention it in front of the regulator. I had a client who said, ‘bringing my emails to the Cloud is one thing, but bringing my main workloads to the Cloud is a no-go’.

Today, risk appetite has changed but the approach of many vendors and consultants is still to start slowly by thinking about which ‘less important’ workloads can be brought to the Cloud first. We argue against that. Banks need to think about how they compete with the digital challengers.

It’s much better to identify a first use case, for example, SME lending, that can be migrated to the Cloud and brought to market. That way you capture certain markets and then you can continue your Cloud journey.

TFM: Both Tuum and Publicis Sapient have worked with banks on Sharia-compliant solutions. What’s the best strategy for supporting both conventional and Islamic

banking without creating two parallel infrastructures?

MS: In the regional context of conventional banking and Islamic banking, the proposition was always that it does require two cores. That is both acceptable and recommended.

You could argue that brings double the licences and double the IT overhead. And that is the primary cost. But what’s typically unseen is a hidden cost. How do you run an entire customer journey or customer relationship if you have these two legacy cores in your dual core tech stack? That’s the biggest challenge that most of the banks have.

So, I would reframe it: how do you architect a single platform that can support both your conventional banking and your Islamic banking proposition? And take it from there.

TFM: Which use cases are best suited to kick-start a transformation journey without requiring full core replacement?

MS: Progressive modernisation is the risk-based approach to transforming your tech stack because the biggest risk for any bank is taking a big-bang approach and it failing.

You can de-risk it by starting small and building capabilities step-by-step, while hollowing out your existing technology stack.

Transformation and progressive modernisation is a marathon. So, it’s important you start with a first win, and in that respect, we often talk about a sidecar strategy – starting with a particular use case that creates the biggest proof of value.

In the Middle East, the cornerstone of any national vision is SME lending. SMEs have been underserved by larger banks due to the banks’ legacy technology, but also because of the way traditional banks would either target retail customers or corporate customers. They’ve basically given up this growth market due to their incapacity to serve it properly.

So, digital providers have stepped in. They target SMEs with a rapid deployment of digital lending solutions, whether it’s loan origination, loan management. So, I think SME lending would be a phenomenal use case for a bank to start with.

Progressive modernisation is the risk-based approach to transforming your entire tech stack. The biggest risk for any bank is taking a big-bang approach and it failing

Miljan Stamenkovic, Tuum

TFM: If banks want to launch a speedboat business instead, what do they need to consider?

RM: A speedboat strategy is creating a digital venture separate from your legacy bank. And the idea is you’re able to take the advantages of the balance sheet, the regulatory licence, the brand of your bank, but you’re not dragged down by the policies, culture, the organisational structure, the legacy tech. That’s key.

With speedboats that don’t go well, it’s probably because they’ve just tried to have digital front ends or digital products, while at the backend, they’re still leveraging the legacy core and the same processes. So, they’ve not really changed anything.

That’s why when you’re looking at the speedboat approach, it’s critical to ask why you are doing it. What’s the value proposition?

Let’s say you’re looking at creating an SME lending platform or a digital AI-first retail-only bank in Saudi Arabia. You need to be laser-focussed about the value proposition. What macro and micro segments are you looking at? What’s the niche? How are you differentiating? Is it in terms of real-time lending? Is it with onboarding within two minutes? The strategy and approach must be crystal clear.

The other aspect of a speedboat is costs. You need to be looking at leveraging software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Do you have flexible vendor arrangements? How do you ensure that you have the best lean processes and a very flat organisational structure?

TFM: What causes modernisation programmes to stall, and how do you avoid this in the Middle East?

RM: The CIO of one of my client banks in the region told me 60 to 70 per cent of his IT and developers’ effort is spent on bug fixing and maintenance. That’s unfortunate; they should be doing far more value-added, innovation-related work.

Now, core modernisation journeys are not a six-week programme, and they present challenges. But there are a few things you need to keep in mind, particularly in the Middle East.

realisation

Miljan Stamenkovic, Chief Revenue Officer at Tuum

Rohit Mathew, MENA Head of Financial Services at Publicis Sapient

You need to be very clear about why you are doing this. Goalposts can’t keep changing; that’s a recipe for disaster. And, with regards to your total cost of ownership, what are you comparing it against? You need to be clear about the business case for making change, and also the case for not doing anything. Also, don’t underestimate the costs around change and programme management.

The other thing I see is banks that still want to build customised solutions in-house; they want to do everything themselves. I can’t fathom that logic. Because you’ve got fintechs – leverage what you can use from them. Doing everything yourself doesn’t work.

So, there’s a lot of synergy there between the likes of Tuum and Publicis Sapient. When we support clients jointly, we can co-create and co-deliver customer journeys.

Vendors and consultants must work together towards one shared success. These partnerships are absolutely critical and I expect to see much more collaboration.

TFM: How is modernisation enabling banks to go beyond compliance and drive growth?

MS: The fact that modernisation has advanced here in the region is due to forward-looking regulators such as Sama [Saudi Central Bank] and the CBUAE

Resistance is futile: Bank modernisation is not a case of ‘if’, but ‘when’ and ‘how’

And finally, when you work out your requirements and decide on a design, cast them in stone. Otherwise, you get into a loop of never-ending journeys.

So there’s a clear playbook, and we at Publicis Sapient have a trusted blueprint and experience.

TFM: Tuum and Publicis Sapient collaborate on bank modernisation. Why is a tech vendor and consultant partnership effective?

RM: A typical core modernisation journey involves a number of participants. It needs your compliance team, product team and your business team.

At Publicis Sapient we advise on the entire value chain in terms of core modernisation. We define the case for change, the business case, the business value. We identify the target architecture. We do the design, the building, the testing, the deployment, change management, programme management.

[Central Bank of the UAE], who are pushing the traditional banks. They’ve been a great catalyst for change. However, it also creates a strategic compromise.

And then the question is, are we creating a compliance engine versus a growth engine?

Do you have a gold-plated system that excels at reporting, but which fails when it comes to generating new revenue streams and products, which the digital challengers do very well?

Forward-looking leaders in these digital organisations think of their business more as tech companies that offer financial services. So, they think very differently about their tech stack and how to target use cases rapidly.

Banks need to ask how they can compete with the most modern of these financial service providers, as well as technology players that offer financial services. And there are quite a few here, the likes of Tamara

and Tabby [BNPL lenders]. They really excel at being digital-first.

TFM: What would you say to bank leaders who are still hesitant to modernise?

MS: First, I’d empathise with them! But if you look over the last two to three decades, the biggest risk was the risk of failure of that big bang. As the markets have shifted, the risk has inverted. The banks’ biggest challenge now is the risk of inaction.

Every month that you’re not modernising your platform, you’re moving further away from your clients’ expectations. Because, if you seriously think about customers’ expectations today, and where the banking capability is, there is a big gap.

So I think the conversation then becomes a strategic conversation, which shouldn’t be asking ‘what if we fail?’, but should ask ‘what if we don’t change? What if we don’t modernise? What happens then?’.

We’ll see banks in the region pivot more to a platform-based economy, where the bank is the core of this ecosystem, and owning that customer journey, end-to-end

Rohit Mathew, Publicis Sapient

TFM: Looking ahead, what trends will shape core transformation in the region over the next 12 to 24 months?

RM: AI is not going to remain on the edges; we will start seeing it embedded as part of the core.

We’re going to start seeing real-time risk monitoring, real-time credit scoring. We’re also probably going to see agentic solutions, not just on the backend, but at the front end, too.

I think we’ll see banks in the region pivot more to the whole platform-based economy, where the banks are at the core of this ecosystem, and owning that customer journey, end-to-end.

And then I would say core and legacy modernisation is no longer just about keeping the lights on.

Unless you really do it – by which I mean get your business operations and tech models to come together – you’re not going to see new revenue models, the value of the ecosystem play, and real AI-first experience, going forward.

Follow the bricyellow k code

BBVA was determined to find its own way across the new financial landscape by embracing open banking early and going into co-opetition with challengers. Carmela Gómez describes how it’s now pushing further on the promise of invisible, intuitive and predictive services

For years, instant payments was the destination that shimmered on the financial industry’s aspirational horizon.

But for Carmela Gómez, Head of Global Embedded Finance at BBVA, that dream is already behind us.

“Instant is no longer ambitious enough,” she says. “Now we’re talking about payments so seamless they happen without users realising –technology that anticipates their needs, helps them manage their money, and even opens opportunities they might otherwise miss.”

Welcome to the new Oz of finance: a world where payments, credit, loyalty

and more are embedded invisibly into everyday life – and where banks are no longer the gatekeepers of financial journeys, but the munchkins making them possible.

At least, that’s one version of the story. But BBVA chose an alternative narrative – one in which banks are the golden path itself, paving a smart, safe route toward customers’ goals, while fending off the flying monkeys of fraud, risk and regulation.

From instant to invisible

In this new landscape, finance isn’t an interruption – it’s an instinct.

“Our vision is to make finance not just useful, but natural,” Gómez explains. “It should enrich what you’re doing – whether that’s paying a bill, financing a purchase or managing your outgoings – without you even thinking about it.”

That ambition sits at the heart of BBVA’s strategy to protect the 30 per cent of traditional banking income that some estimates suggest is under threat from non-bank competitors –firms that offer banking-like services without being regulated banks.

While some incumbents watched the challengers nibble at their margins, BBVA spotted the danger early and chose to play them at their own game. In 2017, it launched its Open API Market,

Carmela Gómez, Head of Global Embedded Finance at BBVA

a digital marketplace giving businesses and developers access to BBVA’s core services – from payments to identity verification – through a library of ready-to-integrate APIs.

Today, that foresight is paying off. BBVA now has embedded finance partnerships across Spain, Turkey and Latin America, powering contextual financial services in retail, mobility, utilities and more.

Gómez’s vision aligns with a global surge in embedded finance. Analysts such as Precedence Research and EY forecast the sector will soar from about US$148billion in 2025 to more than US$1.7trillion by 2034, with 85 per cent of financial executives saying the goal is ‘seamless financial offerings’.

But as Boston Consulting Group noted this year in its report, Moving Embedded Finance From Promise To Practice, disintermediating banks beyond the easy pickings of simple transactions has proven harder than expected. And non-bank platforms still require regulated partners that can manage credit, compliance and risk. In other words, they need banks like BBVA. BBVA is responding from a position of huge strength. With €772billion in assets, a presence in 25 countries, and nearly 80 million customers, Spain’s second-largest bank combines global

scale with deep local expertise and, crucially, a sophisticated data and AI backbone.

APIs: The golden gateways

At the heart of BBVA’s evolution are APIs – elegant digital connectors that weave financial services into everything from e-commerce checkouts to mobility apps.

“It’s tempting to think of APIs as just bits of code,” Gómez says. “But they’re completely reshaping how banks interact with customers and how third parties offer services. They’re small, secure bridges that bring banking back into the customer journey.”

BBVA’s Open API Market provides those transitions, enabling third parties to plug bank-grade payments, loans, insurance and other transaction-related data insights directly into their own platforms. The result: banking where customers already are.

The approach lets BBVA have its cake and eat it – partnering with fintechs and marketplaces while still driving business back to its own products. It’s also a third way between the extremes facing traditional banks: becoming anonymous ‘pipes’ for innovation by others or clinging to old banking distribution models.

BBVA does both – delivering banking-as-a-service through partnerships, while also using APIs to place its own offerings front and centre within partner ecosystems.

In 2025, it also became the first bank to enable real-time inbound payments from outside Europe via Iberpay’s One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme –a milestone for cross-border, always-on connectivity.

“Customers expect things to happen instantly,” Gómez says. “But now they also expect them to happen without thinking – and that’s what APIs make possible.”

data flow complexity, layered intermediation and consumer protection gaps.

“AI is a game-changer in fraud detection,” says Gómez. “Systems can analyse millions of data points in milliseconds, block suspicious transactions and alert you instantly.”

For BBVA, fighting fraud is both a technical and philosophical mission. The bank invests heavily in AI and generative AI, combining human oversight with machine precision to monitor billions of transactions securely.

AI, Gómez says, is the bank’s ‘guardian angel’, silently scanning for threats while keeping experiences smooth. It’s not a fortress that keeps money safe – it’s an intelligent, invisible shield.

“Regulators have understood that open banking and embedded finance can create value for customers and foster innovation,” Gómez says. “But consent and authorisation are vital. Everything depends on the customer’s trust.”

As an early advocate for open banking, BBVA now argues that regulators should go further – towards a global open data regime, spanning industries and geographies. That, Gómez believes, is where the next revolution will come from: an economy where data moves as freely and securely as money.

But challenges remain. As both Validat and TLT LLP highlight in separate risk reports, embedded finance often spans multiple jurisdictions and partner ecosystems, raising complex know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and data governance issues.

APIs are small, secure bridges that bring banking back into the customer journey

Each connection is another brick in the golden path. But every bridge invites new travellers – and some may be less trustworthy than others. The more invisible finance becomes, the more exposed its unseen edges.

Recent research from UK Finance found that 59 per cent of banks believe open and embedded banking increases fraud exposure. TechUK warns of new attack surfaces – from BNPL integrations, to marketplace-lending plug-ins – while PwC’s 2023 report, Uncovering Value In Embedded Finance, identified five emerging risk zones: partner-ecosystem risk, regulatory ambiguity,

BankingDive also reports that more than a third of community banks adopting embedded finance cite compliance with data sharing laws as their biggest challenge.

That’s why Gómez insists regulation and innovation must advance together: “Banks build the rails; regulators make sure they’re safe to travel.”

Co-creating the journey

Behind BBVA’s embedded finance model lies a principle of partnership.

“We don’t push a pre-packaged suite,” Gómez says. “We listen. We co-design solutions around our partners’ ecosystem and customer needs.”

That approach has earned BBVA praise from many quarters. The Banker named BBVA the World’s Best Technology Bank in 2025, citing its pioneering use of data and AI to build trust, improve efficiency, and personalise customer journeys.

Global Finance has also singled it out for making embedded finance a core plank of its

digital strategy. From retail to B2B, its APIs deliver contextual, co-created banking experiences. It’s collaboration, not conquest, a co-designed path where banks, partners and customers move forward together.

AI: the great and powerful enabler

So, if APIs are the road, AI is then perhaps the wizard behind the curtain.

“Combining AI with personalisation helps us anticipate customer needs,” Gómez says. “Imagine you’ve just received your pay cheque and a bill is due. AI can suggest a one-click payment at exactly the right moment.”

The company’s partnership with Google Cloud’s Gemini AI suite brings that magic to life. Meanwhile, in Mexico, its AI assistant Blue now handles calls faster and more intuitively than ever.

The bank is using AI to turn payments into moments of value, says Gómez: “If you buy a latte every morning, instead of generic points, you get a message: ‘Buy five, get the sixth free.’ Suddenly, paying feels like a benefit, not a cost.”

And, at the same time, AI defends the gates – verifying identity, detecting fraud, striking a balance between invisibility and security.

A road still under construction

In the first nine months of 2025, BBVA reported €7.98billion in profit and continued to lead in customer acquisition through digital channels.

This is not just about adding new distribution, though, says Gómez. “It’s about monetising what banks do best – credit, trust, compliance and risk management – in new environments.

“Our ambition is clear,” she adds. “We want to be the partner of reference for ecosystems that need banking services – not just offering products, but co-creating solutions that integrate naturally into people’s lives.

Award-winning innovation

n The Banker named BBVA the World’s Best Technology Bank 2025 for its pioneering AI-driven data strategy.

n Recent launches include its next-gen app in Spain, 24/7 cross-border instant payments, and expanded open API partnerships across Europe and Latin America.

n BBVA has an agreement with OpenAI to integrate genAI into staff workflows.

n The bank has finished the rollout of its Cloud-based ADA (analytics + data + AI) platform, which is now operational across all geographies within BBVA’s footprint, except in Turkey.

BANKINGASASERVICE

Time tostep up!

With a storied history of payment innovation, Ohio-based Fifth Third Bank believes it’s providing a blueprint for others to follow with its embedded payments business – Newline

Fifth Third Bank is an old hand at trailblazing. As far back as 1971, it created Fifth Third Processing Solutions as a payments network to help connect retailers and financial institutions.

It was later renamed Vantiv and then spun off and merged into Worldpay, the largest payment processor in the US.

That legacy was the foundation for a much more fundamental rethink of how banks should take part in the new financial ecosystem – not as followers of fintech, but as leaders.

“One of the things we believe at Fifth Third is, if you’re not interested in the future, the future is not interested in you,” says Tom Bianco, General Manager for Newline, the bank’s embedded payments platform.

“Fifth Third, historically, has been an innovator in the payments landscape and in 2021, we decided to get ahead of where we thought the market was going and enable clients to put our software and our payment capabilities directly at the point of customer experience for their products, their brands, their value proposition.

“Newline is the focal point for all of that payments activity, which goes through the massive processing engines that we have at Fifth Third Bank today.

“With new technologies, new teams, and an innovation mindset, we work with some of the best companies in the industry and put pressure on each other to perform. It’s the best of Silicon Valley with the best of a large FI, and we feel that’s a unique combination in the market. It’s a bit of a different dynamic at Fifth Third.”

The drive to be a market leader led Fifth Third in 2023 to acquire Rize Money, which provides payment infrastructure and risk management capabilities to fintechs and other technology companies that want to offer innovative financial products through a single application programming interface (API). And Newline, Fifth Third’s embedded payments business, delivers a modern API-based payment processing platform and BIN Sponsorship solutions.

”Banks aren’t competing with other banks, from an experiential standpoint,” says Bianco. “We’re competing with the likes of Uber and Amazon – companies that have set a digital-first experience and a real-time expectation.

“Newline finds the leaders in the payments category – Stripe, Trustly, Brex, Rippling – and we put our capabilities, embedded and native, into their software to help meet their customers where they are with the capabilities that you’d expect from a traditional bank.

“It’s been a lot of fun to help build those products, deliver that value, and serve a client population that is national in nature when, as a bank, we don’t have a presence in all 50 states.”

So, by offering a way into bank-grade services (card issuing, payment processing, etc), Fifth Third is expanding its acquisition funnel, while also using its payments technology as an income generator. It’s picky about who it works with, however, targeting only the best and those with ambitions to scale. And it has two further golden rules: a strict policy to have a standardised regulatory and compliance oversight model for all its programmes to provide clarity; and a focus on ensuring that it not only has an understanding of each fintech it decides to work with but a clear full-system view of all third parties involved.

The approach is certainly bearing fruit; Fifth Third’s commercial payments revenue saw 10 per cent growth in Q3 of 2024 compared to the same quarter in the previous year.

“Our clients sometimes have multiples of valuation. They’ve raised $2billion in venture capital,” says Bianco. “So our strategy is to find the best in the business and partner with them so we can do joint distribution, joint marketing, joint product development, and help accelerate both roadmaps.

“Putting our capabilities into our clients’ products helps augment our product development costs. There’s a symbiotic relationship when you think about it because we’re getting access to markets that we wouldn’t have without a physical presence, and they’re getting real-time payment and deposit experiences – capabilities that match the pace, precision and scale that clients demand.”

A prime example of Fifth Third’s cherry-picking approach is its tie-up with Swedish fintech Trustly, an open banking payments solutions specialist,

One of the things we believe at Fifth Third is, if you’re not interested in the future, the future is not interested in you

Tom Bianco, General Manager for Newline by Fifth Third

for which it processes payments coming through the Automatic Clearing House ACH and real-time processing RTP networks and Trustly’s own pay-by-bank ecosystem.

Another example is its partnership with Stripe Treasury, which allows the company’s software platform clients to offer embedded finance products to their customers. It will be working with Newline to expand the embedded product suite available to customers on Stripe’s platform.

From Bianco’s viewpoint, embedded finance is only just starting.

“Embedded payments, embedded banking, feels like the first pitch of the first early innings in a baseball game,”

he explains. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on the payment networks to process payments as we look to grow new payment methods – FedNow, real-time payments, some of those 24-7, 365 mechanisms.”

Looking to the future of how payments infrastructures will develop in the States, he says: “I think you will see a convergence of the card networks, Visa, Mastercard, etc, and some of the more legacy, traditional payment processing systems like ACH and wire. Real-time payments and FedNow kind of bridge that gap, and, so for us, there’s just a massive amount of opportunity when you’ve got access to a bank account through a digital app and experience – rewards, refunds, credits.

“There’s just a lot of really interesting things that happen when you have a digital canvas and you’re operating in real time. So, we’ll continue to place a lot of emphasis on real-time experiences, real-time integrations, real-time information sharing, and that’ll put pressure on the broader payment ecosystem from a modernisation and processing standpoint.”

In October 2925, Fifth Third announced it had entered into a $10.9billion merger agreement with Comerica. The franchises will create the ninth largest bank in the US with $288billion in assets. But far from wanting to monopolise its position, Fifth Third advocates for more established and well-capitalised banks to step up and take an active role in this next phase of banking as a service (BaaS), with risk and compliance at the forefront.

There is a concern that if banks don’t make this transition, different layers in the embedded finance tech stack could continue to operate with a lack of coordination, each player optimising their slice of the pie, further disintermediating the client/bank relationship and creating a fragmented ecosystem – a fintech Wild West.

“We need more of those foundational banks to be able to provide real clarity, direction, and guidance into some of these new and existing large fintech platforms that need to possibly switch banking providers because of the tumult over the past of couple years,” says Bianco. “Our growth strategy is to help set the market.”

Tom Bianco, General Manager for Newline by Fifth Third Bank

Setting African payment flows flows free free

CROSS-BORDER

Freemarket is working alongside Axiym and Fincra on improving cross-border payments in potentially one of the biggest wealth-creating regions in the world, But technology is just one part of the solution. The other is trust

Africa, a sprawling continent of 54 countries with a fast-rising population now standing at 1.5 billion, is a vast melting pot of hugely contrasting economies and cultures. Its sheer diversity provides a complicated and challenging backdrop for trade, including financial services and cross-border money movements, with many banks outside of Africa, perhaps unfairly at times, still labelling countries within it as being high risk.

Subsequently, money transfer fees into Sub Saharan countries were levied at 8.78 per cent compared to a global average of 6.49 per cent, according to the World Bank, for the last quarter

of 2024. Costs for remitting into or out of some individual countries rose to as much as 15 per cent, though for others in North Africa, they were cheaper than Europe.

But huge opportunities abound. Africa has the world’s youngest population, with a median age of a shade under 20, which provides a huge, digitally native workforce ready and willing to adapt to new technologies. As such, it’s providing a rich seam of remote workers for international companies to hire, particularly in information and communications technologies and finance, notably increasing spending power. The continent also contains some of the world’s fastest-growing markets where diversification into new industries is spurring innovation and further attracting investment and, by extension, increased trade in services and products. All of that combined is increasing the demand by businesses and individuals across Africa for faster and cheaper means of payments.

One UK-based fintech helping to satisfy that is Freemarket. A specialist in global money movement, it provides the infrastructure for partners on the ground in Africa who understand the continent’s complex regulatory and cultural differences when it comes to moving money. Among the companies in the ecosystem that Freemarket is building are

Fincra, a Nigerian payment solutions provider, and Axiym, a financial infrastructure provider with headquarters in Dubai, and particular experience in the busy and expanding Africa/Asia trade corridor.

Fincra was founded in Lagos in 2021 with an ambitious plan to solve the complex payments challenges for businesses in Africa and enable borderless payments across the globe.

Axiym facilitates global payments built on the Avalanche blockchain and specialises in stablecoins, which are pegged to a regulated fiat currency, such as the US dollar.

Explaining Fincra’s mission, Malaika (MK) Ademola-Majekodunmi, Vice President, Global Payments Systems, says: “It is, in essence, to build the rails that integrate Africa – with itself, and Africa globally. Because Africa is like pieces of a cake. A lot of its resources were sliced up for the benefit of others, rather than the people of Africa. And so the fragmentation is deeply rooted in how the continent operates, how each country operates, how each market behaves. Even in terms of regulation, they are so different.

“We chose this challenge because of what it would mean for us as a people. New innovations, new technologies, new settlement systems, like stablecoins and cross-border

solutions, and infrastructures that we get from our partners are helping us facilitate this integration, because, for us to grow as an economy, part of what needs to be fixed is how money moves across borders – how I send money from Nigeria to Kenya, or from Nigeria to my supplier in China.

“The rails are so fragmented as it stands right now. If I want to use the regular banking system to send through Swift, for example, most banks here cap it at $10,000. So, if I want to do a $50,000 transaction, I’m going to go each day to the bank and make that $10,000 transaction for five days in a row, and then I’m going to pay Swift charges for all those five days.

For us to grow as an economy, part of what needs to be fixed is how money moves across borders… the rails are so fragmented right now Malaika Ademola-Majekodunmi, Fincra

“That’s crazy. So, when you see how disruptive stablecoin is – how you can move money without all the

bureaucracy or limitations but with compliance – you can appreciate why we went to that next phase of integration. It will allow Africa to come together as a whole, to grow the continent, grow the globe, by facilitating payment flows across borders.”

Trading places

Trade between Africa and Asia alone is valued at $1trillion-plus annually, while inter-country money movement, be it buying or selling goods, or individuals sending money to family and friends, is estimated at up to $100billion annually.

“A huge chunk – around 70 per cent – of the population is under 30 years old,” continues Ademola-Majekodunmi. “They’re all mobile first. They’re all digital. They’re all young, hustling, trying to make money. That already creates demand in terms of payment, buying and selling.

“Then there’s the whole inbound remittance market. That’s a $100billion market where there’s the need for Africans to receive money from other Africans in the diaspora, trying to send

money back home to their friends, to their family members, or maybe even for making purchases.

“And then you see there’s global demand for products and goods into Africa, and from Africa to other countries. The Africa-Asia trade is over a trillion dollars right now, and a lot of what we’re doing at Fincra is facilitating that trade. The demand to make payments from Africa into China, for instance, is creating the need for versatile payment solutions and very diverse products.”

Khibar Rassul, Co-founder and CEO at Axiym, agrees that fast and cost-effective cross-border payments are key drivers for emerging markets.

“It allows them to engage in commerce on personal, business and macroeconomic levels,” he says. “And I think that is where payment companies don’t get enough credit because, without them, you don’t get that commerce, those trades, those shipments. You don’t get those products and services to cross borders.”

Emerging economies in Africa are not shackled by legacy systems, says Rassul, which means they can, and are, moving fast to improve money flows.

“There are no well-established procedures, processes, and players. So it’s really a clean slate for people to go in and find better ways to do things. That’s what makes Africa very exciting for us,” he says.

“You can really innovate. You can take advantage of all kinds of technology, new processes, new innovations, new payment methods, whether it’s stablecoins or different payment aggregators, real-time settlements or any and all of the other tools that have emerged within the fintech space. You can put them together to solve problems, and you don’t have those legacy chains around your ankles that hold you back.”

But for all that to succeed, you need a trusted global infrastructure, like Freemarket’s, underpinning it.

“That’s the core piece in enabling those adoptions,” says Rassul. “Because, if these mobile-based experiences were unreliable and did not work out, you would not have adoption among users. They would still be more comfortable using the branches and the banks.”

Respecting the boundaries

Freemarket’s approach is founded on a bedrock of regulatory compliance, which is core to its business of moving money for industries that are often considered high risk by banks.

“We support CFD brokers, digital asset clients, MSBs, PSPs, gaming, gambling, and they’ve all got different risk profiles,” says Freemarket’s Head of Relationship Management, Nick Miles.

“It’s key that we work very closely with banking partners because, from a regulatory perspective, we are licenced, and our clients are licenced, registered, and domiciled in certain jurisdictions – but where it’s not always simple to just send a payment from A to B.

“Each banking partner we use has its own risk appetite. It would be foolish to say every partner could facilitate every single flow we want to put through, so it’s also hugely important to understand a banking partner’s own risk appetite and really understand that what I’m sending is a) something they can accept, and b) something they’ll process and then settle. It’s all about listening, learning, and understanding what we can onwards offer to clients to make sure we’re within our own – and their – regulation.

There are no well-established procedures and processes and players [in Africa]. It’s a clean slate to find better ways to do things

Khibar Rassul, Axiym

“Ultimately, people want to move money around the world, so how can we help?"

For Ademola-Majekodunmi that strict rule of compliance builds the vital bond of trust needed to tackle Fincra’s mission and have a functioning ecosystem.

“There has to be a compliance-first approach. It’s the make-or-break for everything we design,” she says.

“And the reason I say this is, despite the challenges that regulation may pose on your solution, what’s really behind that is trust or lack of trust. What these regulators are trying to do, in essence, is just protect customers, protect their citizens.

Khibar Rassul, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Axiym Nick Miles, Head of Relationship Management at Freemarket

Malaika AdemolaMajekodunmi, Vice President, Global Payments Systems at Fincra

“Building solutions with trust in mind has made it easier for us to break into new markets and it’s now a foundational thought – ‘OK, we know that this is a particular concern for this market East Africa is a bit more progressive, for example, while West Africa is a bit trickier. So, how do we adapt this solution for each of these markets, knowing the problem that they are truly trying to solve is that trust element?’.”

For Rassul, regulatory compliance also offers Axiym a gateway to growth.

“A lot of the gatekeepers are, actually, the underlying banks. Their risk appetites limit what you can do, how you can do it, how you can innovate,” he says.

“Being licenced and regulated usually allows you to elevate at least some of those risk factors that these partners you’re working

facing with the regular banking rails or the correspondent banks and the delays that they experience,” says Ademola-Majekodunmi.

It’s all about technology solving problems, driving efficiencies, and then trickling down value to customers, adds Rassul.

“Whether you’re automating things with AI or whether you’re using stablecoin for settlements or using virtual IBANs and internal ledgers for the instant settlements within a payment ecosystem, all of these pieces reflect the drive the industry has to find better ways to solve problems,” he says. “And as these technologies become more mature, they can be plugged into more use cases.”

A matter of trust

But even in such a dynamic technology market,

with experience; it actually enables you to do more. So, while you might slow innovation a little bit on one side, you’re opening bigger doors on the other.

“Yes, there are inefficiencies, but getting properly regulated makes you more compatible with underlying banks and flow partners, allows you to enter into places and payment ecosystems and access payment services that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

A prime example of that is Axiym’s use of stablecoins for global payment flows, which overcomes the capital constraints of traditional pre-funding.

Demand for stablecoin-based transactions is also a trend experienced by Fincra since it forged its partnership with Freemarket, as its customers look for not only speedier settlement but also ways to avoid volatility in FX markets, which, in Africa, can be particularly unpredictable.

“A lot of businesses that we’re working with are pivoting to use stablecoins as a settlement currency because of the challenges they are

demographic is driving the economy and demand for fintech solutions

network designed to harness collective strengths – an ecosystem that makes moving money faster, cheaper, and smarter through true collaboration. If we have a client who would like help in certain African countries, for example, we would most likely say, ‘why don’t you have a conversation with Fincra, as they’re better equipped to do this for you?’.

“Fincra and Axiym are the true experts in their field and in the jurisdictions they live and work in,” adds Miles. “We give them the opportunity to integrate with us fairly seamlessly; to be able to provide banking rails in countries and currencies that are not as easy to get into.

“Ultimately, they’re kind of agnostic as to how they settle as long as they go through a trusted party very quickly. But it’s also about realising how we are complementary. They’re clients, yes, but we like to mutually collaborate to get the best out of each other.

“It goes back to truly being a relationship-led organisation, and at Freemarket we’re passionate about that. It is our bread and butter.”

Rassul agrees: “Really successful local partners are the ones who understand that it comes down to building long-term relationships. With Fincra and Freemarket,

it’s human relationships that are at the heart of successful ecosystem of players. Freemarket, Fincra and Axiym know they can’t succeed alone and so their relationship goes beyond the purely transactional.

“People still have an idea that money gets carried across borders or across countries physically,” says Freemarket’s Miles. “In reality, a currency never actually leaves the domicile where it sits. It’s effectively a reflection of a balance, a debit or credit in the jurisdiction of the local payment system where the underlying bank account is opened in that party’s name. With sterling, for example, it’s a reflection of the Bank of England going through different beneficiary or correspondent banks. So, you need the assurance that it’s going to get to the end beneficiary in as quick a time as possible, when it’s not necessarily going from A to B, but from A to B to C to D.

“We’re a trusted party for those payments – our partners trust us to get them to the end beneficiary in a very efficient time span.

“In effect, we’re creating an internal payment

We’re creating an internal payment network designed to harness collective strengths – an ecosystem that makes moving money faster, cheaper, and smarter through true collaboration

Nick Miles, Freemarket

we’re moving each other’s money, so, you have to trust and like the people you work with. It is very personal in many ways, and a lot of businesses that fail in this industry do so because they treat moving money as a technology problem – ‘let me build some APIs’. Or treat it as a purely regulation issue – ‘let me get some licences’.

“And there are people who are good at one thing and are licenced in one place, so you engage with them for this, and you have to engage with someone else for that.

“Volumes go up and down. FX rates go up and down. And payment fees go up and down. But what stays around is the trust that you build with people.”

Youth on their side: Africa’s

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