Ahead of the game: AI innovation must go hand-in-hand with trust and security
Leanıng ın and steppıng up! STATE OF THE NATION
Finastra’s annual State Of The Nation report on the challenges facing financial institutions and their technology responses to them, highlights just how much the instant payment revolution is driving adoption of AI When one of the world’s leading fintechs concludes that decisions made by financial institutions in the next 11 to 18 months will shape their competitiveness for the rest of the decade, it pays to take notice. Finastra’s State Of The Nation 2026 report based its observation on a survey of more than 1,500 banking and FI executives across 11 countries, including the US and the UK. It revealed that AI, modernisation, security, and customer experience are no longer being viewed as separate initiatives. Instead, they are converging into a single operating 32 THEPAYTECHMAGAZINE ISSUE 18
Radha Suvarna, Chief Product Officer for Payments at Finastra
reality where execution, resilience and trust matter just as much as innovation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in payments. That's no surprise, says Radha Suvarna, Finastra’s Chief Product Officer for Payments. “Payments is in the front line of customer experience and trust, more than any other area of financial services, because we’re all interacting with payments every day,” he says. What is new, however, and what the report identified, is that confluence of priorities – execution, resilience and trust – and how AI is being leveraged across all of them.
Suvarna’s advice? “Lean in and figure out your strategy. Craft a story that is very customised to your specific organisation. That’s the key. “Think about what’s going to deliver most value to your customers in the near term. That could be delivering a particular use case, modernising a set of capabilities, or improving the user experience.” Whatever their specific roadmap, Suvarna cautions against banks and FIs going on the journey alone. “Whether it’s a bank or whether it’s Finastra, if everyone tries to do everything by themselves, no one’s going to be successful,” he says. “And FFNEWS.COM