69 points of view from our industry teams — filter by industry or topic, or search. Figures in each article are sourced or labelled.
2026 is the year programmable money moved from pilots to live value: real-value cross-border trials among central banks, bank deposit tokens on public chains and a US stablecoin law about to bite. Banks need a position on all three forms of money, not a bet on one.
Voluntary alliances have dissolved and US supervisors have stepped back, yet European and UK prudential expectations have hardened. For banks, climate is becoming a risk-management and data discipline rather than a public commitment, and financed-emissions data remain the weakest link.
Card networks, big tech and standards bodies are building the rails for AI agents to transact on consumers' behalf. For banks, the shift rewrites the rules of authentication, liability, distribution and brand, and it is arriving faster than consumer trust.
Southeast Asia has built some of the world's most advanced real-time and QR payment systems and licensed a new generation of digital banks. Payments have been won quickly; profitable lending has not. The next phase will be decided by data, credit and cost to serve, and incumbents still hold more cards than the headlines suggest.
By the end of the decade the best banks will be felt more than seen: embedded in the journeys where customers live and work, run by humans supervising a digital workforce, and built on data they can trust. Here is the shape of that bank, and the operating model behind it.
The standards are published and the deadlines are converging on 2030–2035. For banks, post-quantum migration is a multi-year programme whose hardest first step is not cryptography at all: it is building a trustworthy inventory of every key, certificate and algorithm in the estate.