69 points of view from our industry teams — filter by industry or topic, or search. Figures in each article are sourced or labelled.
Banks are more profitable than they have been in years, but their cost bases have hardly changed relative to assets. The next step change will come from redesigning work around AI, not from another round of cost containment.
Finance teams still spend most of their time assembling numbers rather than explaining them. A continuous close, with agents reconciling and drafting commentary as transactions land, turns the finance function from reporter into navigator.
Models are no longer the constraint. Metadata, a shared semantic layer, knowledge graphs and lineage are — and banks that already invest in BCBS 239 compliance are closer to AI-ready data than they may think.
Instant payments are now mandatory across the euro area and growing fast in the US, and 2023 showed how quickly deposits can leave. Treasury needs a live view of intraday liquidity, and the data architecture to support it.
Europe's Digital Operational Resilience Act has produced its first register of critical tech providers and its first year of incident data. With the UK's regime now live as well, the lesson is that resilience depends on third-party dependencies and system failures more than on dramatic cyberattacks.
Core replacement programmes have a long record of overruns and outages. A progressive path — data layer first, capabilities peeled off behind APIs and events, AI to read the legacy code — lowers the risk without lowering the ambition.