69 points of view from our industry teams — filter by industry or topic, or search. Figures in each article are sourced or labelled.
The easing cycle is over almost before it finished, and rates are rising again. The lesson of the past three years is that margin is now earned customer by customer, and that the primary relationship is the only deposit franchise worth defending.
Embedded finance keeps growing, but the US sponsor-bank enforcement wave showed that when a partnership fails, the bank's ledger and licence are what customers fall back on. The winners will be banks that can prove, every day, whose money is where.
Banks earned more in 2025 than any industry on earth, yet investors still price them at the bottom of the league. The next leg of returns will come from productivity and precision, not balance-sheet heft.
Data-sharing regimes are widening from payment accounts to savings, pensions and insurance, but the rules are moving at very different speeds. The economics of access, not the APIs themselves, will decide who wins.
The UK's mandatory reimbursement regime is two years old, the EU has made payee verification universal for euro payments and Australia is legislating shared duties for banks, telcos and platforms. The evidence so far: shifting liability changes behaviour, but banks cannot stop scams alone.
Payments revenue growth is slowing just as the rails underneath are being rebuilt. Instant account-to-account payments are becoming the default in much of Asia and Latin America, digital money is moving from trading to treasury, and banks must decide which layer they intend to own.