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.
A dashboard can be green while the service is not. Pauses without customer contact, closures bunched before reporting dates, changes that skip the CAB and leavers who keep access are rarely found by sample-based audits. Testing every record changes that.
Energy is a safety-critical business. AI agents can watch more signals than any control room, but a wrong action can black out a feeder or breach a pipeline. The answer is not to keep AI out; it is to give every agent an autonomy level, an owner and an audit trail.
Logistics agents can scan, match and draft at a scale no team can. But three kinds of decision — a customs filing, a carrier payment and a commitment to a customer — must stay with a named person. Here is how we design for that.
Trade spend is one of the largest lines on a consumer company's P&L and one of the least evidenced. Supervised agents can evaluate every promotion and check every claim — provided they never approve money on their own and never use customer data without consent.
Access requests are one of the most repetitive jobs in any capability centre — and one of the riskiest to automate. The answer is not to avoid agents, but to design them so that nothing is granted without a named approver and everything is logged.
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.
Manufacturing has safety, quality and money decisions that no agent should take alone. The answer is not to keep agents out, but to give each one an explicit autonomy level, an owner, and a ledger of the value it claims.
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.
Airlines can't let an opaque model decide a maintenance finding, a crew assignment or a passenger's refund. The answer is not to avoid AI but to give every agent an autonomy level, an owner and an audit trail.
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.