Digital Future Of Banking: Pwc

In the new normal, banks need real-time data and an agile approach to strategy development. Contact us today to discover how you can modernise your digital services and keep up with the latest digital banking trends. Real-time payments and digital wallet usage are becoming one of the key digital banking trends. Reliant on APIs, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), and open banking regulations that allow secure, interoperable embedment of financial services. Meniga is currently developing a Conversational Financial Assistant, an LLM-powered tool tailored for banks that provides real-time, natural-language financial insights. This smart, data-driven approach restores the personal touch in digital banking, boosting trust, customer retention, digital sales, and long-term growth.

• AI could also create models to offer personalized tips for saving, spending, and investing, giving customers tools for better financial wellness.
• He’s passionate about the freedom that financial services and technology can create and is currently a Content Strategist at Plaid.
• Key trends include agentic AI, advanced automation, cloud-native infrastructure, new AI-focused roles, and early experimentation with quantum computing.
• By 2025, this trend will be everywhere, integrating financial services into non-financial platforms like e-commerce or ride-hailing apps.
• However, despite the buzz around AI-powered banking and investment products, consumer-facing AI applications remain largely experimental.

Driving Resilience And Sustainable Advantage In Banking

Ramp’s AI-powered automation reduces time spent on approvals and policy checks, while seamless ERP integrations keep your systems perfectly in sync. Strong integration minimizes implementation time, ensures data consistency, and eliminates duplicate invoices. Their work now centers on setting data standards, ensuring accuracy, and maintaining consistency across systems. As automation and AI take on transactional work, finance professionals are focusing more on strategy, data stewardship, and cross-functional collaboration.

• Younger consumers are gravitating more toward online-only banks.
• By 2026, banks and fintech companies are using data, AI, and digital tools to deliver personalized experiences and reach underserved populations.
• But don’t confuse them with digital banks, which are often offshoots of traditional banks operating entirely online.
• This major transition from conventional FI to DFI offers a fundamental reimagination of how technical financial services are offered and accessed, presenting unparalleled opportunities to climb previously unattainable populations and promote inclusive economic growth (Neelam and Bhattacharya, 2022).

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Leading this trend are API-based fintech tools and open banking regulations, which allow financial institutions to access alternative data sources instantly. The digital transformation in banking is redefining how different generations perceive and interact with financial institutions. An estimated 60% of financial institutions are relying on legacy systems and claim to still be in the early stages of their digital transformation initiatives. Blockchain technology and DeFi platforms are set to revolutionize the financial services industry in 2025 by offering more secure, transparent, and decentralized alternatives to traditional financial systems.

How Ai Became The Most Transformative Technology In Finance And Banking

The main purpose of DFI is to empower digital Everestex review channels to provide access to formal financial services for financial exclusion and to segments of society that are considered undeserving (Baheti et al. 2024; Elmaasrawy et al. 2025; Neelam and Bhattacharya, 2022). This concept centers on employing digital financial services (DFS) to advance the objectives of financial inclusion (FI) (Baheti et al. 2024; Becha et al. 2025; Elmaasrawy et al. 2025; Sharma et al. 2020; Reserve Bank of India, 2021; Neelam and Bhattacharya, 2022). The most successful financial services companies of the next decade will be those that deliver value, peace of mind, and relevance at every step of the customer journey.

How Is Ai Changing Technology Roles In Finance?

• This infrastructure supports decentralized finance (DeFi), enabling permissionless applications that reimagine traditional financial services.
• According to Forrester’s January 2025 insights, digital banking is entering another transformative phase – driven by demands for human-like, integrated, and empowering experiences (Forrester).
• Its Digital Knowledge Operations™ framework integrates domain expertise, digital solutions, and operational excellence to drive the change.
• Ed serves as the US Finance Services Leader at Deloitte, helping CFOs and finance leaders prepare for what’s next and navigate change.
• The expansion of e-commerce, the increase in smartphone use and the rising demand for inventive financial technologies has propelled the fintech industry into the digital world.
• It’s going to reshape customer experiences, business models, and operational efficiencies.

A Forrester report found that a decrease in customer experience quality is threatening traditional banks profitability (Forrester). However, offering a mobile banking app is a baseline requirement and does not guarantee customer satisfaction in general. The banks that succeed are those combining modern infrastructure with a data-conscious, customer-first mindset.

Trends In Action: Unlocking Value Through Automation And Scaled Solutions

Many finance teams struggle with mismatched formats, incomplete records, or unclear ownership. Outdated ERPs and accounting software often can’t integrate with modern digital tools. Automation removes repetitive manual work so finance professionals can focus on insights, strategy, and collaboration. Continuous monitoring flags anomalies before they become issues, enabling more accurate forecasting and confident, data-driven decisions.

Here are the key digital banking trends that every bank should be watching closely. Read on to learn more about key digital banking trends so that you can rethink and reshape your strategies and stay relevant. Through APIs, third party business can access the client’s financial data to assist with specialized tasks such as budgeting, financial planning, lending and other services, within a single platform.

• Want to know what today’s customers actually respond to?
• First, it gives clients greater convenience, choice and control over their financial information while preserving privacy.
• Deloitte found that when it comes to personalized financial product recommendations, AI can help increase click-through rates by five times.
• These distinguishing criteria align with the guidelines proposed by Paul et al. (2021), and as a result, the corpus was diminished to include 326 articles.

Digital Finance Developments: Quantum Rises On 2026 Agendas

This study presents a comprehensive review aimed at elucidating the performance and intellectual framework of digital financial inclusion (DFI) research. The future of banking is about using all of your customers’ favorite channels – from SMS, WhatsApp, email, RCS, voice, and more in a scalable, secure way. Because if your systems aren’t speaking the same language, your customers won’t be either. You can create personalized offers and other educational content for both scenarios, and numerous others in each customer’s financial journey. And RCS messaging stands out as one of the most powerful advancements you can adopt for your digital transformation initiatives. If your financial company is still siloing customers into a single communication channel, you probably are hearing complaints if you’re not already seeing churn.

And in 2026, such solutions for budgeting, spending insights, and forecast tools are embedded directly into apps — not as add-ons, but as core features, especially to appeal to younger generations and users underserved by traditional banking. In effect, regulatory requirements are pushing fintechs and banks to treat compliance as architecture — not as boilerplate. A concrete example is the way many European banks and fintechs are adapting to DORA and PSD3/PSR requirements. Several studies show a significant uptick in fintechs and banks investing in regulatory‑compliance tech stacks, not as a cost centre but as a foundation for sustainable, scalable growth.

Plus, we’ll break down how these innovations could change financial strategies, streamline operations, and improve customer experiences across the board. It’s about so much more—think mobile apps, e-payment systems, and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and blockchain. As these technologies evolve, they redefine how financial systems operate, emphasizing trust, accessibility and innovation.