How are banks and fintechs planning for a digital future.

As the Saudi fintech market matures, a new challenge is emerging. Most fintech interactions, whether payments, BNPL, or other services, remain fundamentally transactional.

Loyalty is defined as “a strong feeling of support or allegiance”. However, in the context of financial services, it is more accurately defined as engineered persistence: a series of subconscious cues that steer customers toward familiar choices.

As our financial lives become more complex, there is a growing expectation for banks to offer more support, be more relevant, and generate greater everyday value. One of the clearest places this shift is starting to show up is in subscription banking.

Most AI deployments so far have focused on AI that “talks”, which can search, summarise, and draft content to support employees. The next wave is different: AI agents that “do” are starting to take bounded actions inside workflows, moving cases forward and coordinating steps end-to-end, with humans kept in control where it matters.

While consumer-focused fintech has seen waves of innovation since the early 2000s, the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector has remained comparatively underserved.

Unlocking agentic AI’s upside demands rethinking how humans and systems share control, rebuilding data and API foundations, and scaling autonomy in measured steps with rigorous human-style QA

In the highly competitive insurance sector, customer experience is a critical differentiator. While insurers focus on policy features and premiums, the claims payout process is often overlooked, creating a significant point of friction.

At one of our Truly Digital After Dark events, Anne Boden said “if you call yourself digital, you’re not digital”.

The fintech scene in Asia is booming. In recent years, the region has developed rapidly, with a diverse array of startups and established banks transforming how financial services are delivered and consumed.

Payments in the Middle East are evolving. The payments landscape in the Middle East has stood at an important tipping point for some time.

The U.S. Treasury and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) both hit the headlines with fintech-related announcements. Treasury released a 222-page report on the subject of Nonbank Financials, Fintech, and Innovation, while the OCC almost immediately followed with the news that it would finally begin accepting National Bank Charter applications from fintechs, in line with Treasury recommendations.

How do I create the 5 year plan for 8 software releases a day? This is one of my favourite lines from an old school bank executive. It happened live on stage in front of 500 people when I made the point that challenger banks are now operating at 8 releases per day. It might seem nerdy, but why does it matter how often banks release new software?

Looking to crypto and seeing it simply as a speculative asset class is a common mistake for financial institutions and even regulators. But if you start to look beyond the headlines, you can see there’s untapped potential for banks to better serve the SMB market.