Global

For years, banks have relied on OTPs as a second factor for logins and sensitive actions. Sent via SMS, these short codes were designed to add security on top of a password. But they have become one of the weakest and most frustrating parts of the banking experience.

The people using business banking tools don’t necessarily have financial backgrounds. Many smaller businesses can't afford a dedicated finance team. Yet banks keep building products that assume expertise their customers don't have, leaving them to figure things out on their own.

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.

Around the world, people have instant, around-the-clock access to banking apps and their own financial data. So why do so many people still feel uncertain about their financial future? 

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.

Financial accessibility has long been framed as a matter of compliance or corporate social responsibility. But today, it’s emerging as something much bigger: a competitive advantage.

As the industry adjusts to a new digital landscape, players across the spectrum are fighting to muscle their way into the financial epicentre and ‘win’ the salary battle to become the payday home of their customers.

Consumers are evolving, and so are their expectations and demands. As the purchasing power of the younger, digital-native Gen Z and Gen Alpha grows and older generations become more comfortable with the possibilities that AI and other new technologies enable, businesses have to work harder to keep them happy and retain their business.

Saving money and paying bills might not sound exciting - but today’s finance apps are borrowing tricks from video games to change that.

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 term ‘technical debt’ has been around a long time in software engineering. It shares some common characteristics with financial debt: You can accumulate it, you can ‘pay it off’.