Are You Prepared For The Future Of Finance? 4 Innovation Drivers You Can’t Ignore World Economic Forum

Banks are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation, leveraging their expertise to create secure, trustworthy frameworks for data exchange. Trust is the cornerstone of finance, and in a digital world, it must evolve. Today, digital assets include cryptocurrencies, tokenized real-world assets and innovations like stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The journey began with Bitcoin, whose invention in 2009 – following Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper – marked a turning point in digital finance. The financial system is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by technological mega-trends that are reshaping its foundations. We support the introduction of disruptive technology to increase competition and to demonstrate the necessity and business case for serving traditionally un(der)served segments, developing new products, and reducing inefficiencies.

The Current State Of Digital Transformation In The Banking Industry

The IIF presents Digital Finance Developments, a bi-weekly series offering insights into timely topics in digital finance. Learn how to overcome typical challenges in the banking sector so you can improve security, modernise systems & deliver better customer experiences. These statistics present clear opportunities for banks to leverage real-time payment capabilities. Autonomous banking systems make decisions, optimise financial outcomes, and execute complex tasks with minimal human input, creating a seamless, intelligent, and live banking experience.

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• According to one report, many are struggling to maintain (nevermind build) customer relationships after the initial bank account sign-up.
• Many finance teams struggle with mismatched formats, incomplete records, or unclear ownership.
• Bibliometric analysis includes performance analysis, science mapping via temporary analysis using word clouds, and network analysis using keyword co-occurrences.

According to KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech, total fintech investment reached over $150 billionglobally in H1 2025. To understand more about the way and pace at which the fintech market is growing, let’s take a closer look at the market. Plus, having all the information within the same platform is really valuable.”

Position Your Firm For The Next Phase Of Digital Transformation In The Financial Sector

However, despite the buzz around AI-powered banking and investment products, consumer-facing AI applications remain largely experimental. AI was a hot fintech topic in 2024, with many companies rapidly adopting AI tools for internal operations and fraud prevention. This enables faster, more informed loan decisions while expanding financial access for millions of Americans. As demand grows, once outlier payment models are becoming mainstream alternatives to traditional bank transfers.

Cluster 5 (purple) Financial Literacy

That goes for traditional institutions and digital banks alike. A full 98% of financial services respondents indicate that they plan to invest in or improve their customer communication channels over the coming year. This could be part of the reason why 55% of financial services leaders see RCS as a game changer for business messaging. Of financial institutions worry about customer Everestex forex broker trust in AI-generated responses

What Is Driving Digital Transformation In Financial Services?

By prioritizing strong data, their finance organization can “hang tools on top of it to become more strategic and efficient.” Many finance leaders are leaving no stone unturned in their hunt to lure or nurture high-priority skills. Finding the right blend of technology and talent appears to be top of mind in many finance departments, with technology emerging as a potential solution when talent is scarce. How finance leaders meet their pressing talent needs will likely have major implications for their departments going forward. This finding jibes with Deloitte’s Q CFO Signals™ survey, in which surveyed finance chiefs listed lack of skilled talent, along with employee engagement, staff resistance to using new technology, and work overload, as the biggest workforce challenges in meeting C-suite expectations for their finance departments. Several of our interviewees stressed that data privacy is particularly relevant in finance, where teams handle some of the organization’s most sensitive data.

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• This literature review primarily focuses on FI, financial technology, and financial literacy.
• At the same time, in Europe, SEPA Instant should enable payments in ten seconds or less where supported.
• Currently, only 58% believe that their financial organization achieves this, demonstrating the gap that needs to be closed (Unblu).

And as GenAI becomes more integral to strategic execution, institutions must be ready. It’s going to reshape customer experiences, business models, and operational efficiencies. Banks and payment providers may need to upgrade their infrastructure to support digital wallets and CBDC transactions, ensuring that they can compete in this evolving landscape. Many countries will launch CBDCs to provide their citizens with secure, government-backed digital currency alternatives. Digital wallets have already become popular for their convenience in making contactless payments, and CBDCs offer a new digital form of government-backed currency. The tokenization of assets, including real estate, art, and commodities, will gain traction, providing new investment opportunities.

• 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.
• What digital banking trends are impacting the way consumers interact with banks and credit unions today?
• An informed, holistic approach to digital transformation allows banks to concurrently evolve operations across all business units.
• Following that, we exported the bibliometric file and read each article, removing an additional 15 articles that only briefly mentioned the search keywords.

“Scenario planning is something we’ve always done, but the current environment has caused us to really accelerate the way we do it,” says Walmart’s Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer David Chojnowski. Elevating the frequency and sophistication of scenario-planning techniques is becoming critical for many leaders. How leaders maintain focus amid competing priorities can influence a company’s agility and resilience. Three-quarters of the leaders we surveyed say their organization requires either a moderate amount or “a lot more” resources to maximize investment opportunities across the business.

Some online banks focus on a particular cause or consumer group. Most of the best high-yield savings account rates are offered by online banks. Without the cost of establishing and operating physical branches, online banks can redirect those funds elsewhere, such as yields offered on savings products or ATM fee reimbursements. More than three-quarters (80 percent) of millennials prefer to bank digitally, the highest of any generation, according to the ABA. Digital banking is somewhat more popular among younger generations, though it’s the preferred method of banking among all generations.

Other notable keywords or topics in this cluster studied in association with financial services include “economic growth”, “artificial intelligence”, “finance”, and “banking”. “Digital financial inclusion involves the deployment of cost-saving digital means to reach currently financially excluded and underserved populations with a range of formal financial services suited to their needs that are responsibly delivered at a cost affordable to customers and sustainable for providers” (World Bank Group, 2016, para. 3). That suggests that one in two financial institutions don’t have fully integrated systems, which can be frustrating when a customer gets involved. Let’s start with what our data revealed about the five trends every financial services leader needs to understand. Topping the list of the skills many surveyed finance leaders are prioritizing for the next fiscal year are AI and automation, along with data analysis and technology integration (figure 9). Prior Deloitte Global research suggests finance leaders should adopt a more holistic view of AI’s return on investment—measuring sentiment like organizational trust along with traditional financial metrics.10

AI-powered compliance monitoring is giving commercial banks a new lever for fraud prevention and optimization, including real-time interventions. Secure SMS and texting in commercial banking is transforming client engagement with real-time approvals, alerts, and communication. With the right foundation in place, future banking leaders won’t need to work so hard to gain meaningful insights from their data. As digital transformation continues to accelerate across the sector, banks will likely require more advanced digital capabilities in order to compete. An informed, holistic approach to digital transformation allows banks to concurrently evolve operations across all business units. Executives strive to strike the balance between delivering on customer-centric digital business models and meeting near-term financial requirements.