Fintech leaders go into 2026 with a familiar tension: customer expectations keep rising, while regulators, boards and auditors are pushing harder on resilience, data controls and operational risk. That pressure is showing up in global payments policy, too.
Against that backdrop, executives and vendors who shared their 2026 predictions with TechInformed point to practical shifts already reshaping fintech roadmaps. Agentic AI is moving from demos into regulated workflows, while “trust-by-design” controls, fraud and identity checks, and resilience engineering become gating requirements for real-time money movement.
ISO 20022 readiness work is hitting hard deadlines, APIs are expanding as regulations push richer data sharing, finance teams are tightening spend discipline, and digital assets are moving closer to the core as stablecoin policy firms up in the US and UK.
Agentic AI expands but data governance decides who can scale
Monica Hovsepian, Head of Financial Services Industry Strategy, OpenText
“AI is Embedded in Core Financial Operations: In 2026, AI will become deeply embedded in core financial operations such as shifting from automated loan approvals to dynamic risk modeling, acting as a trusted teammate that predicts risk, automates compliance, and adapts to customer needs in real time. Their accuracy will depend entirely on clean, secure, and well-governed data.
“Finance Runs on Intelligence, Not Infrastructure: Open banking, AI, and embedded finance are converging into a connected system where money moves securely and often without user input. Agentic AI will anticipate intent, verify identity, detect fraud, and authorize transactions in real time across platforms.
“Compliance Becomes a Competitive Edge, not a Check Box: Compliance will shift from a static requirement to a dynamic, AI-powered discipline. As financial data moves across borders, institutions must manage conflicting regulations in real time.”
Brett Sievwright, CEO, Platcorp
“The defining force in fintech by 2026 will be the rapid, widespread rise of AI agents and embedded finance, automating everything from financial access to compliance. The era of basic mobile app digitisation will give way to true automation.”
Payments infrastructure shifts to resilience and automation
Nadish Lad, Global Head of Product and Strategic Business, Volante Technologies
“2026 will be the year the payments industry finally accepts that legacy, centralised infrastructure cannot keep pace with a real-time, data-driven economy. The institutions that move the fastest will be those that rethink their operating models entirely, building around data, automation, and resilient multi-cloud strategies.
“Real-time payment systems have matured. The next breakthrough will be the creation of the first scalable, high-volume instant cross-border corridors. ISO 20022 will enable this, not just for compliance, but because its rich, structured data finally allows banks to automate sanctions, fraud checks, reconciliation, and reporting at a global scale.”
Nick Fernando, Co-founder and Director, Aqua Global
“Customers now expect secure, real-time payments anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Cut-off times, hidden fees, and multi-day settlements are no longer acceptable, and many customers have already moved to providers that do better.”
Cian Fernando, CEO, Aqua Global
“In 2026, banks that relied on translation tools to meet Swift’s ISO 20022 migration deadline will reach the limits of these stopgap measures. Translation tools, designed as temporary fixes, cannot deliver the precision or depth of structure required.”
Monica Hovsepian, Head of Financial Services Industry Strategy, OpenText
“Payments will become invisible as they route themselves through the safest, most efficient paths while remaining transparent and auditable. Financial trust will depend less on interfaces and more on clean, well-governed data that keeps intelligent systems aligned and secure.”
Fraud, APIs and security become the hard part of “real time”
Nick Fernando, Co-founder and Director, Aqua Global
“In 2026, fraud, not speed, will become the defining challenge in the race to real-time payments. As banks strive to process transactions in seconds, the same automation designed to improve efficiency will expose them to new risks.
“To defend against this new wave of fraud, banks must evolve from basic automation to intelligent automation. Real-time, accurate data on every transaction will be essential. Institutions will need to gather and analyse as much information as possible about each payment and payer – and ensure it can be retrieved instantly.
“Integrating this intelligence into configurable payment orchestration and CoP/VoP systems will enable banks not just to react, but to act automatically – flagging anomalies, blocking duplicates, and intercepting fraud before payments settle.”
Andy Parsons, Director, EMEA, financial services and insurance, CyberArk
“The introduction of PSD3 regulation is set to transform the European financial landscape in 2026, mandating improved security, richer data sharing and stronger customer authentication through APIs.”
Operational resilience becomes a board-level expectation
Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty
“By 2026, financial services firms have turned hard-won lessons from the Treasury’s 2025 outage reports into action. Years of costly downtime and lost trust pushed the industry to rebuild around resilience.
“Always-on access is non-negotiable. Customers leave if they can’t transact in real time, and regulators are watching. In response, banks are overhauling legacy stacks and embedding AI at the core of incident management.
“AI isn’t a pilot project anymore, it’s become part of frontline defence. Systems now detect and diagnose disruption before it happens, enabling predictive maintenance and softening the blow of unplanned events. In 2026, resilience is a competitive edge.”
Stablecoins and tokenisation move closer to business-as-usual
Leon Stevens, Managing Director, EMEA, Mambu
“Digital assets were battle tested in 2025. Clearer rules and tougher standards meant that financial institutions had fewer reasons to stay on the sidelines. And as the operational benefits become evident, next year we can expect digital assets to move from experimentation to full-scale integration.”
Anil Oncu, CEO, Bitpace
“By 2026, digital assets will no longer be considered emerging. They will be fully embedded in mainstream finance.”
Investors and operators prioritise governance and unit economics
Monika Liikamaa, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Enfuce
“In 2026, investors will look beyond ambition and start valuing the discipline behind it. Trust becomes a measurable asset, and stability becomes a competitive advantage.”
Arjun Kumar, Founder, Taxd
“In 2026, we will see fintechs moving away from ‘growth-at-all-costs’ strategies, investing huge amounts of cash for enormous growth. Instead, we will see a move towards sustainable growth and retention.”
Settlement compression forces wealth platforms to modernise
Cian Fernando, CEO, Aqua Global
“With T+1 settlement already live in the US and Canada and set to become mandatory across Europe, institutions must reconcile and report trades within a single business day. Relying on manual, fragmented systems to meet these requirements is both costly and risky.”
Embedded finance shows up in business spend not just consumer apps
Gareth Jones, Chief Information Officer, Conferma
“A lot of businesses still rely on infrastructure that were never designed to move at the speed they now need to operate. That’s where the breakage is showing up: in reconciliation delays, missing controls, or spend you can’t trace until someone flags it weeks later.”
AI-native businesses pressure billing and payments rails to evolve
Susan O’Neill, Founder and CEO, Paygentic
“Most billing and payment rails were built for monthly SaaS invoices and card payments, but AI-native products generate millions of real-time, tiny transactions – creating a gap between current infrastructure and what agentic businesses need to thrive.”
