During the last few years, the banking world has been undergoing a profound transformation
Banking is considered to be one of the most conservative areas. However, in most recent years, even banking has been constantly undergoing change. Nowadays fintech startups, such as Revolut or Monzo, raise millions of dollars, hence they are mushrooming. Thus, banking has no other choice but to change, in order to retain clients. Artificial intelligence has become the main driver of this change: customers now ask AI assistants about their money, and banks have to be the ones who answer.
PaySpace Magazine has decided to take stock, highlighting the major trends of 2026, and anticipating what is to come from banking during 2027.
1. Segmenting
Today many banks implement segmentation of their audience according to various criteria: demographics, lifestyles, values, aspirations, needs.
Most likely, during the next years, the banks will go even further and focus on personal communication when each person will be considered as a “separate segment”. This is a very high level of innovative personalization, which is made possible by being provided with a large amount of data, advanced analytics, and digital technologies. In 2027, generative AI is expected to make this level of personalization affordable not only for the largest banks.
Having division by advanced criteria, design concepts and CRM tools, financial and lending institutions will understand customer needs and respond to them promptly in real time.
In addition, financial institutions will probably build separate communications with segments of small and medium-sized enterprises. According to Backbase’s 2027 banking predictions, banks will go further here. They will connect through APIs to the accounting, point-of-sale, payroll and tax tools a business already uses, and add an AI assistant that forecasts cash flow and chases invoices. The bank becomes the place where a small business runs its money.
2. Open Banking age
An increasing number of regulators demand that financial institutions provide their customers with an opportunity to share their data with third parties safely. This will facilitate the provision of new financial services, as well as increase competition within the banking sector.
Consumers gain more independence and control over the way they interact with their financial service providers if they provide credentials and billing information through a secure application programming interface (API).
Open Banking is able to boost innovation and collaboration, which leads to the expansion of banking ecosystems. They, in turn, can include much more than conventional financial services, which will improve consumers’ lifestyles.
Open Banking will also enable conventional financial institutions to allow customers to control their own data. Furthermore, the introduction of the system will encourage non-traditional financial firms to cooperate with traditional banks.
In 2027, the focus moves from open banking to open finance. In the EU, PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation tighten fraud liability and API quality requirements, and the proposed Financial Data Access (FiDA) regulation would extend data sharing to savings, investments, pensions, mortgages and insurance. In the UK, the FCA published an open finance roadmap through 2030 in April 2026. The US is moving more slowly. A federal injunction blocked enforcement of the CFPB’s Section 1033 rule on 1 April 2026, and the agency is working on a revised proposal. Meanwhile, large banks sign private data-access agreements with aggregators.
3. We know what you might like tomorrow
Anticipating (Predictive Banking) is another highly expected trend. Today, banks have broad, accessible and financially viable data. This information helps financial institutions not only know their customers well, but also gives them valuable advice for the future.
This feature will be particularly useful in collaboration with AI agents that act on the customer’s behalf. The banks will considerably benefit if they integrate this functionality with Open Banking.
This «collaboration» will allow financial institutions to not only sell a product «here and now», but also offer clients possible further actions.
The next step is already visible. The UK Financial Conduct Authority describes a scenario in which a customer’s AI agent moves spare cash into savings, flags upcoming renewals and switches accounts within the limits the customer sets. McKinsey & Company estimates that $23 trillion sits idle in low-interest checking accounts globally. The bank that puts this money to work will keep the relationship.
4. New omnipresent payment ways
The payment industry is one of the most dynamic areas in the banking sector. Influenced by changing consumer expectations and technological advances, fintech startups will continue to implement all new payment solutions.
Financial institutions will move away from specific products, and instead, introduce payment options for everyday-use products.
The possibility of combining the payments industry with the Internet of things, mobile wallets, cryptocurrency, and blockchain will play a significant role in this process.
Stablecoins and AI agents are the newest additions to this list. Agentic payments and stablecoin adoption were named among the top banking trends of 2026, and in 2027 software agents will pay on behalf of customers within the limits the customer sets. Real-time payments keep growing too. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) alone handles 49% of the world’s real-time payments, according to Backbase.
5. Blockchain
It is no big secret that banks were for a long time wary of cryptocurrencies. However, its underlying technology (blockchain) has earned much more confidence of financial institutions worldwide. No one would be surprised by the fact that banks already use or plan to implement blockchain for their services.
The GENIUS Act, signed in the US on 18 July 2025, created the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. It requires issuers to hold liquid reserves backed 1:1 and keeps tokenized bank deposits outside the stablecoin definition. As a result, banks can issue deposit tokens that pay interest and stay within existing banking rules. JPMorgan’s JPMD, a tokenized deposit available on a public blockchain to institutional clients, is one example. In 2026, the FDIC proposed rules to implement the Act and to clarify the treatment of tokenized deposits.
Moreover, Ripple has already shown the benefits of blockchain use. Some specs have even surpassed those of SWIFT, such as:
- speed of payment processing
- tracing
- scalability
- liquidity.
Swift has since built its own blockchain-based shared ledger. Seventeen banks on six continents prepared live pilots, and on 19 August 2026 HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first live cross-border tokenized deposit transaction on it. The ledger adds one more spec to the list: settlement around the clock, including weekends. Live use among more banks is expected in 2027.
6. AI agents leave the pilot stage
Almost every bank has tested artificial intelligence. Far fewer have taken it into daily work. According to the Institute of International Finance and EY, cited in the Backbase report, only 23% of financial institutions run agentic AI in production. PwC found that 56% of CEOs have seen no revenue or cost benefit from AI yet.
The leaders show what production looks like. DBS runs more than 2,000 models across over 430 use cases, worth about SGD 1 billion in economic value. Commonwealth Bank of Australia measured about A$200 million in AI benefits in fiscal 2026 and expects the figure to double in 2027.
In 2027, boards are expected to stop funding pilots that have no path to production and to ask for proof of return, use case by use case. Banks will also send routine tasks to smaller, specialized models instead of the most expensive one. Gartner estimates that by 2027 organizations will use small task-specific models at least three times more often than general-purpose language models.
Agents will take over the work between the steps, such as preparing a case and gathering evidence, while people make the final decision. JPMorganChase expects its operations headcount to fall about 10% over five years while the business grows by more than 25%.
7. Banking by conversation
Customers are getting used to asking AI for what they need. Next, they will expect to tell their bank what they want done and have it handled, without forms and screen-by-screen journeys.
The first results are in. DBS’s generative AI assistants reach 10 million customers. In the first half of 2026, they resolved 9 in 10 queries fully digitally, calls and emails fell 7%, and satisfaction rose 17%. NatWest’s assistant Cora handled 12.9 million conversations in 2025, and the bank is testing voice-to-voice service.
Voice is expected to become a mainstream way to bank in 2027. Banks will also report resolution rates and satisfaction from AI conversations, and some will let agents move money for customers under standing consent. Third-party AI assistants will connect to bank accounts through open finance. Nearly half of global consumers have already used AI to support their savings and investment decisions, so the question is whether that conversation happens with their bank or outside of it.
8. Governance for AI agents
As banks move from single assistants to teams of agents, rules written in policy documents no longer keep up. Deloitte found that only one in five companies has mature governance for autonomous agents.
Many banks run their agents on a customer’s login or a shared service account. In this case, the bank cannot tell a read-only agent from one that moves money, and cannot switch off one agent without stopping all of them. The first question any auditor will ask is which agent did this.
In 2027, leading banks are expected to give every agent its own identity, with credentials that expire in minutes. They will also check each action against the bank’s rules in real time and keep a formal inventory of every agent they run. Regulators will sharpen their expectations. The first enforcement action over an automated decision that nobody can trace is one of the events to watch.
