Holly Sraeel

Digital finance strategies are still too often organized around products and rails rather than customer behavior and intent. This session explores how fraud, payments, identity, and digital assets are converging—and why banks must shift toward customer-centric architectures and intelligence models to compete, protect trust, and manage risk in real time.

Between 2026 and 2030, banking will be re-architected at its core. Artificial intelligence will move from decision support to autonomous execution. Financial activity will increasingly occur on-chain. Banking services will be embedded into non-bank platforms. Cyber risk and fraud will redefine digital trust. And regulation will be rewritten for a world of real-time, programmable finance.

This super-panel brings together executive leaders to examine the five forces that will define competitive advantage over the next five years—and to debate what incumbents must change now to remain relevant. The discussion will focus not on experimentation, but on strategic choices, operating model shifts, and leadership decisions that will shape the future of banking, including a deep dive into the following:

• Agentic AI becomes core banking infrastructure.
• On-chain finance moves from edge case to systemic relevance.
• Open finance becomes embedded finance.
• Digital trust, cybersecurity, and fraud converge.
• Regulation rewrites the rules of innovation.

In 2026, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has evolved into a roughly $30 billion market defined by “invisible banking,” where financial services function as modular “bricks” embedded in every digital journey. This panel explores the next frontier of BaaS, focusing on the shift toward open finance, the rise of autonomous agentic money, and the integration of stablecoin rails for real-time settlements. Industry leaders will discuss how leveraging cloud-native cores and agentic AI allows firms to move beyond legacy constraints to deliver a hyper-personalized, 24/7 financial ecosystem.

With tokenized deposits, stablecoins and on-chain settlement gaining momentum, bank executives must recognize that these developments represent a foundational shift in the industry and decide where best they can play a crucial role in the on-chain ecosystem. Panelists will discuss where on-chain finance creates real strategic advantage, how it integrates with existing balance sheets and regulatory frameworks that are changing, and what banks should—and should not—be investing in now.

The hardest challenge in business banking isn’t serving small businesses OR enterprise clients—it’s serving both on the same platform without compromise. A local coffee shop needs payroll and point-of-sale. A multinational needs letters of credit and supply chain finance. Building digital banking that scales across this spectrum requires platforms that are simultaneously simple enough for a sole proprietor and sophisticated enough for treasury teams. This panel examines how major banks architect products and capabilities that work for businesses of all sizes, the technical decisions that enable scale without fragmentation, and why “comprehensive” beats “specialized” in competitive business banking.

Cross-border payments have been banking’s most profitable inefficiency—generating billions for banks precisely because they’re slow, expensive, and opaque: taking days, costing 6-7% in fees, with zero customer visibility. That’s ending. Real-time networks are connecting across countries, stablecoins are bypassing traditional banking, and new standards are forcing transparency. Banks moving $150 trillion annually face fintechs offering instant settlement at a fraction of the cost. Yet compliance remains complex at real-time speeds. This session examines how instant cross-border payments work, where stablecoins fit, how to maintain compliance at settlement speed, and whether traditional correspondent banking survives.

Operating at the intersection of traditional banking and digital innovation, Gill Haus oversees a $7 billion annual technology budget and 12,000+ technologists serving nearly 87 million consumers and 7.5 million small businesses. In this conversation, Haus discusses technology transformation at scale, from modernizing legacy systems and accelerating cloud migration to deploying AI across the organization. Drawing from experience at both digital-native companies and established financial institutions, he explores what it takes to build technology infrastructure that moves at the speed customers demand.

As innovation accelerates, economic uncertainty grows and the regulatory environment seems fluid, this super-panel discussion with high-profile executives from across the digital finance landscape, including banks and financial institutions, fintechs, venture capitalists, and management consultants, takes the audience through five or so critical themes that will drive the future of digital finance over the next five years and the implications for players industry-wide. Themes to be explored include the dramatic rise of account-to-account (A2A) payments, social commerce and payments, the institutionalization of generative and agentic artificial intelligence, the mainstreaming of stablecoin payments and on-chain finance, the emergence of new models for Banking-as-a-Service and Payments-as-Service, and the impact of cyber risks on identity verification, privacy and compliance are among the top-of-mind trends.

Perhaps nowhere is artificial intelligence more vital to digital banking than in identifying risks and ensuring compliance with regulations, while also increasing operational efficiency and futureproofing against known and unknown risks. If financial institutions want to develop a modern-day playbook for AI-driven compliance and risk management, then learn from these experts and practitioners on how to develop an integrated approach that will ensure a compliance framework that meets banks’ needs in a complex regulatory environment with greater efficiency.

The tidal wave of fintech innovation that is transforming financial services shows no signs of retreating, as open banking, emerging technologies and customer expectations continue to evolve the industry at an accelerated pace. Bank-fintech partnerships have been instrumental in shaping the future of global digital finance, delivering seamless, mobile-first solutions, but operational risks and regulatory compliance must be managed and met by models that foster collaboration and ensure safety and soundness. Industry participants and experts weigh in on how these innovation-based partnerships are expanding access to banking services, optimizing the customer experience, speeding product development, and increasing operational efficiency—all with an eye on establishing a framework for bank-fintech partnership that manages risks and compliance without compromising innovation.

Payroll and workforce management providers are embedding instant wage access and virtual wallets into their platforms to give employers the ability to provide employees with greater options as to when and how they get paid. Yet these embedded solutions suggest another emerging trend: That employees could soon also have access to more affordable consumer bank products and financial tax and health benefits through their employers’ payroll and workforce management platforms, particularly as younger workers look to “unbank” themselves.

The urgency of personalization and customer experience over the next five years is being driven by customers that are demanding products and services tailored—in real time—to their individual needs and smoother, frictionless experiences across platforms and channels. The ability of banks to deliver on both will drive customer acquisition and growth. Artificial intelligence is playing a central role in banks’ ability to use data-driven insights to capitalize on the hyper-personalization of financial services, including predictive engagement for real-time CX. Yet the vast opportunities must be balanced with operational commitment and execution on privacy, trust and compliance concerns.

Why Digital-First Wealth Platforms and Banks See a Hybrid Model as a Wealth Generator for All

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its final rule under Dodd-Frank’s Section 1033, the world of open banking and finance was set to change in unprecedented ways, not least of which is banks’ ability to innovate faster and remain agile by “co-creating” value-added products and services developed by fintechs, while still remaining compliant with requirements to protect the consumer data that is accessed and shared. An expert panel discusses the monetization and innovation potentials of APIs-as-a-Service to fintechs and the emergence of open API marketplaces, advantages of proactive compliance, third-party risk management, the need for data architecture upgrades to handle real-time access and sharing, and monitoring systems to track data access and security.