Three trends to shape banking and financial services in 2026

Cassandra Goh, Group CEO, Silverlake shares three trends that she feels will shape the banking and financial services sector in the year ahead.

Compared to other sectors that are adopting emerging technologies, the banking and financial services sector needs to take a more cautious approach in their journey due to regulatory requirements.

The banking and financial services industry is one of the fastest sectors to adopt emerging technologies. This is because the industry needs to cope with the increasing demand from customers for better and faster services.

While ensuring regulatory compliance is imperative to the industries’ digital journey, banks and financial services are focused on how they can apply AI to enhance products and services to customers. This includes investing to modernize legacy banking infrastructures to cater to growing digital demands by customers.

In Southeast Asia, Silverlake has been providing solutions to local and regional banks, ensuring compliance and a 100% project implementation success rate. Enabling is the many vendors Silverlake has partnered in the region to cater to banks and financial services critical needs in their digital journey.

According to Cassandra Goh, Group CEO, Silverlake, the financial services industry stands at an inflection point as 2026 approaches. She believes that the conversation has moved beyond digital transformation to cognitive banking with financial institutions now focused on applying AI and automation to sharpen decision-making and deliver more meaningful value to customers.

Given this scenario, Goh shares three trends that she feels will shape the banking and financial services sector in the year ahead.

First, Goh predicts that AI will be more than just a tool next year and be more of a business partner. Goh believes that AI should be applied from the core of financial institutions, supporting decision-making across credit assessment, fraud detection, and operational efficiency from the core since that’s where the center of the deep banking knowledge resides.

“Rather than isolated use cases, we will see AI embedded in workflows, acting as a trusted co-pilot for relationship managers, risk teams, and customer service operations. Success will depend on having an intelligent platform to work with data foundations to ensure seamless workflows, processes, transparency and accountability with human oversight,” she said.

The next trend will see the shift to intelligence banking accelerate. As banks are moving beyond basic digitization toward AI-enabled, real-time decisioning across credit, fraud, risk, and customer engagement, what used to take days will happen in seconds.

“This will redefine operational efficiency and customer expectations. Core platforms will need to be ready to support streaming data, embedded AI models, and instant processing which is why our latest hybrid and cloud-native architectures will become non-negotiable,” she added.

The third trend will see smarter automation in the back office. Goh highlighted that automation would evolve from task-level optimization to intelligent orchestration. This means financial institutions will use AI-driven workflows to reduce reconciliation time, simplify reporting, and strengthen compliance oversight. As such, in 2026, the focus will shift from cost reduction to accuracy, scalability, and freeing human talent for higher-value work.

“In the year ahead, technology will not just support financial services but define its competitive edge. The banks that invest strategically in intelligence, trust, and resilience today will set the benchmark for the industry’s next phase of growth,” she concluded.