financial services
Financial services firms are under pressure as more investors choose a self-directed approach and shift their money toward emergent fintech disruptors. Discover how financial services firms can evolve to stay competitive, win business, and leverage CX to succeed.
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AI Isn’t Fixing Retail Banking’s Customer Growth Problem — It’s Exacerbating It
Retail banks are moving fast on AI in 2026. Budgets are growing. Roadmaps are packed. Internal momentum is real. Customer loyalty, however, is not. And the disconnect is becoming harder to ignore. AI adoption is accelerating across retail banking, yet differentiation keeps slipping and relationships continue to thin. This isn’t because AI isn’t powerful enough. […]
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Trust, Modernize, Transcend: What I Took Away From Temenos Community Forum 2026
I spent last week in Copenhagen at the Temenos Community Forum (TCF) alongside more than 1,300 banking leaders, technologists, and practitioners. The theme — “Trust. Modernize. Transcend.” — is one banks have heard before. What made TCF different was how consistently Temenos tied that message to live products, execution discipline, and the realities banks face […]
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OpenAI’s Daybreak Promises To Improve AppSec But Introduces A New Pricing Model: Five Buyer-Side Implications For CISOs
OpenAI recently announced Daybreak, its vision for making agentic application security faster and more capable. While promising, Daybreak will also make security more expensive per unit of work. In this model, customers will pay for tokens and multiagent workflows burn tokens. CISOs and CIOs should budget for application security (AppSec) line-item inflation, not deflation, with […]
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How Google Pay Is Using UPI Circle To Reach Young Banking Customers In India
If you’re a retail banking leader in India, your future customer may already be learning how digital money works — and it may not be through your bank. This isn’t a future scenario; it’s happening now. While bank digital teams debate how much control is “too much,” customers have been clear about what they want: […]
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SLED Leaders: Use IT Spend Management To Manage Budget Pressures
What does Forrester’s IT spend management framework mean for state, local, and educational (SLED) tech leaders? I connected with Yessica Jones, a former State of Arkansas CIO who recently joined the Forrester team, on this topic, and it produced some interesting observations: SLED tech leaders are not expecting funding cuts. In fact, in a recent […]
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In The AI Era, Banks Need Dynamic Platforms — Results From The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026
To compete for customers and grow profitably, banks need the ability to adjust as much and as fast as required at any given moment. Leading digital banking engagement platforms (DBEPs) make that possible. My new report, The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026, reveals insights about the current AI and technology landscape in […]
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How AI Is Rearchitecting Lending
Lending Is Reaching An Inflection Point More than 80% of financial services (FS) AI decision‑makers plan to increase investments in both predictive AI and generative AI (genAI), with most firms expecting double‑digit growth. The immediate focus for the majority of FS leaders remains pragmatic: scaling origination, reducing friction caused by handoffs, and improving risk control. […]
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Beyond Chatbots: Designing Conversational Banking Experiences That Scale
Learn how banks can scale conversational experiences at CX Summit EMEA 2026.
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Banks Are Leaving A Billion-Dollar SMB Segment On The Table
Banks believe they understand small business risk. They don’t — what they actually understand is paperwork. Every day, revenue‑generating small businesses are declined, downgraded, or quietly pushed away — not because they are unstable but because they don’t resemble the customers that banking systems were designed to recognize. Each rejection reinforces a costly illusion: that […]
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How CommBank Blends Customer, Digital, And AI Leadership
Cowritten with Janis Teo, senior research associate Five months ago, I published a blog post about banking’s new power role, the chief digital, data, and AI officer, an executive mandate designed not just for a simple consolidation for efficiency but to unify digital, data, and AI around a single strategic vision for growth, decision-making, and […]
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Banks Are Losing Their Place In Small Business Decisions — Here’s How To Reclaim It
Small businesses face more volatility than ever, yet banks are becoming less present at the moments when owners make critical financial choices. This growing gap is why relationship sovereignty in small business banking has become the defining challenge for 2026. Small business owners now rely on the platforms they use every day — accounting, payroll, […]
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Intelligent Finance: From Digital Experiences To AI‑Orchestrated Financial Outcomes
Explore Forrester’s intelligent finance research and learn how financial services leaders can deliver AI‑orchestrated financial outcomes.
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The Consent Deficit: RBI’s Draft Responsible Business Conduct Directions Turn Misselling Into A Proof Problem
India’s misselling problem is no longer being treated as a training lapse or “rogue agent” issue. The Finance Minister has publicly stated that misselling is an offence: not a training failure, not a rogue agent problem — an offence, with institutional accountability attached and welcomed, tighter Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidance. RBI’s responsible business […]
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Unified Financial Crime Management Is Not Just For Small And Regional Banks
Fraud management and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions share common traits and requirements: Both are about risk scoring of entities (names, phone numbers, email addresses, accounts) and routing and investigating alerts and cases to AI agents and human investigators. While smaller, regional financial institutions (FIs) and insurers have always been motivated to consolidate tools and resources […]
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FinovateEurope 2026: From AI Hype To Bank‑Ready Execution
FinovateEurope 2026 marks the shift from AI hype to bank‑ready execution, with agentic AI, fraud intelligence, and governed innovation.
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US Financial Services Tech Spending Hits $495 Billion
Financial services firms are increasing tech spending faster than the market average, signaling a deliberate bet that technology is a strategic lever and not a discretionary cost.
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Forrester’s Digital Success Benchmark — How Leaders Should Use It
Organizations need digital metrics to track the success of their digital strategy. These metrics articulate intended outcomes and provide a yardstick for measuring progress. Many organizations use digital success metrics to compare themselves against their peers, but outperforming — or underperforming — these metrics isn’t the end goal. The real value of benchmarks lies in […]
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Capital One’s Acquisition Of Brex Signals A New Era For B2B Fintech
From Prediction To Reality: B2B Fintech Brex Acquired By Capital One Capital One’s acquisition of BlueTarp Financial in 2019 bolstered its B2B financing and trade credit solutions for business sellers (from the AR perspective). Now, with the acquisition of Brex, Capital One completes a crucial piece for B2B buyers in the AP process. This landmark […]
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DBS Bank’s Billion-Dollar AI Dream — Realized
Around this time two years ago, I published a blog announcing my report, Case Study: DBS Bank’s Billion-Dollar AI Banking Dream. It detailed how this Singaporean bank built and directed its AI capabilities to benefit its customers, business lines, employees, and shareholders. The total economic value the bank had derived that year (i.e., by end […]
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Conversational Banking: The New Gateway To Digital Banking Experiences
Explore how conversational banking is reshaping customer engagement and redefining banks’ strategic priorities.
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