Artificial Intelligence

Tech Trends 2026: How Technology Will Impact Financial Services This Year

Artificial intelligence will drive innovation for banks, credit unions and investment companies, but they mustn’t lose sight of cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and customer experience.

Adam Stone

Adam Stone writes on technology trends from Annapolis, Md., with a focus on government IT, military and first-responder technologies.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing financial services. For banks, insurers and others, this has big implications. It will impact compliance and data management, customer service and cloud modernization. Here are four key trends to keep on the radar.

AI Integration: Balancing Personalization With Compliance

Financial institutions are poised to embed AI into both customer-facing processes and compliance workflows. They’ll need to meet stringent regulatory requirements as they look to enable hyper-personalized experiences.

On the plus side, AI promises to improve the customer experience — without adding human labor on the part of financial institutions. Even as AI drives personalized interactions, however, “all of the institutions need to prove compliance with existing regulations,” says Jerry Silva, program vice president for IDC Financial Insights.

That will be particularly true as agentic AI comes to the fore. With AI not merely answering questions but taking action on behalf of customers, organizations will need their AI “to be auditable and explainable, so that you can prove to the auditors that the AI model is not only compliant to the regulations but is also not biased in any way,” he says.

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Digital Sovereignty and Cloud Modernization

Banks need to balance global operations with regional compliance, especially as data privacy and cross-border regulations tighten. Sovereign-ready cloud solutions ensure compliance across jurisdictions while enabling global scalability, and many are headed in that direction.

As customer data moves to the cloud, Silva says, banks must worry not only about security but sovereignty: Some nations, for example, won’t allow financial data in the public cloud. “It varies by country, it varies by local region,” he says.

Cloud providers are stepping up with solutions, including sovereign-ready clouds that offer financial institutions global reach while ensuring their data is handled in ways that comply with the relevant national and regional requirements.

WATCH: How 2026 cloud trends can make your organization more agile and efficient.

Embedded Finance and API Ecosystems

With Banking as a Service (BaaS) and application programming interface-first models, organizations have the opportunity to integrate lending, insurance and payments into nonfinancial platforms, such as retail and healthcare apps. This opens the door to new revenue streams and customer touchpoints, but it demands robust governance and interoperability.

This is happening already. “Uber offers its drivers a deposit account and a debit card. As far as the driver is concerned, Uber is the bank, although it’s not really: There’s a bank behind Uber doing all of this,” Silva says. Buy now, pay later offerings operate in the same way.

There’s an opportunity here for financial services. “Banks can provide financial services to non-financial services organizations” and potentially build new revenue streams on their existing infrastructure, he says. But it’s not for everyone: “Some banks won’t do it because they think that they have a differentiating product or service, a differentiated brand, that means more than the revenue.”

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Cybersecurity and AI Risk Management

With AI agents increasingly mediating B2B transactions and automating workflows, there’s rising risk. Financial firms will need to prioritize AI security platforms and zero-trust architectures in order to mitigate threats and avoid costly compliance failures.

“As much as we can benefit from the use of AI, so can the bad actors,” Silva says. “What are these AI agents talking to each other about? Is there fraud being committed between these agents? That’s a scary prospect for any security expert.”

The safeguard here lies in robust governance. In the most proactive financial organizations, “they are looking at it from an enterprise perspective,” he says. “They’ve got executives from every part of the institution, from the lines of business to the IT groups, the chief risk officer and the CISO. Even the CFO and legal are there.”

In the coming year, successful organizations will have “a framework that every AI project has to adhere to,” Silva says. “They can control every aspect, including how they measure success in any particular project.”

EXPLORE: How will artificial intelligence impact cybersecurity in 2026?

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