AI is becoming a defining force in financial services, changing how banks and fintechs operate, serve customers, and optimize the movement of money. As AI in financial services continues to evolve, putting it to work requires more than adopting new tools. Financial institutions must modernize their infrastructure, rethink how payments and digital assets move across networks, and establish the trust and governance needed as AI agents take on more responsibilities.
These challenges were reflected at Money20/20 USA, where this year’s four content pillars, Borderless Financial Architecture, Technology as the Great Equalizer, Partnerships as the Engine to Scale, and Brave New World: Setting Guardrails, offered a snapshot of the priorities shaping the industry’s next chapter.
From cloud-native transaction banking and onchain finance to agentic commerce, institutions are exploring new ways to deliver financial services. Across these developments, AI is both an enabler of change and a catalyst for rethinking existing business models. Turning that potential into results will require modern technology, stronger partnerships, and responsible governance.
What’s happening in the industry?
The financial services market is poised for robust expansion over the next few years, projected to reach $51.11 trillion by 2030 at a 7.3% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Growth is driven by digital banking, expanding cross-border payments, financial inclusion, and demand for personalized services. Key trends include AI adoption, embedded finance, omnichannel experiences, and stricter regulation.
Here are four takeaways from Money20/20 USA that reveal how these forces are reshaping banking, payments, and digital finance.
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Born in the cloud, built for treasury
A new class of transaction banks is turning its digital-first, cloud-native foundation into a competitive edge over incumbents still tied to legacy platforms, for example such as Goldman Sachs TxB and ClearBank.
Their focus is core treasury services, including domestic and cross-border payments across major rails, with ISO 20022 as the preferred standard. Newer options like stablecoins come second. When entering a new market, these banks partner locally for services such as cash deposits, then decide over time whether to build or keep the partnership between a digital-native bank and a local bank.
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Banks’ Onchain Ambitions Outpace Execution
Onchain refers to financial activities recorded and processed directly on a blockchain, a shared digital ledger, rather than exclusively through traditional banking systems.
For banks, this includes tokenizing assets (such as bonds and deposits), processing payments through blockchain networks, managing digital assets, and automating transactions through smart contracts. Unlike traditional banking, which relies on institutional databases and intermediaries, onchain infrastructure can enable faster settlement, more direct transfers, and 24/7 operations.
At the Summit, Kevin Worth, former CEO of CoinDesk, shared new research from American Banker and Uphold on the challenges banks face in implementing onchain technologies. He shared that while banks have strategies and budgets in place, execution remains a challenge.
Digital wallets and custody are leading priorities, alongside stablecoin rails and tokenized assets, with regional and super-regional banks keeping pace with larger institutions. Turning these priorities into production-ready offerings requires more than technology: banks must address operational risk, compliance, talent and legacy integration to move from pilots to scale. This makes banking modernization a strategic priority for institutions looking to compete in an increasingly digital financial ecosystem.
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Agentic Commerce Won’t Scale Without Trust in Agentic AI
As for moving from traditional ecommerce to agentic commerce, it introduces a different challenge: trust. For agents to participate in payments, the technology and protocols must evolve, and payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard need ways to recognize and support agent-driven transactions. Customers, meanwhile, need confidence in what their agents will do and clear safeguards around the decisions they make.
The success of agentic banking and commerce will depend less on adopting AI and more on earning the trust to let it act on people’s behalf.
From Customer Journeys to Agentic Banking
In conversation with Romina Simonelli, CEO of Nave (Grupo Galicia), she explained that, for banks and fintechs, that means starting with clearly defined processes, using agents to improve customer service, and keeping humans involved as confidence develops.
In payments, scaling agentic commerce will require more than technology: customers need control over what agents can do, payment networks need protocols to support agent-driven transactions, and the industry must address what happens when agents get things wrong. The competitive advantage will go to organizations that understand their customers and build these capabilities responsibly, rather than adopting AI for its own sake.
For Simonelli, the transition to agentic banking starts with understanding business processes, assessing team capabilities, and adopting AI at a pace the organization can sustain. Because experimenting with AI can be costly, organizations should first identify where it can make a meaningful difference before turning existing processes into agentic workflows. At NAVE, this approach is taking shape journey by journey, with customer service emerging as an early application for human-in-the-loop AI: agents are helping teams serve clients while people continue to handle many interactions.
“You need to change mindsets to go into the agentic AI world. We started by selecting specific journeys and changing the way we work on them. Partnering with Globant is changing how we do QA: we’re making it part of the product and tech teams. We’re moving from a world where people did QA by hand to one where AI takes the first pass on the user stories at the beginning and on QA at the end of every piece we put into production.”
Romina Simonelli, CEO, Nave (Grupo Galicia)
Our Approach at Globant
We built AI Pods for Banking and Payments around the challenges facing financial institutions, from reducing technical debt through AI-driven legacy modernization to modernizing payment gateways and enabling access to data, platforms and intelligence. This includes capabilities spanning data migration to data products, as well as the modernization of payment infrastructure supporting domestic and cross-border payments. Our approach is grounded in one promise from AI-native services: Agentic Speed, Human Governance and Enterprise Quality.
Delivered through Glob.AI, Globant’s AI-native services model, AI Pods change how enterprises access, purchase and deploy AI services. The platform provides a single destination to discover and consume the right AI Pod for each enterprise challenge, with instant, self-service deployment. AI agents execute the work while Globant experts supervise and validate the outputs, combining agentic speed with the governance and quality required by financial institutions.
An open partner ecosystem supports this approach, bringing together AI partners such as Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud. Because outcomes matter as much as how they are delivered, each engagement is designed to give technology and procurement decision-makers greater predictability, consistent quality, and the right price.
Ready to build the foundations for AI-native financial services? Explore how Globant’s Financial Services Studio helps banks and fintechs modernize infrastructure, scale AI-powered capabilities, and bring innovation into production with the speed, governance and quality the industry demands.
