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On 22 April 2026, the IMF published a note titled "How Agentic AI Will Reshape Payments." It outlined a future where autonomous AI agents initiate, route, and reconcile transactions with minimal human oversight. That same week, SWIFT reminded the industry that 65 percent of cross-border payment messages still contain unstructured address data, six months before the November 2026 ISO 20022 deadline that will reject those messages entirely. And buried in the EU Instant Payments

The latest edition of FinanceX Magazine has just landed, and this May we are turning our attention to one of the most consequential corners of financial services: RegTech. Once seen as a back-office cost centre, regulatory technology has quietly become one of the defining battlegrounds of modern finance. Compliance teams are no longer simply reacting to rulebooks. They are embedding controls into processes, surfacing risk in real time, and using AI, automation and shared data

On 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act reaches full enforcement. Every high-risk AI system operating inside a European financial institution, from automated credit scoring to AI-driven customer suitability assessments, will need to demonstrate structured risk management, explainability, and human supervision. Meanwhile, agentic AI, systems that do not just recommend actions but execute them autonomously, is already moving from pilot to production across compliance, fraud detection,

Why staying current inside a financial institution got harder, and what is replacing the formats that used to work. There was a time, not long ago, when staying current inside a bank or an insurer was a fairly orderly exercise. A team would block out a Thursday afternoon, invite three or four vendors, sit through a sequence of decks, ask a few questions, and walk away with a working sense of what was moving in payments, in compliance, in data, or in customer experience. The f

A small format, deliberately composed, doing more of the work of staying current than its size would suggest. A head of innovation at a European bank blocks an hour on a Tuesday afternoon. The theme she has chosen is agentic compliance. Three innovators selected for relevance to that theme, plus two peers from non-competing institutions in two other markets, join the call. The conversation is structured but unhurried. Sixty minutes later she has a working view of where the te

The era of grow-now-profit-later is over. Here is what replaces it. Something quietly shifted in fintech over the past eighteen months. Global investment rebounded to $116 billion across 4,719 deals in 2025, up from $95.5 billion the year before. On the surface, that looks like recovery. But dig into the numbers from KPMG 's Pulse of Fintech report and a different picture emerges: deal volume dropped to its lowest annual level since 2017. More money is chasing fewer companies

Most fintech “European expansion” plans sound like a map problem: add a flag in London, a flag in Frankfurt, a flag in Paris. But Europe is not a map problem. It’s a credibility problem. One reason this is getting harder (not easier): Europe’s payments landscape is moving toward bigger, more interoperable networks that are already trusted locally. In February 2026, the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and several major national wallet schemes signed an MoU that claimed a c

You’re Not Losing Deals Because Your Product Is Weak Most fintech founders and commercial leads assume that if their pipeline is thin, the product needs fixing or the pitch needs refining. That assumption is usually wrong. The more common problem is simpler and harder to fix with a slide deck: the right people at financial institutions have never heard of you. In a market where consolidation is accelerating, where banks are under regulatory pressure to scrutinise their partne

Something unusual is happening in European banking. Two forces are converging at the same time, and neither is optional. On one side, PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation are heading toward publication in the Official Journal of the European Union in the first half of 2026, with compliance deadlines following 18 months later. On the other side, agentic AI, autonomous systems that approve loans, flag compliance risks, and reconcile transactions without human input, is mo

Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026. We are now living in that prediction. Over half of American consumers now use AI tools like ChatGPT for financial research instead of Google . For fintech companies that spent years optimising for search rankings, the ground has shifted beneath them, and most have not noticed yet. This is not a gradual evolution. It is a structural reset. And the fintechs that fail to adapt their visibility stra

The demo was great. The partnership still died. Banks and insurers don't lack access to fintech innovation. They have too much of it. Every week, a corporate venture team gets 30 inbound decks. A business line asks for “AI in underwriting.” An innovation lab runs a pilot. A procurement team flags supplier risk. A risk committee asks for audit rights. And somewhere between the demo and the contract, the project quietly stalls. In industry circles, this is often described as “p

The fintech hiring market has flipped. EC1 Partners ' 2026 hiring digest puts it bluntly: the market now rewards "precision over headcount." Investors and boards want executional maturity, not org-chart growth. And yet, when a fintech scaleup decides it needs pipeline, the reflex is still the same - post a job ad for a Head of Sales, wait three months to fill it, and hope the new hire figures out the market before the runway burns down. That reflex is expensive. In fintech B2