Most banks are using AI like a digital air-freshener: to slightly improve products, tweak client support and maybe slow down churn. Meanwhile, the real game has already moved.
Facing ‘fluid’ SMEs who switch easily and aggressive fintechs, most banks are still stuck in defensive mode – polishing apps, matching competitors’ rates a quarter too late, and hoping brand heritage will carry them. It won’t! The uncomfortable shift is this: AI is a magnificent raid tool to attack your competitors’ base!

In late 2025, a telecom entrepreneur pulled off what lenders described as a “breathtaking” fraud — and he did it right under the noses of expert auditors. For years, no one saw it. The lenders only began asking questions in 2025, after things started to smell off. By then, it was too late: lawsuits were already flying, and the cash was gone! Could an AI-Process Have Caught It? Absolutely! — Here’s How

AI-driven agentic commerce—where autonomous agents shop on behalf of customers—is fast breaking the assumptions behind banks’ KYC/ KYB controls. Payment systems built for human-initiated purchases are suddenly blind to who (or should I rather say “what”) is actually pressing “BUY.” The new strategic mandate for Banks and Payment Service Providers is KYA: “Know Your Agent”.

What if the “AI startup vendor” powering your bank’s shiny new product is actually a fragile middleman sitting on a ticking economic time-bomb? Generative AI is hailed as the biggest productivity leap since the internet. Yet beneath the hype lies a hidden vulnerability: most AI startups your business hires may not be building anything new…

Google announced a couple of days ago, the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard that fixes a basic flaw in today’s commerce checkout: systems assume that a human clicks the “BUY” button. Yet AI agents are increasingly doing the deciding!

Marketplaces are quietly becoming lenders and "owning" the loan funnel. This issue discusses how banks could win it back with instant, transparent credit decisions powered by AI — plus offers the rails of a plan to partner at checkout, scale safely, and keep the margin.

Cards. Cash. Local payment schemes. Account-to-Account payments. Digital Euro. Everyone’s still arguing over which rail will dominate payments in Europe by 2030. But here’s the inconvenient truth: None of them will!

Banks and financial institutions face a simple choice:
Treat AI as one more automation tool — or rebuild their entire operating system for speed, compliance, and long-term advantage. In this issue, I outline why AI must be treated as a Strategic Operating System — and how leadership, regulation, and architecture must shift together.