Author: Gayathri

What Is KYC in Digital Banking Today? Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process banks use to verify a customer’s identity, understand their risk profile, and comply with anti–money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) rules. In a branch-first world, that meant paper forms, photocopied IDs, and many face-to-face judgment calls. In digital banking, the entire KYC process has shifted to mobile and web. Customers expect to open an account, upload documents, and pass identity checks from their phones in minutes, not days. KYC is no longer a back-office control; it’s a visible part of the onboarding journey that customers…

The New Collateral: Turning ESG Data into Financial Leverage In the evolving landscape of sustainable banking, 2026 marks a radical shift. The conversation has moved beyond green bonds and sustainability-linked loans, toward a future where ESG data itself becomes collateral. For decades, collateral meant tangible assets: property, inventory, or equipment. But as climate risk becomes synonymous with financial risk, banks are exploring how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics can directly influence lending terms, credit exposure, and asset valuation. The result? A new era of climate-linked finance, where your sustainability performance could quite literally back your loan. Why ESG-Linked Collateral…

Legacy, rules-based monitoring is like using a rear-view mirror to drive a Formula 1 car. Financial crime moves in milliseconds; most controls still react in days. AI-powered transaction monitoring gives fintechs real-time visibility into risk, without grinding customer experience to a halt or endlessly adding headcount. What Is AI-Powered Transaction Monitoring in Fintech? Transaction monitoring is the backbone of fraud and anti–money laundering (AML) controls. It tracks customer activity across payments, transfers, and accounts to spot suspicious behavior that might indicate fraud, money laundering, or sanctions breaches. Traditionally, this monitoring has been rules-based: flag everything over a fixed amount, block…

Why “Trust” Has Become the Weakest Link in Financial Security For decades, banks and financial institutions relied on the idea that once you were inside the system, you were safe. But in today’s digital-first, API-driven ecosystem, where a transaction crosses cloud services, open-banking APIs, and third-party vendors in milliseconds, trust is not protection. The financial sector’s evolving threat landscape demands a shift from “trust but verify” to “never trust, always verify.” This is the essence of Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), a model that treats every device, identity, and transaction as potentially compromised until proven otherwise. What began as a cybersecurity…

The New Reality of Platform Banking Picture this: a regional bank that once prided itself on agility and innovation now finds itself squeezed between mega-platforms with deeper pockets and stronger compliance capabilities. In just a few years, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has gone from a fragmented field of fintech hopefuls to a market defined by scale, regulation, and survival. What began as a movement to “open up” banking has now become a race to consolidate it. The question dominating boardrooms in 2025 isn’t whether BaaS will endure; it’s who will endure within BaaS. What Exactly Is BaaS Consolidation? At its core, Banking-as-a-Service…

The Consolidation Moment in Financial Crime Tech Walk into any large bank’s financial-crime operations center today and you’ll likely find fewer screens, fewer systems, and fewer vendor logos than you did five years ago. Where once AML, fraud, sanctions, and customer due diligence functions ran on separate technologies, the walls are now lined with unified dashboards, powered by integrated platforms that merge detection, case management, and analytics. This shift isn’t accidental. It’s the result of an accelerating consolidation trend within the financial-crime technology ecosystem, a trend reshaping how banks fight financial crime, manage regulatory risk, and allocate compliance budgets. In…

The Evolution of Risk: From Reactive to Continuous The fintech and banking world in 2025 is living through a fundamental transformation. Digital ecosystems have grown more complex, driven by hybrid-cloud infrastructures, open-banking APIs, and AI-enabled operations. At the same time, cyber threats have become faster, more adaptive, and more expensive. Regulators are responding in kind; Europe’s DORA, the U.S. SEC’s cyber-disclosure rule, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s TRM guidelines all now demand continuous assurance rather than static compliance. This new reality has made continuous IT risk management more than a best practice; it’s now a survival skill. At the…

When Suspicion Lives in the Links Picture a global bank investigator staring at a mountain of AML alerts, thousands of transactions flagged, dozens of shell companies, several jurisdictions, and not a single obvious “smoking gun.” All the rules-based thresholds did their job, yet the laundering structure, funds hopping through intermediaries, disguised ownership chains, and multi-hop layering, remain hidden. This is the precise moment when network analytics powered by Graph AI enters the scene: surfacing the relationships that rule-based systems miss. The industry is quietly undergoing a structural pivot, from transaction-centric AML to network-centric AML. What Is Network Analytics & Graph…

When Money Moves Faster Than Risk Can Blink Imagine a treasury team in Singapore receiving funds from a European buyer in seconds, with the transaction instantly hedged, settled, and paid out to suppliers through an API-driven platform. No waiting, no batch windows, no reconciliation delay. Now zoom out: every data element in that transaction, payer identity, account details, purpose code, is exchanged via open APIs, shared across banking, fintech, and compliance ecosystems. This is real-time payments meeting open finance, an intersection that promises new business models and introduces new regulatory headaches. The world’s banks are racing to connect instant payment…

When the Assistant Starts Advising Imagine this: your mobile banking app doesn’t just reply when you ask for your balance, it acts. It reviews your spending habits, rebalances your portfolio, reminds you of an upcoming bill, and suggests a product that improves your yield. All without a prompt. That’s the next frontier in banking, the move from generative assistants that chat to autonomous advisory engines that think and act. In 2023–2024, most banks were racing to launch GPT-like copilots. In 2025, the smart ones are re-architecting for agentic AI, systems that do, not just talk. The real question for every…