Sound familiar?

Your customers now choose financial providers like items from a menu, selecting specialized services rather than committing to a single institution. This fragmentation reflects a fundamental shift in banking, driven by two converging forces: the largest wealth transfer in history and the uncompromising demand for tailored services and products.

Trust me when I say, I don’t want the complexity of multiple banks and apps. But if I can’t get what I need, I will find it elsewhere.

The $124 trillion opportunity banks can’t afford to miss

Right now, $124 trillion is beginning to shift from older generations to younger ones. This transfer will happen over just 23 years, not in some distant future. For banks, this isn’t just money changing accounts. This represents a fundamental transformation in how wealth flows across generations and accounts.

Look at the warning signs. According to the Williams Group, 90% of family wealth disappears by the third generation. Most heirs feel unprepared. Only 22% of parents inform their children about inheritance plans before age 25. This knowledge gap creates vulnerability and opportunity.

Your younger customers invest differently. They prioritize impact investing, ESG considerations, and philanthropy. Two-thirds of customers under 40 allocate 70% of their investments to ESG opportunities. They demand different tools, different approaches, and different conversations about money.

Your customers won’t wait

Remember when waiting 2-3 days to move some money around was acceptable? Now, even 2-3 hours feels like an eternity. And given the market volatility we’ve seen lately, even a few hours can mean the difference between a good financial choice and a bad one.

The Financial Conduct Authority discovered that 66% of younger investors spend less than 24 hours deciding on investments. A shocking 14% make these decisions in under an hour. This isn’t just impatience. This is a new operational reality.

Your customers expect to move funds instantly between checking, savings, investment accounts, and retirement funds. They want to monitor positions across distributed accounts. They need the ability to move money at precisely the right moment to seize opportunities in increasingly volatile markets.

And they want to do so with ease. Ironically enough, this is also a key desire for wealth advisors serving these customers: less context switching, more customer focus. A case in point is during significant life events.

Gartner research showed that approximately 50% of younger generations prefer to visit an agent at a bank branch or speak to someone on the phone for major events compared to digital-only channels. The demand for blended experiences that combine digital speed with human expertise has never been higher.

Financial wellbeing starts with knowing your customer

With 48% of consumers feeling financially worse off than last year, your institution has a profound opportunity to deliver meaningful value through holistic wellbeing services.

But here’s the hard truth. Only 40% of financial services companies are confident their customer profiles are both complete and accurate. With today’s technological capabilities, how can there be such a wide gap? Without foundational data, personalized guidance becomes impossible.

Think about what your customers actually experience. Most have fragmented financial identities spread across multiple institutions. They receive disconnected advice based on partial information. They struggle to make confident decisions amid complexity and uncertainty.

Even if your customers are loyal and stick with your bank, the likelihood that your customer data is complete is low. The rise of Open Banking and Open Finance initiatives promises to solve this problem, but most institutions still struggle to align strategy and execution.

What customers truly want is reassurance from trusted experts who see their complete financial picture and can provide guidance based on that holistic view.

Three imperatives for surviving the great wealth transfer

To thrive in this new landscape, focus on three practical initiatives.

Connect everything

Create an ecosystem that bridges all endpoints, from modern APIs to legacy systems and third-party providers. In the Open Banking era, the banks seeing 30% higher customer satisfaction are those enabling seamless data sharing across institutional boundaries.

Your customer doesn’t care about your technical debt. They care about complete financial visibility that enables better decision-making and customer experiences. Process orchestration turns fragmented systems into cohesive customer journeys.

Apply the right level of governance

As AI-driven advisory services expand, establish governance that maintains trust without sacrificing speed. Financial institutions that operationalize AI in one central platform reduce compliance risks while accelerating service delivery.

This isn’t just about risk mitigation. It’s about turning regulatory requirements into competitive advantages through consistent, auditable processes.

Stay agile

The financial landscape changes constantly. Implement operations that enable continuous adaptation to changing market conditions. Banks that build standardized, reusable process components launch new products with 45% less effort.

Your technology must evolve as rapidly as customer needs, with modular components that can be reconfigured without disrupting existing services.

Finding the human balance

The ultimate challenge isn’t technological. It’s human.

Your customers need proper guardrails alongside instantaneous advisory services. They need the freedom to move quickly alongside the wisdom to think long-term. They need digital convenience alongside human expertise.

The most successful institutions will recognize that customers increasingly choose specific providers for specific purposes. They’ll open their ecosystems to gather information across institutional—and even industry—boundaries, creating complete customer profiles that enable truly holistic advice.

Your success won’t come from simply moving money faster or cheaper.

It will come from orchestrating processes that help customers make better financial decisions in real time, transforming the greatest wealth transfer in history into the greatest opportunity for financial wellbeing we’ve ever seen.

For more on this topic, you can watch Sathya Sethuraman, field CTO at Camunda, and Shane Ernest, senior product marketing manager at Camunda, discussing the issue in the video below.

This article is the third in our Financial Services Reflection Series, examining how 2025’s banking predictions are playing out in reality. Read Sathya Sethuraman’s original “2025 Banking & Financial Services Predictions” and explore our solutions for building adaptable banking operations.

The post Money in Motion: A $124 Trillion Moment of Truth appeared first on Camunda.

They can execute complex scams in minutes using AI. And with real-time payments, they can wire money across different accounts using synthetic identities. Meanwhile, legitimate cross-border transfers can still take weeks at certain institutions. This gap represents both a challenge and an opportunity for banks ready to transform their approach to commercial services.

In a recent webinar, Enrico Camerinelli, strategic advisor at Datos Insights, and Sathya Sethuraman, field CTO for banking and financial services at Camunda, explored how process orchestration and automation enables banks to bridge this divide and generate more value for commercial banking clients.

What commercial clients really want

As Camerinelli explains in the webinar, Datos Insights research reveals that nearly 90% of corporate treasurers consider it essential to run banking operations directly from their enterprise systems. This seamless integration creates significant orchestration challenges spanning technology, processes, and people. Not just for the bank itself, but also for commercial clients.

“Corporate users want to control inbound and outbound transactions directly from their enterprise system,” explains Camerinelli. “But this integration creates potential break points that require thoughtful orchestration of applications on both the enterprise and banking sides.” Half of corporate treasurers cited issues with integration, multiple screens, and a high dependence on Excel or external systems.

Without effective orchestration, this integration challenge creates risk. When Datos Insights asked why corporate treasurers partner with fintech firms instead of traditional banks, they cited better functionality (48%), more payment options (46%), better integration with internal systems (43%), and access to real-time payments (41%).

These proof points show the growing risk posed to incumbent banks that are slow to respond to their clients’ needs. If commercial clients don’t get what they need, they’ll pursue other options without thinking about loyalty or long-standing relationships.

Why API catalogs alone fail to deliver value

Many banks have responded to integration demands by building extensive API catalogs, but this approach creates new problems rather than solutions.

“The more API catalogs banks create, the more they risk widening the divide from corporate users,” notes Camerinelli. “These APIs exist, but corporate clients struggle to use them efficiently or build ROI from them.”

According to Datos Insights data, the challenges are multithreaded. The biggest hurdle is the underlying process and operational changes are difficult to manage, with over 50% citing this obstacle. Cost (45%) and IT dependence (41%) issues were cited next, which is expected given the complexity of a modern enterprise.

Without a strategic framework in place, banks can often find their APIs and technology stacks grow out of control. As teams can often work in silos, they risk building the same integration multiple times. The lack of reuse and increased duplication isn’t just bad for productivity. It increases maintenance costs and adds to the risk of complexity, which ultimately increases the total cost of ownership. 

Instead, banks need to think differently. They need to think beyond APIs and offer customers what they want.

Focusing on API calls is missing the point

When discussing open banking, conversations should fixate on the end users. However, research shows that corporate clients have a matrix of important capabilities. They prioritize liquidity, convenience, security, and of course, yield. But each of these elements carry different weights.

“Corporate treasurers want yield, but not at the cost of missing other priorities like sufficient liquidity, safety, and ease of use,” explains Camerinelli. “No treasurer will lose their job for missing a few extra basis points, but they certainly will if they compromise liquidity or security.”

Sethuraman adds that properly orchestrated open banking actually enhances security while delivering on these other priorities: “By opening your APIs strategically, you can embed your services into corporate ERPs. This delivers the functionality and capabilities they demand.”

Orchestrating and scaling AI capabilities in banking

Process orchestration creates the critical framework for effectively applying artificial intelligence across banking operations. This represents a shift from isolated AI applications to a cohesive approach for embedding capabilities spanning deterministic and non-deterministic processes. 

Yet in banking, there needs to be a balance of both. Mission-critical processes need to function as designed. Every time. Otherwise, there’s a risk of disruption, regulatory action, or brand impact.

Agentic AI opportunities are still plentiful in the industry that’s practically led the revolution. Having the ability to blend both gives banks the freedom to apply the right technology at the right time instead of being limited.

Orchestration allows banks to speed up deploying new models or capabilities. It prevents AI hallucination risks while creating a governance framework that helps banks accelerate innovation without compromising safety.

For example, one bank monitoring for synthetic identity fraud implemented an agentic approach that allowed their fraud team to identify repetitive patterns in certain document types without disrupting their existing processes. They could test these patterns with real data, refine their models, and gradually deploy improvements. 

By essentially A/B testing fraud models, the bank was able to reduce false positives while simultaneously improving the detection of bad actors. Something impossible with traditional, static approaches.

Building incrementally while maintaining vision

One of the most powerful advantages of process orchestration is enabling incremental modernization within a coherent strategic framework. Rather than waiting years for comprehensive implementations, banks can deliver value continuously from the start.

Sethuraman described how one multinational bank evolved from a narrow payment system implementation in one country to a 70-plus country platform vision through orchestration. Without process orchestration, they would have faced an impossible choice: wait years for a complete solution or implement disconnected point solutions.

“Process orchestration provides the flexibility to start small but think big,” he explained. “The bank didn’t wait five years to deliver value. They incrementally built their platform while maintaining a consistent vision.”

This approach requires business and IT collaboration to map the true vision, identify customer requirements, and build, buy, and blend what’s needed to achieve strategic goals. Process landscapes allow business stakeholders to create standardized process hierarchies and catalogs that IT can implement incrementally, preventing both analysis paralysis and technology sprawl.

When another audience member asked if orchestration just adds more complexity to overlapping systems, Camerinelli clarified: “Orchestration isn’t just connecting fragmented pieces. It ensures processes are properly reviewed and revised first. You’re not just automating existing problems. You’re resolving them within a coherent framework.”

The path forward

As open banking transforms commercial relationships, process orchestration provides the critical link between everything and enables rapid innovation.

When implemented thoughtfully, you can:

• Create secure connections to client systems with appropriate permissions
• Deliver enhanced functionality that meets rising expectations
• Apply AI intelligently to improve experiences while reducing costs
• Build incrementally toward a comprehensive, bank-wide transformation that reduces the total cost of ownership and enables faster scaling

Process orchestration transforms open banking from a checkbox exercise into a growth opportunity. It balances innovation with practical security measures that protect you and your clients while delivering the capabilities commercial clients actually value.

Ready to learn how process orchestration helps banks grow revenue with open banking? Watch the complete conversation between industry experts Enrico Camarinelli and Sathya Sethuraman to discover practical strategies for balancing innovation with security in open banking. 

The post How to Grow Commercial Revenue with Open Banking appeared first on Camunda.

The potential for tariff-driven increases in technology costs, particularly for advanced chips essential to AI and cloud infrastructure, adds another layer of complexity and uncertainty. As these components become more expensive, banks must be smarter about building and deploying technology to drive measurable benefits.

The efficiencies gained through AI and automation may be partially offset by rising infrastructure costs, making architectural decisions even more critical for future-proofing innovation programs.

Global realities reshape banking

The global economic landscape is fragmenting in ways that demand fundamental changes to bank operations. In the US, persistent inflation, wavering consumer confidence, and policy volatility have created market uncertainty, with the S&P down significantly from its February peak.

The “yo-yo tariffs”—on-again, off-again trade policies that recently imposed 25% tariffs on crucial technology components like chips—have intensified this commercial instability and potentially slowed GDP growth worldwide. Meanwhile, Europe and APAC are experiencing increased market confidence due to inflation tapering and stable employment conditions.

This economic divergence is driving a regulatory divergence. The US is shifting toward deregulation in certain areas (notably consumer protection), while Europe maintains and, in some cases, strengthens its regulatory frameworks. As a result of overall volatility in the US, capital flows are following, with some of the largest institutional investors redirecting funds from US investments toward non-US ETFs.

For global banks and financial services enterprises, fragmentation of process, technology infrastructure, and compliance disparity increase operational complexity:

• Settlement timelines are desynchronizing: The US has implemented T+1 settlement, while Europe won’t adopt T+1 until 2027. Additionally, NASDAQ is exploring a 24/7 trading cycle on its exchange. This, in addition to the global investment movement, is bound to lead to more operating costs in trade settlements.
• Regulatory requirements are diverging: Customer data protection rules, in particular, are creating significant operating model challenges regardless of the rigor of enforcement mechanisms. While privacy and control are top concerns for data protection, we expect the cost of managing cross-border customer data to escalate.
• Cross-border service delivery is becoming more complex: Even fundamental activities like ESG reporting now face conflicting requirements across jurisdictions. Higher operating costs will be attributed, a result of increasing complexity in everything from creating customer awareness for cross-border rules to managing accurate asset attribution to reporting.

From hub-and-spoke to regional models

Perhaps the most profound shift is occurring within bank operating models. Maintaining the traditional approach of regional front offices with global shared services for back-office functions is becoming increasingly difficult.

Previously, banks operated with something like a hub-and-spoke model. Regional differences were more in the front office and middle office, and when you converge, the shared services operations are in the back office.

With regulatory divergence between regions (T+1 settlement in the US vs. T+2 in Europe; relaxed rules in some areas vs. stricter oversight in others), the traditional scale advantages of globally centralized operations are diminishing. Banks must now build multiple, different federated environments to manage their operational needs.

Functions that were once centralized for efficiency must now be reconfigured to accommodate regional requirements while still delivering consistent customer experiences.

Adaptable foundations for a fragmented world

With the traditional operating models coming under increased stress, three critical capabilities emerge:

1. AI-powered regional scale

With traditional scale advantages diminishing, banks must leverage AI and automation to create “regional scale”—efficient operations that respect jurisdictional boundaries. The only way to build scale now without reducing margins is through AI.

This means developing region-specific AI agents that can handle processes like regulatory filings—for example, a system of AI agents only for US or EU regulatory compliance. However, there needs to be trust and guardrails before firms commit to leaving humans out of the loop.

2. Composable business and technology architecture

Banks need to replicate successful capabilities across regions while adapting them to local requirements. This demands modular processes and application infrastructures that can be assembled and reassembled for different jurisdictions.

Composability also requires scalability, as the growing volume of transactions will likely only increase as AI continues accelerating.

3. Orchestration as a fabric

Perhaps most critically, banks need sophisticated capabilities that can distinguish between deterministic processes (for example, those mandated by regulation or internal policies) and nondeterministic processes (highly dynamic). This orchestration layer becomes the connective tissue that enables adaptability while maintaining control, oversight, and most important, auditability of decisions and actions.

Adaptiveness at the core

The implications for banking leaders are clear. The age of global operational standardization is giving way to a more complex reality where local requirements drive differentiation, yet consistent customer experiences remain essential.

Success requires adaptiveness and composability to build scale without adding extra overhead and costs. This isn’t simply about technology. The change requires fundamentally rethinking organizational structures, process designs, and governance models.

Banks that recognize this shift early and build the capabilities to thrive in this “open economy, closed borders” world will gain significant competitive advantages. Those who cling to rigid global models risk being unable to adapt quickly enough to regional changes, potentially losing both market share and regulatory compliance.

The transformation won’t be easy, but the direction is clear: banking’s future belongs to those building adaptable, intelligent operations that respect regional boundaries, while delivering seamless customer experiences across a still-interconnected global economy.

For more on this topic, you can watch Sathya Sethuraman, Field CTO at Camunda, and Shane Ernest, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Camunda, discussing the issue in the video below.

The post Open Economy, Closed Borders appeared first on Camunda.

Anyone who watched the markets in early 2025 when DeepSeek—a relatively unknown player in the AI space—announced they had built something remarkable. They’ve built an AI model that could match the capabilities of tech giants who had spent billions—but at a fraction of the cost. The announcement wiped 3% off the Nasdaq in a single day, and removed $600m in value from Nvidia alone. Before the ripples could settle, Alibaba claimed their models could outperform DeepSeek’s, sending fresh waves through the market.

The LLM shakeup, coupled with the recent announcement of 25% tariffs on advanced chips, exemplifies the challenges banks face in 2025. How do you maintain resilience and customer focus when technology and market dynamics shift dramatically overnight?

Three pressures reshaping banking priorities

Banks are grappling with three interconnected pressure points reshaping their operational landscape. 

First, customer expectations continue to evolve beyond traditional personalization. Today’s clients demand products that align not just with their life stage but with their precise moment in life—all while banks face mounting pressure to optimize efficiency and manage costs as rate cuts look slow or entirely unlikely. With the headwinds of slow rate cuts in the US and continued inflation, balancing these two priorities will be a challenge that requires new approaches.

Second, we’re witnessing a significant divergence in regulatory approaches to operational resilience. While Europe implements increasingly structured oversight through initiatives like the EU’s AI Act, the United States’ new administration is moving toward a model of self-governance. This regulatory bifurcation creates unique challenges for global institutions that must maintain operational consistency across different jurisdictions.

Third, the technology infrastructure landscape is becoming more complex and costly. The introduction of 25% tariffs on crucial components like chips affects everything from AI deployment costs to Cloud infrastructure expenses, eroding efficiency gains that banks were counting on from their AI investments.

Building a resilient and adaptable foundation

The path forward requires a balanced approach to operational transformation. The answer lies in developing what might be called a “customer-cost-centric transformation” approach. This isn’t just about balancing customer experience with efficiency—it’s about fundamentally reimagining how banks deliver value in an AI-driven world.

A recent incident at a major bank illustrates the challenges. An executive assistant used an internal AI copilot to summarize confidential board discussions. Yet they only realized later that the summary would be accessible to all employees—including interns. 

This near-miss with potential insider trading exposure underscores a crucial point with the rapid pace of AI deployments. Responsible AI implementation requires sophisticated governance frameworks that balance capability with control. Focusing too much on either side will ultimately lead to an equal or greater risk to organizations.

The path forward: Three strategic imperatives

Create a cohesive, open ecosystem

The evolution from open banking to open finance, and now to a future of an “open economy,” requires a more sophisticated approach than basic connectivity. Banks must have an ecosystem mindset and create a platform approach to handle the complexity and increasing scale. They also need to be flexible and composable enough to respect increasingly distinct regional boundaries while enabling collaboration and iterative innovation. 

This means building a platform that enables the reusability of infrastructure and tech investments while operating differently in various jurisdictions. For example, supporting specific API and data sharing policies in regions like Europe while enabling more controlled data exchange in others. 

The goal isn’t universal openness but a strategic platform approach that helps banks grow and delight customers while improving costs to serve them.

Blend deterministic and non-deterministic processes 

Many firms are stuck “planting 1000 flowers” of AI experiments trying to find what brings the most value. Banks must clearly differentiate between operations that require consistent, deterministic outcomes and those where AI can provide valuable supplementary support. This distinction helps optimize investments while maintaining appropriate control over AI deployments and how they operate.

The flexibility to blend agentic AI with deterministic flows enables firms to increase their overall automation rate and free capacity so employees can work on higher-value—and ultimately—more human-centric activities. Simply put, you can model the portion of your process that requires predictability and control. Then let AI agents handle work that is more dynamic in nature.

Build enterprise-scale deployment models

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in banking operations, governance frameworks must evolve beyond basic risk management to comprehensive operational controls. This includes everything from data access protocols to model deployment strategies and ethical considerations.

Additionally, they need the flexibility to swap out models with ones that offer new value, whether that’s lower cost or improvements in accuracy or speed. Balancing these opposing forces will be a continuous challenge, reinforcing the need for adaptability and composability.

Looking ahead

The successful banks of tomorrow will be those that can build technology platforms capable of absorbing market shocks while keeping the business moving forward. While technology is an important ingredient, it demands a fundamental rethinking of operational excellence and business resilience

As we progress through 2025, banks need to focus on developing flexible, agile process platforms—systems and processes that can evolve without compromising stability or compliance. This means investing in infrastructure that supports both current needs and future possibilities while maintaining the right balance of governance and freedom to innovate.

The challenge isn’t predicting every potential market disruption. That’s nearly impossible (even if we were three for three in this episode!). It’s building a technology foundation that can adapt to unexpected changes while delivering value today and sustainably into the future. 

For banks that get this right, the reward will be the ability to turn future tsunamis into surfable waves, maintaining operational excellence even as the storms rage on.

Want to see how these trends are playing out against the original predictions? Read Financial Services Industry Outlook & Guidance for 2025 for a deeper look at Sathya’s predictions for what will shape the industry in the coming year.

Explore Camunda for Banking and Financial Services to learn more about how leading banks are building resilient platforms to operationalize AI and iterative innovation.

The post When a Pebble Creates a Tsunami: Banking’s New Reality in 2025 appeared first on Camunda.

As financial institutions update their infrastructure to support growing customer demands for “real-time everything,” they should map out an approach to achieve compliance with current standards. These institutions also need to create a foundation that allows them to adapt to new and changing market and regulatory requirements.

Current Open Banking initiatives need to have an eye on the future

Current Open Banking regulations center on secure data sharing, as customer data is the fuel that powers new, collaborative consumer offerings. In response, to comply with regulators and compete in the market, major banks are updating their enterprise systems to improve how customer data is collected, authenticated, stored, and shared. IT teams are also building catalogs of APIs that enable third parties to connect with and use a bank’s customer data, and special portals that allow third-party developers to access these APIs.

These advances bring new challenges. New financial services, such as embedded finance products and real-time payments, introduce more complexity into banking operations. As a result, IT staff now have the additional tasks of building, maintaining, and governing an institution’s ever-growing catalog of Open Banking APIs.

As banks  move forward with re-architecting their systems for Open Banking, they will be continually challenged to modernize system capabilities in response to more regulations and emerging technology. For example, in 2026, the European Union’s Payment Services Directive 3 (PSD3) is expected to come into force. It will include new rules to improve fraud protection and customer rights. It will also increase competition and consumer choice by allowing non-bank payment service providers access to payment systems.

These and future directives have the potential to completely change the way consumers pay for goods and services and could upend conventional banking and payment processes. In some cases, banks may need to show compliance with new regulations within as little as 18 months of enactment. Timelines will challenge leaders who are already managing multiple, parallel digitization and modernization projects geared toward operational efficiencies and customer experiences.

That’s why, instead of solving for each new directive and regulation as it comes online, forward-looking leaders are thinking about how to transform operations beyond ticking the boxes for compliance. They’re preparing for the future with a strategic approach to banking innovation that will help them remain competitive in the market and is centered on a resilient platform.

Prioritize these five core capabilities for strategic transformation

IT leaders committed to modernizing enterprise systems and supporting the next generation of Open Banking should think holistically about how best to capitalize on regulatory changes, in order to improve enterprise agility and scalability and expand opportunities in the marketplace. They should extend their vision from building application tools to designing adaptable, collaborative ecosystems that make it easier to co-create secure, digital solutions that provide better, value-added benefits to consumers. APIs, microservices, and cloud-based solutions will continue to be essential components of this ecosystem.

We recommend IT leaders make a holistic assessment of their enterprise operations and prioritize ways to improve competitive resilience in the following five areas.

Collaboration

In the Open Banking era, adaptability to new customer demands will require internal teams, service providers, and third-party partners to strategically collaborate on and deploy new products and services as quickly and efficiently as possible—a difficult task. Often, business logic is hidden in code, trapped in legacy systems, or is undocumented “tribal knowledge.”

The lack of visibility prevents alignment between IT and business teams and can slow time to market. IT leaders will need tools that bring end-to-end visibility and alignment to complex processes so fusion teams can quickly understand, maintain, and optimize them.

Action item

Support alignment across internal and external teams with common visual models using a standards-based notation such as BPMN and DMN. This one model approach is used across industries and easy to adopt. It allows stakeholders to build visual representations of complex processes, illustrating every interaction in the journey. It also simplifies the versioning, maintenance, optimization, and reusability of the foundational process models to preserve your intellectual property to ensure business continuity regardless of talent turnover.

This approach also supports stronger CI/CD integration, giving teams the ability to improve existing experiences and get new products to market faster without interrupting the rhythm of business.

Open design

As the term Open Banking suggests, openness is key. That means ensuring flexibility to integrate with any people, systems, or devices to maximize resources and use best-in-class solutions and partnerships to advantage. IT leaders will need to ramp up the transformation of legacy, point, and monolithic technologies to open systems that support partnerships, provide end-to-end process visibility, and help teams deliver faster.

Action item

Continue to revamp the enterprise architecture to phase out legacy systems and siloed solutions and replace them with flexible technology that is language-agnostic. This helps development teams reduce efforts by using their preferred tooling, APIs, and Connectors to build solutions that connect the people, systems, and devices that power mission-critical operations.

Composability 

In this next era of Open Banking, banks will need the capability to anticipate and rapidly respond to dynamic customer demands with differentiated services. The ability to build and reuse process components in multiple ways can help banks increase speed to market and lower development costs. This is especially helpful for banks that support multiple processes (e.g., consumer, commercial) and operate in multiple regions (e.g., the US, EU, and UK).

Action item

Use a process orchestration and automation platform like Camunda to build process components once and reuse them in multiple processes to reduce efforts and speed up deployment cycles. With process orchestration as a foundational layer in the tech stack, banks can maximize existing resources and customize any workflow to fit specific needs. Process orchestration unlocks value from existing IT investments and helps banks use composable capabilities to quickly respond to changing market and regulatory requirements.

Intelligence

As AI and automation rapidly advance, banks need the ability to leverage vast amounts of financial data and analytics with integrated intelligence to deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize banking operations. Banks also need to provide regulators with transparency in their operations, especially as AI comes under greater scrutiny globally.

Action item

Include a tool in the enterprise tech stack that can orchestrate and rapidly deploy AI services and machine learning models across mission-critical business processes from end to end. It should provide visibility into how machine learning and AI are applied and provide an airtight audit trail of every action and decision for every process.

This visibility also allows banks to use AI-based analytics to uncover opportunities to continuously improve and transform banking workflows.

Scalability and resilience

With annual growth from Open Banking projected at 20% or more over the next decade, banks can stay competitive by simplifying their complex technology ecosystems to improve agility, streamline operations, and execute any process at scale. This is veryimportant for banks running processes that must comply with multiple regional standards and data differences across implementations. And, of course, high availability, security, and resilience to support digital operations is paramount.

Action item

Adopt a cloud-based workflow engine that supports an event-based architecture for low latency processes such as payments and long-running processes such as disputes or claims that can take months to complete. Ensure the engine is flexible to deploy in cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments to support experimentation with new business models and processes without limitations.

Opportunities in Open Banking are accelerating—are you tech-ready?

Open Banking is reinventing the banking industry. In response, banks must rethink their business models and enterprise systems to support the new reality. Those that do will be competitive players in a new era of banking with a value creation opportunity estimated up to $20 trillion.

Success will require new, strategic thinking, new business models, and agile go-to-market capabilities. The banks that will win in the next era of Open Banking will develop a strategic approach to delivering seamless, personalized experiences through advanced analytical decision-making, open and composable systems, robust process orchestration, and automation. Monolithic, legacy tech will be more of a blocker than ever, which is why institutions with an eye toward the future are doing the hard work now to revise enterprise architectures for agility, security, collaboration, and speed.

Today’s APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, cloud platforms, and user-friendly development tools are a start. They will help accelerate innovation, as will a growing offering of AI-based tools and services.

But to lead in the next era, banks will need a holistic view and roadmap for breaking down their operational silos and connecting and orchestrating the tools, tasks, processes, workflows, data, AI, and people needed to deliver differentiated, market-leading customer experiences over the long term.

Learn more

Lead the Open Banking revolution by delivering differentiated products and experiences with greater control and speed at enterprise scale. Camunda’s open, standards-based platform bridges business, IT, and third-party providers to collaboratively build unique, high-performance processes for the products and services that customers demand.

Whether orchestrating real-time cross-border payment workflows, offering white-labeled services to a new brand, or expanding into underserved markets, Camunda provides a foundation for customer-first innovation.

The post Next-Era Open Banking: Think Beyond the Basics to Lead the Industry appeared first on Camunda.

Two important factors are contributing to this evolution: a shift in mindset by banking leaders that data is a collaborative resource instead of a guarded secret; and the ongoing modernization of enterprise systems from monolithic platforms to cloud-native, composable architectures. Both present challenges for enterprise architects working to create more open, interconnected systems. Process orchestration can help manage these challenges and transform core banking systems for the Open Banking era.

IT leaders should prioritize these capabilities to future-proof operations for the Open Banking era

For enterprise architects, Open Banking is about balancing innovation with compliance and operational efficiency. That’s not easy to do when faced with a complex web of emerging technology alongside underlying IT architecture that may still be running critical components on legacy systems, including mainframe.

These systems were not built to interact with modern APIs or Open Banking frameworks, making integration difficult. They also may lack robust authentication, monitoring, and security mechanisms necessary for secure data sharing, as well as real-time processing capabilities.

And modern systems present their own challenges with siloed processes, hidden business logic, and varying data schemas that prevent integration. In short, banks have a lot of work to do to transform their architectures and capitalize on Open Banking opportunities. It’s more complicated than just offering new APIs.

To simplify the complexity inherent in the core banking processes and establish a future-ready framework for Open Banking, we recommend tech leaders start by prioritizing the following capabilities:

Of course, the next step to achieving success in Open Banking is being able to coordinate all of these capabilities into a seamless, strategic workflow. Process orchestration is the best tool for this task.

Process orchestration helps transform Open Banking capabilities into strategic products and services 

Process orchestration is an essential tool for integrating, automating, and optimizing processes as part of Open Banking initiatives. It empowers seamless integration and automation of multiple application components from end to end and brings visibility into those processes from start to finish—which is crucial in the banking industry for operational transparency, auditing, and compliance.

The transparency enabled by process orchestration also encourages new ideas through collaborative development. For banking technology leaders, it can create an opportunity to collaborate with business leaders to reimagine financial services, break down existing limitations, and create more inclusive, efficient, and customer-centric financial experiences through the strategic use of technology.

For example, consider the following potential use cases for process orchestration in Open Banking:

• Operationalizing AI: Every firm wants to get ahead of the trend but often struggles to deploy AI solutions and prove their value. Process orchestration can help speed up experimentation so you can iterate faster and unlock the value of emerging technology in ways that help you stand out. As an open platform, you can deploy new AI-infused processes faster because it fits within your existing software development lifecycle, can integrate any technology—whether homegrown or third party—and works with any programming language and deployment model.
• Smarter lending: Faster credit risk assessment is possible by using real-time access to transaction and account data. Process orchestration integrates workflows across banks, third-party providers, and credit agencies to aggregate multiple data sources and determine creditworthiness in real time. Orchestration coordinates the end-to-end journey from application submission through verification, underwriting, and payment, reducing manual effort and accelerating decision-making. As a result, consumers have faster access to tailored loan options and banks can better convey trust and security in the process.
• Optimizing payments: Real-time payments are a growing trend globally. Process orchestration coordinates the end-to-end flow from initiation through settlement. This involves reliable and secure integration between banks, third-party providers, and payment networks. Orchestration enables real-time data exchange and seamless payment processing. It also manages error handling, transaction tracking, and reconciliation with full visibility. By streamlining these processes through orchestration, banks can better leverage payment data to improve other areas of the business like financial crime.
• Mitigating financial crime: Orchestration enables you to take a multi-vendor strategy by weaving together a variety of technologies—such as homegrown fraud models and third-party fraud detection platforms—as part of your end-to-end due diligence workflows. Banks then have more freedom to move from periodic to perpetual monitoring to help mitigate financial crime and improve risk posture. It helps analyze, identify, and stop bad actors early and provides rich data for faster investigations by securely aggregating data from various sources.  
• Personalized financial products: Process orchestration automates and streamlines workflows that analyze customer data and match individuals with tailored financial solutions for insurance, loans, and investments based on transaction history. It integrates data from multiple accounts via secure APIs, ensuring compliance with Open Banking regulations, and manages tasks like customer profiling, creditworthiness assessment, and product recommendations in real time. By enabling seamless data exchange, process orchestration helps financial institutions respond to individual needs, which improves customer satisfaction and drives better financial outcomes.

These are just a few of the potential use cases for process orchestration in Open Banking. In such a rapidly evolving banking and technology ecosystem, however, the potential could be limitless.

Success in Open Banking will require IT to lead the way with agility and innovation

Open Banking products and services have the potential to generate new revenue through more innovative, customer-centric experiences. However, to realize that potential, IT leaders will need to champion programs to rapidly modernize legacy systems, enhance data security, and adapt to increased operational complexity.

The key competitive advantage in the next banking era lies in creating composable banking frameworks that can seamlessly orchestrate and automate processes from end to end with unparalleled control and transparency. IT leaders will be challenged to lead initiatives to overcome their bank’s complex technology ecosystems and legacy limitations, plus align internal and external teams to future-proof operations and continuously adapt.

Financial institutions that achieve the most success will be led by those who leverage tools like process orchestration to deliver differentiated products and experiences with greater control and speed at enterprise scale.

Learn how Camunda can help your institution scale innovation in banking and financial services. Schedule a custom demo today.

The post It’s Time to Future-Proof Your Open Banking Infrastructure with Scalable Process Orchestration and Automation appeared first on Camunda.

Traditional banks see Open Banking as an opportunity to collaborate to grow market share, improve customer loyalty, and create new revenue streams. But to achieve those goals, the C-suite and other executives need help breaking down the operational silos that prevent innovation, growth, and successful programs.

Industry experts like Deloitte suggest that “any financial services firm wishing to participate successfully in this new environment will need to go through a radical review of its long-term strategy, as well as its technological and operational capabilities.”

Complexity and misalignment are holding banks back

Years of digital upgrades have created a tangled technological landscape that siloed core banking operations. What began as well-intentioned efforts to modernize legacy systems resulted in a complex network of legacy, bespoke, and modern systems that trap data in silos and don’t communicate effectively with each other. This technological maze makes it difficult for banks to beagile in a volatile market.

Even after decades of digital transformation upgrades, many banks still struggle to unify customer account data and coordinate processes from end to end within their own systems, let alone a third party. Banks eager to expand into Open Banking need to untangle their digital knots and reimagine how technology can truly support—rather than complicate—their business goals.

Complicating things further is the misalignment between business and IT teams. Getting everyone on the same page within such a complicated and interconnected tech ecosystem slows banks down and can even result in rolling out the wrong features to customers. According to a recent study of 800 IT and business decision-makers, 82% say miscommunication between teams leads to the wrong thing being built. Process orchestration can help simplify system complexity, improve collaboration between business and IT teams, and unlock the right Open Banking opportunities.

Unite strategy and execution with process orchestration

Process orchestration is designed to coordinate diverse technologies and tie together your most critical—and often complex—business processes. It plays a pivotal role in connecting, automating, and optimizing Open Banking workflows because it can orchestrate moving parts from end-to-end across disparate systems, people, and third parties.

As digital demands increase, having a scalable and flexible platform as your foundation will be crucial to achieving your transformation goals. It will enable you to turn strategic vision into operational reality while being able to maximize the investments you’ve made in technology and teams.

Banks are using process orchestration to drive key Open Banking capabilities, including:

• Strategic partnerships and differentiation: Process orchestration helps to bring together the diverse financial ecosystem. By securely connecting and opening up your core banking systems to third parties, you can forge profitable new partnerships with fintech and non-financial firms that help expand your market share and add new revenue streams.
• Operational excellence and resilience: High-quality, timely data fuels Open Banking and other innovation initiatives. Process orchestration helps ensure accurate, real-time data sharing across platforms with complete visibility from end to end. Not only does this improve risk management and compliance oversight, it also helps you find areas for optimization—whether for cost reductions or to improve customer satisfaction scores. Ultimately, you’re able to create and ship new products and deliver better experiences for your customers and the employees who serve them.
• Future readiness and agility: Process orchestration provides a platform for agility required by any forward-looking bank. The inherent composability enables you to reuse and modify process components to improve standardization and speed up deployment cycles. Whether you’re expanding into new markets, taking advantage of new technology, or launching new value-added services for your customers, the platform ensures you can move faster with lower risks.

Most important, process orchestration provides a foundation for the flexibility required to navigate a dynamic global market where customer demands, emerging technology, and regulatory requirements are constantly shifting. Ultimately, it helps banks unite their strategic vision with their technical reality so they can get the most value from their investments and deliver unique, differentiated services and products faster.

BNY is an example of a long-established bank that uses process orchestration and automation to enable Open Banking capabilities. For example, their client-facing SaaS data platform (Data Vault) gives clients the ability to access data and analytics from a multi-tenant, public, cloud-based application. The platform is designed to ingest structured and unstructured data from multiple sources such as vendors, clients, order management systems, and accounting platforms by streaming, sharing, or batch processing and then transform it. A data virtualization layer allows clients to query across multiple data stores. The Data Vault platform uses a microservices architecture to securely expose different services with which clients can build an application or feature. Process orchestration is the capability that makes it possible for BNY to coordinate and automate all of the platform’s services for multiple, simultaneous users.

Future-proofing Open Banking ecosystems with process orchestration and automation

As banks undertake more Open Banking initiatives, they will face increased demands, new compliance standards, and expanding partner ecosystems. Process orchestration can help banks adapt to these changes by fostering agility and resilience. That’s why CIOs and CTOs consider process orchestration a critical investment to stay competitive in the Open Banking era and why they are choosing Camunda’s universal platform for process orchestration and automation as the orchestration and automation layer in their Open Banking frameworks.

Camunda is designed to integrate and scale to meet business and performance needs. The open, standards-based platform bridges business, IT, and third-party providers to collaboratively build unique, tailored experiences that customers demand. Its composability enables teams to design once and reuse process models, decision tables, Connectors, and other components in multiple ways. These capabilities help banks speed time-to-value and innovate without compromising on quality or control.

Building a connected, customer-centric future in Open Banking

The next era of banking will be defined by Open Banking. As Deloitte experts see it, “There is little doubt that markets believe that Open Banking, closely followed by a broader cross-industry data sharing ecosystem, is the way forward.”

Traditional banks can compete with fintechs and neobanks in this new era if they can modernize and transform their internal systems to be engines for growth. Banks that succeed will not be defined by their traditional assets but by their ability to rapidly adapt, integrate, and innovate. They will be the ones that build agile, interconnected financial ecosystems that can pivot instantly to changing market demands and customer expectations.

Learn how Camunda can help your institution scale innovation in banking and financial services. Schedule a custom demo today.

The post Building the Connected Bank: Why Collaboration and Orchestration are Key to Succeeding with Open Banking appeared first on Camunda.

Here’s my latest thinking on the dynamics to plan for in 2025 and what you can do to stay ahead of change.

Untamed inflation

In the major developed and developing economies, inflation could continue trending upward if populism and protectionism drive the policies, leading to increased labor costs, tariffs, and fiscal policy expansion.

Slower rate cuts

Slower-than-expected rate cuts keep borrowing interest rates high, which, in turn, creates credit availability constraints. These limitations act as business growth barriers and create personal financial vulnerabilities for the economy.

Regulatory shifts

Many governments are moving towards global regulations and local deregulation. Relaxing national business regulations while rolling out stifling regulations on international businesses is a major risk. This policy approach creates complexities in managing customer information security and difficulties in achieving the benefits of scaled adoption of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Above broader social, economic, and geopolitical shifts will shape the following industry-specific trends, implications, and pressures on the Financial Services industry at large. As always, the winners will proactively respond by prioritizing their investments in the right capabilities that will deliver strategic results efficiently and effectively.  

Key Trends & Pressures

Personalized products and service to customers everywhere

Customers demand ready-to-access, personalized banking and financial services products that are relevant to their situational needs. This results in continued momentum and expansion of products and channels such as mobile-only, digital-first, embedded, and as-a-service offerings. The industry is expected to invest more in capabilities such as core systems modernization, expanding omni-channel experiences, pre-integrated partnership ecosystem, 360-degree customer views, real-time analytics, and robo-advisory for personalized and embedded product offerings.

The rise of AI-powered Super Apps is emerging to provide personalized financial products, on-demand, to customers through a unified platform. According to Gartner, over 50% of the world’s population will use multiple super apps by 2027, while Statista reports 66% of users in Australia, Germany, the UK, and the US favor super apps for convenience, 61% for security benefits, and 54% for better coordination between services.

Smarter, safer money movement 

Customers need their money to be moved instantaneously, safely, and at lower costs when they receive or make payments. Initial pushback by Banks to regulatory Open Banking mandates is waning as customer preference is pressuring them to deliver unique and personalized experiences. Real-time payments through open banking are becoming the norm. The rollout of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) and the adoption of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) by Banks and payment carriers will continue to increase. Currently, 150 CBDC trials taking place worldwide, with payment values via CBDCs are expected to reach $213 billion a year by 2030, up from just $100 million in 2023.

Strengthening of operational resilience against risks

Basel 3 and 3.1 regulations in the UK and EU continue to evolve and will move from solvency monitoring and reporting to board governance and accountability. Global regulators and controllers across the world are rolling out regulations and directives (DORA, Operational Resilience, Sec. 1033, FiDA, etc.) to address operational threats and disruptions in the areas of digital, Shadow IT, third-party services, personal data privacy (GDPR, CCPA), Cyber Security and AI. In a significant market structure shift, the SEC’s new Treasury Repo clearing mandate requires clearing of eligible Treasury securities transactions through qualified clearing agencies. Covered clearing agencies (CCAs) must implement enhanced practices, including risk management, margin, and customer asset protection. By December 31, 2025, direct participants of Covered Clearing Agencies must clear eligible cash secondary market transactions.

Additionally, cross-border and real-time payment directives are becoming more stringent, exemplified by the Open Banking (US) and Authorized Push Payment Fraud (UK) initiatives. While the new administration in the US might water down the regulations’ commitment, the industry still needs to continue its regulatory compliance investments to reduce costs and mitigate risk.

Securing Innovation and Managing Disruption in AI/ML

The considerable leap in Generative AI (Gen AI) technology is shuffling leaders and laggards in the race to improve accuracy while reducing costs for the initiatives. Finally, what started as a Gen AI fad has developed into a plethora of opportunities with practical applications ranging from front-office agents and middle-office document extraction models, to back-office risk assessment models in KYC & AML domains.  

However, advancements in AI also bring increased threats such as fraud and financial crime by using synthetic data and realistic deep-fakes. The financial services industry must outsmart the bad actors with continuous training and deployment of cybersecurity and forensic models to build resilience from disruptions. Emerging technology also provides both opportunity and disruption in terms of future skills that are required in technology discovery, development, testing, implementation, and maintenance from program coding to prompt engineering,  

Investment Priorities Outlook

During the last two years of conservative spending in the high-yield regime, the financial services industry has focused primarily on run-the-business initiatives while also testing the waters in incremental modernization through automation technologies and small-scale AI adoption.

The major shifts above and the learning from the incremental modernization create opportunities for the industry to accelerate its investments in customer-centric transformation and innovation with a focus in the following areas:

Customer-Centric transformation 

To win loyal customers today and in the future requires personalization that goes beyond digital channels – it demands building a platform that takes a 360-degree customer view to anticipate their changing needs. Investment will increase in unified technology stacks that combine customer intelligence, real-time analytics, intentional partner ecosystems, and AI-powered cognitive capabilities that deliver personalized experiences everywhere.

Omni-channel experiences mandate breaking silos and building well-integrated customer journeys by connecting digital, branch, and contact centers seamlessly together. These investments enable context-driven financial products through traditional and emerging channels such as super apps and embedded finance offerings. Hyperpersonalization can be made possible by investing in customer intelligence and agentic capabilities to support the personal bankers and wealth managers complimenting low-touch Robo advisory services.

Future-ready payment infrastructure

Banks that have already started investing in payment capabilities, starting as cost-centers for compliance, are only accelerating their investment in real-time capabilities to expand and retain customers. Providing well-secured and real-time open banking and open finance APIs, instant payments, cross-border payments, and multi-rail capabilities are at the top of the investment. The multi-threaded approach opens up the end points to increase transactional volume for better monetization and greater insights from payment data.

Industry tested the use of digital currencies, digital ledgers, and decentralized finance last year and found it can be deployed at scale with security while saving cost. Central Banks are also jumping into the fray, as they see investment in Digital Assets and money will continue to increase multi-fold. The open and real-time payment ecosystem has also created a mandate to invest in cybersecurity intelligence capabilities to protect the customer against fraud, whether through regulators or self-managed.  

Fully integrated risk and resilience

Rather than looking at operational resilience as a cost, leading institutions are investing to turn regulatory compliance into a competitive advantage. While some countries may water down their regulatory mandates, investment focusing on digital operations will continue to reduce costs and risks. Institutions are investing in building intelligent monitoring, reporting, and remediation to recover from business disruptions. Additionally, there’s a keen focus on managing third-party risks, catastrophic crises, security incidents, cyber breaches, and natural disasters to ensure business continuity. As the world becomes more interconnected, the various threat vectors and sophistication will only increase as emerging technologies become more accessible and affordable.  

Enterprise foundation to effectively operationalize AI

The years of test-and-learn are over. Now that financial services enterprises have found where the real value for AI/ML–including Gen AI–can be pinpointed, industry leaders are planning to accelerate investments in purpose-driven AI.

Due to hype, changes in the technology landscape, and high borrowing costs in the past year, true innovation budgets were allocated to run-the-business innovation. Now institutions are moving beyond experimentation with clarity towards change-the-business innovation that will pay dividends. Key areas of investments are co-pilot in IT automation, intelligent document processing, customer insights from non-traditional data (a.k.a. bigger data), using AI against threats from AI, and automating deterministic processes that can bring measurable cost savings from efficiency to support the growth.

Practical guidance to win

As mentioned in the beginning, higher inflation and yield will continue to exert cost pressure on the investments in the above strategic programs. The win ratio in large-scale transformation programs is abysmal: 30%.

The top three reasons are the gap in communication from vision to execution, the lack of measurable performance indicators, and business-IT priority conflicts. Consistent winners have delivered successful programs with measurable benefits by applying the following approaches for strategic planning and execution.

Critical success factors would be:

Creating balanced scorecards

Capturing both business and technology metrics ensures the program outcomes align with the executive-level vision, and makes it easier to translate them into the program-level objectives and outcomes. This also helps in setting expectations on the intended outcome and time to value so that each iteration of incremental value towards the strategic value is clearly realized by the leadership chain.

For example, rolling out a web-based customer onboarding process for personal lending as a standalone initiative using point-to-point automation can appear more affordable at first. However, building this way will lead to multiple siloed, disconnected journeys. While a quick initial win, the approach doesn’t fit the business vision to build multi-product and channel journeys to expand its market share. This ultimately leads to higher IT costs in the long term and lowers customer conversions. Instead, organizations should evaluate comprehensive metrics at IT costs for customer acquisition revenue to guide platform capabilities and investments in a more holistic and future-proof way.

Ensuring tight collaboration between Business and IT teams

Aligning strategy and execution is key not just at the start of an initiative, but extends throughout the entire program lifecycle. This requires defining clear standards for the business to capture comprehensive requirements, working with enterprise architects to convert them into modular designs, handing technology teams clear guidance for delivery, and signing off from the business before rolling it out to customers. Providing end-to-end visibility of the process using open standards helps simplify the lifecycle and protects IP from talent turnover. Moreover, it alleviates the change management risks and smooths the adoption of the new capabilities at scale.

Ensuring business and IT collaboration also warrants implementing role-based process visibility to iteratively optimize the journeys and processes that the transformation program supports. This will, in turn, lead to better customer and employee experiences, which are becoming table stakes for loyalty. In the personal lending process example, business and IT collaboration can help identify opportunities for improving straight-through processing by continuously monitoring and optimizing the decision management capability based on the risk appetite without disrupting existing business in the pipeline.

Building for enterprise scale

Modern transformation programs require a composable, modular architecture that maximizes reusability and avoids functional redundancy and tech obsolescence – two hallmarks of increasingly rapid change of emerging technology. Reimagining the processes and capabilities as Lego blocks will help to construct the deterministic processes and decisions, while remaining flexible to incorporate custom capabilities such as AI-driven risk models to improve accuracy.

This approach maximizes use across domains and lines of business. In the personal lending example, other lines of business, such as auto lending, are able to leverage and customize the proven core lending processes to their needs without impacting existing workflows. They’re ultimately able to roll out their transformation program faster, accelerate, reduce risk of change, and lower costs. Designing the process and platform as Lego blocks will help each lending team to develop and deploy their own risk-based underwriting models using AI / ML, trained on bigger, non-traditional datasets while being able to test and implement new products with clear explainability and control.  

I am looking forward to collaborating with the industry cohort to continue scaling innovation and pushing the win rate of the transformation programs up in 2025. In 2026, I hope to report back on the outcome of these programs and their impact on customer experience, cost optimization, growth, and operational resilience.

Learn more

Visit our website to learn more about how Camunda can help you scale innovation in banking and financial services today.

References

1. World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
2. World Economic Outlook (WEO)
3. Top 10 Trends For Banking In 2025 – The Future Is Back – Forbes
4. Banking: The future is back | Trends shaping the industry in 2025 and beyond – Accenture
5. Top retail banking trends 2025 – Capgemini
6. Retail Banking 2025 and Beyond – pwc
7. 2025 Financial Services regulatory priorities
8. Top 10: Fintech Predictions for 2025
9. Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short

The post Financial Services Industry Outlook & Guidance for 2025 appeared first on Camunda.

Consumers know this story too well and are taking their wallets elsewhere. According to Rivel Banking Research’s 2023 Q3 data, 32% of retail banking customers nationwide are now open to switching their primary bank. Major pains that are driving customers to consider a move include high fees, poor rates on their deposits and loans, an antiquated digital experience, and the institution failing to support their financial well-being.

Banking and financial services are constantly evolving to mitigate the customer exodus by investing in new technology. FinTechs and disruptive concepts such as embedded banking, embedded finance, and banking-as-a-service are emerging as digital-first competitors to traditional banks. Most importantly, constant scrutiny and compliance frameworks from regulatory bodies around the world are also mounting pressure on banking and financial service enterprises to increase speed, security, and transparency while reducing costs.

All these pressures make adapting mission-critical processes more difficult due to their scale and the complexity of the business and technology they rely on. Yet they all seem to come into force at such a steady pace that it can feel like there’s no end in sight. Even the smallest regulatory change can trigger extensive, end-to-end updates from customer interactions to middle-office decision making—not just in back-office reporting.

Other times, the sheer complexity and scope of changes require a near-complete overhaul of the technologies, processes, and change management for the people impacted. Add together aging legacy systems, a growing zoo of technology, and a tight talent market and firms face an uphill battle to stay ahead of change.

Build the right solution, at the right time

Even with a clear vision of jobs-to-be-done, aligning business and IT teams is a challenge. The business and product teams know the desired outcome and experience. However, IT teams understand what’s truly feasible given the scope of changes in their technology landscape required to achieve the organization’s goals.

Take the example of the mandate by SEC to T+1 settlements. This process is incredibly complex and often hidden behind legacy code, various homegrown or third-party systems, and a mix of internal and external parties involved. The entire end-to-end process is complex and opaque. Pinpointing those bottlenecks and breakpoints is tough as so many processes rely on a collection of siloed automations. This isolated approach ultimately reduces a company’s ability to drive greater value from the technology and can even negatively impact customer experiences because point automation is brittle and prone to failure.

The disconnect between IT and business can be a challenge if they don’t have a common language they share. A recent report from Accenture showed that most firms underestimate the total cost and length of time it would take to modernize their trade lifecycle. The firm hypothesizes the estimations differ greatly because respondents are looking at costs isolated to their specific function instead of across the organization. This misalignment can wreak havoc with a regulatory change as massive as T+1—not just in terms of budget, but also customer experience and risk.

Knowing what needs to change to comply with the new settlement timeframe involves a long end-to-end journey and is crucial to creating the right solution.

Tame complexity, and maximize value

Simplicity is a lofty goal that’s hard to achieve in our increasingly complex world. It’s simply not a reality for most organizations. Even digital-first competitors who have more greenfield opportunities can quickly find themselves trapped behind point automation technologies and mounting technical debt.

This creates opposing forces behind any pressure to adapt. Firms need to both run the business today—to continue delivering excellent customer experiences—and change the business for the future. With those two forces working against each other, it’s even more imperative to have flexible tools to efficiently change and modify processes—and even create completely new ones.

The cure comes from composability and openness. Both offer ways to maximize resources and have become essential to stay ahead so that firms can maximize the technology already in place and replace whatever isn’t serving their needs long term.

It also allows your development teams to continue using the languages and tools they are familiar with, eliminating the need to hire specialized roles whose expertise in proprietary technology is limited to specific projects and not widely applicable. This further reduces the teams’ cognitive load, which gives them more space to find innovative solutions to complex problems and a strong pool of talent to call on.

Innovate at scale

As trends like open banking with and corresponding regulatory rules, such as one from CFPB in the U.S. continue to grow, there’s even more pressure on the technology infrastructure powering everything. The sheer volume of transactions flowing through mission-critical systems can put them at risk of slowing down or faltering altogether, leading to business disruption and unhappy customers.

However, these trends provide a wealth of new growth opportunities that firms are just starting to innovate around. For example, with the upcoming ISO 20022 messaging standard, organizations will have a wealth of new payment-related data they can use to improve efficiency or offer new value-added services.

Generative AI is another business-transforming technology that’s risen to the top of boardroom priorities. The firms that are strategic and quick to implement AI in a value-driven way seize a first-mover advantage. At the same time, there’s additional risk placed on deployments. With new AI regulations in discussion, any of these products—whether customer or employee-facing—are under increased scrutiny, and they may face strict guardrails that would require rework or pulling them offline altogether. This means firms need an effective way to prioritize, deploy, monitor, optimize, and govern their generative AI use cases.

With each innovation, organizations need the proper infrastructure to scale to meet customer demands and built-in resilience to overcome potential disruption. Processes locked behind proprietary systems or aging legacy infrastructure make improving or changing them increasingly risky and expensive. Some technology may lack the ability altogether without specialized services or other add-ons.

Open architecture and truly cloud-native capabilities are needed to give organizations the ability to scale up as demand increases and stay resilient against disruption. Scalability is also essential for certain time-sensitive processes to run at very low latencies to ensure everything continues running smoothly which is difficult to achieve without the right technology.

Take advantage of the next disruption

With the constant flow of change, banking and financial services executives are looking to process orchestration to weave together their disconnected business processes across a complex web of people, systems, and devices.

With process orchestration, organizations create a foundation for faster response to market changes and disruptors. It enables organizations to maximize their current technology, customize solutions to their unique requirements, and ultimately respond quicker to changing customer demands, technologies, and regulations.

The post Adapting Faster: Transforming Regulatory Requirements into Opportunities in Banking and Financial Services appeared first on Camunda.