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🔗https://www.pymnts.com/news/banking/2026/davos-signals-a-disciplined-era-for-ai-in-banking-and-fintech/

The Davos discussion “Banking Accelerated” framed a clear shift in tone around AI in financial services: moving from experimentation and “speed” narratives toward disciplined deployment—where trust, resilience, collaboration, and enabling regulation determine who wins.

Leaders from RBC, PayPal, Commerzbank, BTG Pactual, and the Qatar Central Bank converged on the idea that AI is reshaping finance faster than any single institution can adapt alone, so the competitive game is now about earning and sustaining trust while scaling safely.

Frenemies in a Digital Value Chain

Banks and FinTechs are increasingly “frenemies”: they compete across payments, wallets, and commerce, yet depend on each other to innovate and scale.

RBC’s CEO emphasized that digitization is pushing banks to expand beyond pure transaction processing into earlier stages of customer intent—like discovery and decision-making—because staying “the last mile of payments” invites disintermediation by platforms that control devices, data, and customer interfaces.

The core message: banks aren’t just competing with other banks anymore; they’re competing with ecosystems that can own the end-user relationship.

Trust as the Core Competitive Advantage

PayPal’s perspective sharpened the argument that trust is not a “nice to have,” but the essential currency of digital finance. Trust spans safe handling of money, data, and identity, plus transparency in pricing and lending outcomes. It was described as the “real network effect” that stimulates commerce—because scale without trust doesn’t compound; it collapses under risk, friction, and reputational damage.

Scale, Trust and the Risk of Being Disintermediated

It is relevant connects the classic bank advantages (scale + trust) with a warning: those advantages only hold if banks move up the value chain and redesign services end-to-end, rather than merely automating legacy workflows.

AI is positioned as central to this redesign—from earlier machine learning waves to today’s generative and agentic AI—but executives highlighted caution when AI touches customer-facing decisions, especially due to error risk and hallucinations. The winners will be those who can industrialize AI without letting AI’s failure modes undermine the trust they rely on.

Digital Friction and the Evolving Role of the Branch

Even as digital grows, friction hasn’t disappeared—because customer needs are uneven. Commerzbank noted the dual reality of serving both digital-native users and customers who still rely on branches and human interaction. AI is framed as a bridge: agent-assist in call centers improves speed and quality for human-supported service, while digital platforms continue to expand for self-serve journeys.

RBC reinforced that branches aren’t “dead”—they’re being re-engineered into multi-channel hubs where staff handle in-person, chat, and call-center work together, shifting branch economics toward productivity gains rather than footprint growth.

Collaboration as a Structural Requirement

Collaboration was presented not as optional partnership theater, but as structural necessity to reduce friction in commerce, lending, and cross-border flows—especially for consumers and SMEs.

BTG Pactual added a caution about regulatory arbitrage as innovation accelerates across banks, FinTechs, and adjacent financial actors. The Brazil example highlighted how fast payments infrastructure and digital adoption can reshape markets quickly, while also raising questions about consistent oversight.

The panel also stressed that even with high digital efficiency, human relationships remain crucial in domains like wealth management and complex decisions—because trust is still often personal, not purely technical.

How Much Are Banks Spending on Technology

Commerzbank cited roughly €500M annually on modernization, digitization, AI, and compliance; RBC cited about $6B per year in total tech spend, with around $2B allocated to modernization and initiatives like application development.

Cybersecurity alone consumes hundreds of millions, reflecting the growing risk surface—particularly third-party and supply-chain exposure as banks integrate FinTech partners into critical systems. “AI strategy” is inseparable from platform modernization + security investment.

Regulation as Enabler, Not Obstacle

From the regulator viewpoint, the Qatar Central Bank argued that if oversight doesn’t keep pace, risk migrates outside traditional supervision.

Regulators are increasingly positioned not only as rule-setters, but as infrastructure builders and enablers, investing in payment rails (e.g., instant payments) and issuing AI governance guidance focused on data protection, cyber risk management, and innovation enablement.

Tools like regulatory sandboxes and direct FinTech access to central bank systems were framed as ways to balance safety with growth—suggesting a more “systems design” approach to regulation.

AI, Resilience and a Level Playing Field

Operational resilience surfaced as a first-order priority—on par with capital and liquidity—under the assumption that disruptions must be recoverable in minutes, not hours.

AI is already delivering productivity gains across operations, fraud detection, and compliance, but whether it ultimately makes the system safer remains open.

The panel’s closing logic was that a “level playing field” in AI-enabled finance depends on shared standards, robust resilience expectations, and above all, trust—because the more automated the system becomes, the more catastrophic trust failures can be.

Conclusion

Davos signaled a maturity moment: finance is entering a more disciplined AI era where the central challenge is not capability, but governed scaling—combining modernized platforms, cybersecurity, resilient operations, and collaborative ecosystems under regulation designed to enable innovation without weakening stability.

Banks that remain “last-mile utilities” risk being disintermediated, while those that build trusted, integrated journeys (often with FinTech partners) can defend their relevance—so long as they treat trust and resilience as the product, not the afterthought.