The Innovators 2026: North America

North America’s financial landscape is defined by the regulated adoption and institutionalization of advanced, multi-layered AI platforms, shifting the focus from simple digital access to comprehensive digital empowerment. In corporate banking, innovation primarily targets corporate finance, and the current market is marked by a strong emphasis on security and the mainstreaming of digital assets and open banking, driven by significant regulatory milestones.

North America remains the world’s largest fintech market, with annual revenues of approximately $310 billion (McKinsey, 2026). Transaction volumes across FedNow and the RTP network are projected to reach 8 billion in 2026, with a CAGR of over 31% (ACI Worldwide). The current implementation of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. This provides a formal framework for stablecoin issuers, requiring 100% reserve backing and bringing digital assets closer to the traditional banking perimeter (Bottomline, 2026).

Broadridge anticipates a shift beyond simple chatbots to Agentic AI by 2027–2028 even as consumer caution remains high (84% of Americans express concerns about AI in banking). AI is the primary frontline for fraud detection, using behavioral biometrics to combat increasingly sophisticated deepfake attacks (RFI Global, 2026). Widespread AI adoption is evident across enterprise banking and treasury management.

For instance, Bank of America’s CashPro platform leverages a multi-layered AI environment that includes the AI-powered CashPro Chat for seamless service resolution and CashPro Forecasting, a predictive modeling tool that helps Chief Financial Officers analyze complex cash flow patterns and assess liquidity trade-offs.

Concurrently, Symphony is setting the standard for securely integrating AI into regulated financial markets. Their current use of AI-powered transcription for trader voice calls provides crucial dual benefits for compliance teams and front-office intelligence.

Bank of America

The primary digital-banking and treasury management platform of Bank of America (BoA), CashPro, is now used by more than 40,000 companies worldwide. Its AI-powered virtual assistant, CashPro Chat, which uses the same Erica technology that underpins BofA’s consumer banking, has seen a 21% year-over-year increase in usage. Almost 70% of the bank’s corporate clients use it to access account information, track transactions, and resolve service issues.

Recent enhancements to the CashPro Data Intelligence product suite include two significant AI innovations: Ask GPS and CashPro Capital Markets Insights. These operate within a multi-layered AI environment that also incorporates established tools such as CashPro Forecasting and CashPro Chat.

“With CashPro Forecasting, we’re using AI to do the predictive heavy lifting that helps CFOs model what could happen next in a highly dynamic macro environment,” says Mark Monaco, head of Global Payments Solutions. “By running scenarios and analyzing cash flow patterns, finance leaders can assess liquidity tradeoffs, optimize working capital, and make informed decisions despite ongoing rate and market volatility.”
These innovations position CashPro to continue evolving its offerings to corporate finance leaders.

Symphony

Symphony, a platform that securely integrates AI into regulated financial markets, helps financial institutions use AI to improve productivity, risk management, and client service—including data analysis and automation—while complying with global regulatory and data security standards.

“Symphony redefines compliance by leveraging AI-powered transcription of trader voice calls for dual benefit,” COO Michael Lynch says. “Compliance teams use transcripts for efficient case management; and the front office gains near real-time, proactive intelligence to facilitate call assistance, confirm trader actions, and automate transactions through precise deal tagging.”

Symphony has evolved from a secure chat tool into an AI-agentic, cloud-native voice platform designed to replace outdated trading hardware. Key developments since last year include the Cloud9 mobile app for digitized “hoot-and-holler” and AI trade analytics, the launch of the Symphony AI Agent Studio for compliant AI agents, and the introduction of Confidential Cloud (a Google Cloud software-as-a-service tool) for secure AI deployment with sensitive data. Also, this year, Symphony has upgraded Federation, its mobile communication interface, to support WhatsApp voice recording and archiving.

Bank of America | Ask Global Payments Solutions (AskGPS)

Launched in August 2025, AskGPS is an internally built Gen AI platform. Trained on more than 3,200 vetted internal documents, it uses emerging AI to reconcile conflicting information and deliver real-time insights with enterprise-grade governance. This AI-based advisory tool reduces the time to answer from an hour to seconds, an efficiency gain Bank of America estimates will save tens of thousands of employee hours annually.

Bank of America | CashPro Capital Markets Insights

Launched in September 2025, this new corporate treasury app marks the first time a major bank has integrated high-level investment banking data into a daily tool, according to BofA. At its core, the Trade Evaluation Driver (TED) is a proprietary AI algorithm that analyzes hundreds of market variables to generate a single, objective TED score. This score quantifies market favorability for a bond offering, replacing reliance on intuition or consultation calls. The innovation democratizes sophisticated Wall Street-level intelligence, making it accessible to corporate treasurers.

F.N.B. Corporation | Driving Customer Primacy

F.N.B.’s eStore is powered by AI, with automated payment switching and a universal application, sets the standard for seamless banking and is the most effective customer-acquisition engine in the US regional-banking sector. In 2025, F.N.B. introduced Direct Deposit Switch and Payment Switch. The bank has also expanded its eStore Common Application, integrating it across the branch network. Bankers can now efficiently deliver tailored, data-driven “next-best” product or service recommendations using AI and automation. F.N.B. has addressed major deterrents to switching banks by embedding automated features, such as Direct Deposit Switch and Payment Switch, directly in the new-customer onboarding and digital banking experience.

Fifth Third Bank | Newline

Newline is an API-first embedded finance platform used by companies such as Stripe and Brex to offer regulated financial services. In 2025, Newline introduced Virtual Reference Numbers (VRNs) for automated reconciliation and real-time authorization, positioning Fifth Third as a leading real-time payment processor and driving significant growth and cost savings. The launch of AI-native documentation, conversational search, and contextual assistance accelerated time-to-market by improving the developer experience. Enhanced dashboards and self-service VRN management give finance teams greater autonomy. Meanwhile, Newline’s VRNs simplify payment operations, boosting security and efficiency. Newline’s key differentiator is enabling enterprise clients to leverage these capabilities at scale for measurable bottom-line impact.

Huntington National Bank | Capabilities-First Agent Platform

Launched early in the fourth quarter of 2025, Huntington’s capabilities-first agent platform delivers scalable, governed agentic AI in a regulated environment. This new operating model, built around a shared catalog of pre-governed, reusable services, drastically accelerates solution development, cutting production-agent development time and approval cycles by 85%, from months to weeks. Accessible to nontechnical staff, the platform transforms AI from isolated pilots into an enterprise advantage and an innovation platform for co-creation with fintech partners, effectively treating AI as an operating system to speed product delivery.

Intuit | CLARA (Conversational Analytics Response Agent)

Launched in September 2025, Intuit’s CLARA is a multiagent conversational analytics platform. It provides 1,200 finance professionals with 100% accurate insights from data lakes without requiring expertise in Structured Query Language (SQL), cutting request time by 99%. CLARA uses custom financial large language models fine-tuned on 60 billion daily machine-learning predictions, delivering 5% higher accuracy and 50% lower latency than GPT-4 for accounting. This platform, which is transparent by default and triggers real-world actions, is setting a global benchmark for handing off complex tasks to human experts.

J.P. Morgan | Kinexys

In 2025–2026, JPM Coin evolved into a public-blockchain-integrated financial rail capable of processing high transaction volumes. Key innovations included Programmable Payments, which use “if-then” logic. In November 2025, J.P. Morgan added the U.S. dollar-denominated JPMD deposit token to public blockchains such as Base, providing 24/7 liquidity and instant settlement to reduce cash drag. According to the bank, the broader Kinexys payments platform has processed more than $1.5 trillion in cumulative notional value and about $2 billion in daily transaction volume. The system has been used by clients including BMW Group.

TD Bank | AI Prism (for Marketing)

TD Bank Group developed AI Prism, a proprietary foundation model launched in June 2025 to power its predictive marketing and personalization engine. This innovation is significant because the single, adaptable engine can process more than 100 times as many data variables as previous systems, enhancing its ability to predict a wide range of customer needs, from mortgage interest rates to investment products.

Zenus Bank | Zenus Embedded Banking

Zenus pivoted in late 2024/early 2025 from a retail neobank to a leading cross-border banking-as-a-service provider, specializing in business-to-business infrastructure banking. Primary innovations include an API-driven embedded compliance engine that automates anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance, as well as U.S. regulatory reporting for international fintechs. Zenus also significantly expanded its global BIN Sponsorship program, enabling non-U.S. fintechs to issue U.S.-originated Visa cards to their customers. Finally, integrating the Tuum core banking platform created a modular architecture, enabling partners to embed specific services, such as payment rails or virtual card issuance, directly into their offerings.