Intuit, J.P. Morgan, and SAB delivered some of the most consequential financial innovations over the past year.
From AI-powered analytics that give finance professionals instant access to enterprise data, to blockchain-based deposit tokens enabling round-the-clock settlement, to tokenized Islamic finance instruments that modernize centuries-old structures, this year’s breakthrough innovations are focused on efficiency, transparency, and accessibility.
Developed by institutions ranging from fintech pioneers to global banks, these solutions demonstrate how artificial intelligence, digital assets, and distributed ledger technology are transforming financial infrastructure at scale.
Intuit
CLARA (Conversational Analytics Response Agent): Maybe Intuit’s CLARA hasn’t turned the company’s financial professionals into full-fledged data scientists, but it has given them direct access to company data streams without requiring mediation by coders.
Launched in September 2025, CLARA enables nontechnical professionals to bypass SQL/BI coding barriers and directly access data lakes on AWS and Oracle.
Before CLARA, Intuit relied on 28 analysts to support 1,200 finance users. The latter were generating 350 intake requests per 100 users annually; 40% of these were simple, nontechnical ad hoc requests, such as “What was our spend with Google?”
The new solution uses Agent Bricks (Mosaic AI) and DSPy to integrate Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data. CLARA has automated these requests (over 4,200 annually), enabling finance officers to retrieve data themselves and freeing analysts to focus on high-priority strategic problems.
The platform, which began as a grassroots prototype during an Intuit Global Engineering Days event, has achieved a 72% monthly adoption rate among the firm’s internal finance users. Intuit has reclaimed 187,200 annual hours since the September launch, averaging three hours per employee per week—representing $14.9 million in annual productivity gains.
J.P. Morgan
Kinexys: Banks and corporations have issued digital tokens on private blockchains for years, but in November, J.P. Morgan became the first global bank to issue a US dollar-denominated deposit token on a public blockchain when it made JPM Coin (ticker: JPMD) available to institutional clients on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain.
Institutional clients can use the token for a range of purposes, including facilitating payment for and redemption of digital assets such as tokenized money market funds, enabling 24/7 cross-border payments, serving as on-chain collateral, and supporting cross-border settlement with automated initiation triggers.
Like stablecoins, deposit tokens are designed to maintain a stable value. But unlike most stablecoins, which are typically backed by cash reserves, government securities, or other liquid assets, deposit tokens are backed by deposits held within the issuing bank. JPM Coin was developed by the J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys blockchain business unit, originally known as Onyx.
Deposit tokens also offer a quick off-ramp into an account-based structure—another distinction from stablecoins—which may prove attractive to corporate treasurers, Emma Landriault, head of Kinexys Labs and product lead for JPM Coin, told Global Finance. JPM Coin should “provide meaningful interoperability for financial institutions entering public blockchain for the first time, as well as corporate treasurers in the Web3 space, both of which need to manage treasury resources on-chain,” she adds.
Saudi Awwal Bank (SAB)
Tokenized Islamic Repo: In 2025, SAB executed the first blockchain-based completion of a traditionally complex Islamic repurchase agreement (repo). SAB’s solution, in partnership with digital-asset infrastructure provider Oumla, used smart contracts on a private blockchain to tokenize a borrower’s physical collateral. In August, nine repo transactions were executed with instant T+0 settlement on Oumla’s private, permissioned blockchain, demonstrating proof of concept.
Blockchain transactions are often cited for their security, transparency, and round-the-clock availability, but they may also offer additional benefits for Islamic repos. Because blockchain transactions are recorded on a tamper-free digital ledger, each state change can be traced and reviewed for a Sharia audit. Also, blockchain-based repos settle the same day, compared with traditional Islamic repos, where settlement can extend beyond T+0.
The repo journey began at the Virtual Assets Summit, held at SAB Tower in Riyadh in late 2024, where SAB convened supervisors and technology leaders from 10 banks to examine the role of distributed ledgers in treasury operations.
By March 2026, SAB’s pilot had become part of a broader on-chain finance strategy, with SAB using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol to communicate with other blockchains.
