Topping the priority list for our Innovators class of 2025 are addressing uncertainty, improving customer experience, and leveraging technology for broader applications.
Uncertain times call for innovative thinking and a greater focus on both future-proofing and resilience. Accordingly, many of the innovations this year’s award winners are putting in place focus on two imperatives: minimizing the risk of obsolescence or failure when facing unforeseen circumstances and developing greater agility to adapt and thrive in the face of future uncertainties and disruptions.
APIs continue to provide banks with ways to increase efficiency and improve customer experience, lowering the entry barrier for creating new services and introducing new business models. This year’s winners include API-based embedded-finance and open-banking solutions.
AI remains a critical enabler, driving innovation in areas such as chatbots, risk monitoring and detection, algorithms, automation, and internal GenAI customer service assistance.
Banking-app enhancements include budget management, onboarding processes, and the use of telemetry to enhance business management and data utilization.
Digital assets, encompassing a broad spectrum from conventional bonds to instruments backed by unique items like violins, are the rare emerging field that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional finance. Expanded use of digital assets is transforming payment processes. This year’s winners have been active in such areas as tokenization, integration of assets typically financed with bitcoin, and development of crypto-custody services.
Banking innovations are opening doors to expanded opportunities. Hyper-personalized lifestyle banking can now encompass services such as mobile phone access, insurance, mortgages, and even estate-management support. Broader applications of finance, including the linking of operational weather forecasts with commodity prices and improved monitoring of ESG performance, demonstrate how technology is expanding finance’s remit. Innovations addressing financial accessibility, unclaimed benefits solutions, and simplified access to credit underscore how financial inclusion remains a hotbed of innovation. Among our nonbank winners, meanwhile, are firms that support banks in everything from compliance to payments.
Banking innovation is by no means confined to the largest and most mature markets. Indeed, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East reported the highest number of financial innovations this year, thanks to a focus on meeting unmet needs, the ability to leapfrog legacy systems, a strong mobile-first culture, and a potentially supportive regulatory approach. These regions are likely to remain fertile ground for financial innovation as they strive for greater financial inclusion and leverage technology to address their specific economic and social challenges.
Innovation is proving a process of evolution for all banks, wherever they are located, leaving no margin for complacency if they want to remain competitive. Innovation for innovation’s sake, however, should be avoided as it is only by understanding user needs that banks can adopt and integrate new technologies that deliver innovations to genuinely benefit users and improve the customer experience.
The 2025 Innovator Winners
