2026 Digital Banking Trends

This will be a year in which the industry’s well-intentioned focus on adding investing capabilities, boosting digital sales, and simplifying money movement will expose deep digital weaknesses and challenges.

• Many banks and credit unions will follow the standard path of quickly bolting on investing and adding a digital “door” to wealth services, but their aspirations will suffer from a lack of digital banking experiences that patiently coach savers and prepare them to pivot to investing.
• AI-powered search engines will transform how consumers shop for financial products and force digital banking strategists to combat the lost traffic by identifying true differentiators that can dispel the perception that one FI is the same as another.
• More FIs will consolidate money movement options in a single portal, initially with the aim of making these essential features easy to find and cross-selling customers on additional use cases of each option. But that seemingly simple goal will expose shortcomings related to Zelle integration, inconsistent money movement flows, intelligent payment routing, and the lack of clear value propositions for real-time transfers.