The rate of development in banking technology continues to accelerate as institutions broaden the use of data, AI and automation across core banking functions. This year’s Technology Awards underline the growing impact of these digital initiatives, particularly across internal operations, risk management and customer service.
With close to 200 submissions across 17 regional and product categories, the 2026 awards provide an overview of how financial institutions are responding to rising cost pressures, regulatory complexity and increasing expectations for real-time services. What stands out this year is not only the volume of innovation, but also the depth of integration into core banking infrastructure.
Regional winners
Product winners
Like last year, generative AI was a defining theme. By 2025, however, its application had moved from experimentation towards production-level use cases. Rather than standalone chatbots or proof-of-concept tools, banks are increasingly deploying AI to automate testing, streamline document processing, enhance internal knowledge retrieval and support compliance workflows. The focus has shifted to demonstrable results, with productivity gains, financial impacts and governance among the priorities.
Mobile platforms, meanwhile, continue to evolve into full-service banking interfaces. This is particularly evident in wealth and investment services, where real-time execution, FX trading and structured products are becoming standard features. Yet much of the most consequential change remains less visible to customers, instead taking place in internal systems that underpin resilience and efficiency.
Many initiatives also delivered measurable outcomes. In one case, an AI-enabled digital assistant saved staff thousands of hours. In another, real-time scoring shortened lending decision times from days to minutes.
Several submissions focused on re-engineering operational and risk frameworks. Banks are embedding controls directly into execution environments, reducing reliance on retrospective monitoring and manual intervention.
This reflects a broader shift towards continuous, end-to-end governance in which compliance is enforced at the point of action rather than after the fact.
Another notable trend is the industrial-isation of previously fragmented processes. Areas such as software testing, document ingestion and privileged access management are being reworked through automation and AI, unlocking efficiency gains that were difficult to achieve through incremental change alone. These are often complex, high-stakes environments where improvements can have a disproportionate impact.
Collectively, this year’s entries reflect an industry moving beyond digitisation towards structured integration, with intelligence, automation and control increasingly woven into the same operating fabric.
The result is a financial services landscape that is more connected, more automated and more tightly governed than in previous cycles.
Judges
Francesco Burelli, partner at Arkwright Consulting, with more than 20 years of experience in digital strategy and transformation
Alessandro Hatami, founder of Pacemakers, regulated non-executive director and former digital chief operating officer at Lloyds Banking Group
Thomas Macaulay, technology correspondent, The Banker
John Everington, senior editor, The Banker
Aliya Shibli, senior reporter, The Banker
Global and Latin AmericaWinner: Banco Bradesco
Brazil’s Banco Bradesco secured this year’s global prize after delivering a suite of impactful digital initiatives that combine to create a cohesive structure for accelerating financial innovation. Serving more than 70mn customers and standing as the Latin America regional winner, the bank recorded particularly strong results across its AI and mobile initiatives.
A standout innovation is Bridge, a generative AI operating system. The platform serves as the foundation for all AI projects within Banco Bradesco, giving every business unit a unified infrastructure for creating and scaling their solutions.
Bridge goes beyond a conventional rollout of multiple AI applications to connect market-leading models, internal systems, corporate data and business applications in one integrated system. Instead of individual departments building their own separate AI tools, they go through Bridge, which provides a standard set of shared resources, security protocols and infrastructure. This reduces duplication across business units and significantly speeds up deployment.
The platform delivered a 10-fold reduction in AI integration cycles and an 87 per cent resolution rate for customer service interactions, proving its capacity to accelerate product delivery and enhance operational performance. Customer queries are increasingly resolved without human intervention.
Banco Bradesco also won plaudits for PDPJ, developed to lower the barriers preventing Brazil’s small and medium-sized enterprises from accessing robust digital financial services. Built on a cloud-native architecture of APIs and microservices, the platform serves as a financial and operational hub, integrating essential banking with management tools such as invoicing and payment processing. It brings day-to-day business operations directly into the banking ecosystem.
More than 90 per cent of the customer base have become active users of PDPJ. It also achieved an 83 per cent reduction in cost-to-serve per client, while simultaneously preventing losses worth tens of millions of dollars through its advanced AI-driven fraud-detection systems. The model has given small and medium-sized enterprises an efficient new way to interact with banking services in Brazil.
Banco Bradesco’s architectural progress extended well beyond AI and SME banking. In risk management, the bank has re-architected its credit-loss provisioning process. By migrating to a modern lakehouse architecture on Microsoft Azure and Databricks, it has reduced the execution time for its expected credit loss calculations by more than 90 per cent, dropping from 30 hours to 2.5 hours. This shift has delivered a fully automated, auditable process that minimises manual interventions and enhances regulatory compliance.
Building on these foundations, the bank has successfully transformed open finance from a regulatory requirement into a strategic engine for credit. By integrating external market data into its internal credit engines, Bradesco has moved beyond partial internal history to evaluate a client’s real-time financial position. This has generated R$8bn (£1.2bn) in highly qualified credit proposals and expanded access to fair, personalised lending.
These structural advancements directly feed into the bank’s client-facing transformation projects. One example is the Bradesco Principal segment, a bespoke experience for high-net-worth clients. This initiative involved integrating more than 60 legacy and modern systems to create a unified Cockpit 360° system for 4,500 relationship managers. By centralising real-time data and actionable insights, the bank has achieved hyper-personalisation at scale, bolstered by native international integration with Bradesco Bank in Miami.
Another impactful innovation came in payments. By integrating its BIA intelligence assistant with WhatsApp, the bank has turned a standard chat into a secure banking interface. Customers can now execute instant transactions with Pix — Brazil’s most popular payment method — using both natural language and voice commands. Bradesco now processes around a billion Pix transactions a month.
The new approach replaces traditional, high-friction app journeys with simple payments on the country’s most widely used messaging platform. It has reduced the transaction journey by two-thirds and cut completion time by 75 per cent, improving accessibility for users who struggle with complex banking interfaces.
Collectively, these innovations have won Banco Bradesco the global prize. Marcelo Noronha, the bank’s chief executive, points to the diversity of the initiatives.
“Leveraging an agile-at-scale operating model and a mobile‑first ecosystem with frictionless journeys, our investments in AI, advanced analytics, application modernisation, cybersecurity, resilience and talents are redefining banking, setting a global benchmark for customer‑centric innovation and expanding financial inclusion,” he says.
A message from Francesco di Marcello, chief information officer and Cíntia Scovine Barcelos, chief technology officer, Bradesco
This video was produced and provided by Bradesco, the winner of the Global, Latin America, AI and Machine Learning, and Mobile awards.
AfricaWinner: United Bank for Africa
United Bank for Africa has cemented its status as a leading digital operator by placing technology at the centre of its growth strategy across more than 20 countries. This approach is evident across digital payments, AI-driven engagement and e-business, but is most visible in its work on cross-border transfers.
Across a continent where moving money across borders is often slow and expensive, the bank is working to make the process feel almost invisible. UBS’s focal point is Leo, its AI-powered digital banker which supports cross-border payments through integration with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. Customers can send funds in local currencies through a conversational interface, reducing both friction and reliance on traditional banking channels.
The initiative has seen strong adoption. Leo’s user base has surpassed 6mn, with around 1mn added in 2025 alone, signalling a steady shift towards chat-based banking as a primary interface.
“Serving millions of customers across 20+ markets, UBA’s mobile apps and Leo . . . enable seamless cross-border payments in local currencies,” says Emmanuel Lamptey, UBA’s executive director designate for digital banking. “Africa’s financial future won’t be built on branches or borders; it will be built on intelligence, interoperability and trust at scale.”
Beyond cross-border transactions, UBA has expanded its reach in domestic payments and merchant acquiring. The rollout of more than 23,000 upgraded point-of-sale terminals across Nigeria last year supported collections of N176bn ($130mn), helping small businesses accept digital payments more reliably. Investment in electronic channels has also led to significant revenue growth, with N157.5bn generated from e-payments in the first nine months of 2025.
A key tenet of UBA’s digital strategy is consistency. Rather than relying on a single flagship product, the bank is lowering barriers at multiple points. UBA has also shown that digital infrastructure can spread across an entire region. “Most banks digitise their products; at United Bank for Africa, we digitalise the continent,” says Lamptey.
Asia-PacificWinner: DBS
DBS has developed an impressive array of digital capabilities that span the full operating stack of a modern bank, from customer-facing mobile tools to operational controls and enterprise-wide AI. Rather than running isolated experiments, the bank has steadily industrialised digital assets into production systems that guide how work is done, how risk is controlled and how services are delivered at scale.
“At DBS, our technology strategy is anchored on the Rise framework — resiliency, innovation, security and efficiency — which guides how we build trusted, future-ready platforms across the bank,” says Eugene Huang, chief information officer at DBS.
For customers, DBS Hong Kong has bolstered digital experiences across a striking range of banking functions. They can now open multi-currency accounts instantly, access FX tools with real-time insights, and trade across stock markets within the same equity account. At the same time, the Money Safe feature strengthens their security by restricting fund outflows and requiring in-person verification for fraudulent activities.
At the infrastructure layer, DBS has built the Enhanced Jumphost, a privileged execution architecture that enforces governance at the moment of action. Unlike traditional solutions, the Enhanced Jumphost applies change policies inside every command executed in production. The bank’s entire production infrastructure is now protected by real-time privileged execution controls.
Internally, DBS has pushed AI deep into its operations. The Gen AI-enabled Jira Assistant has transformed user acceptance testing by automatically generating user stories and test cases. By replacing manual processes, Jira has saved staff thousands of hours.
The bank has also built DBS-GPT, a secure, enterprise-wide Gen AI platform. The system provides staff with a personal assistant, enterprise search across around 4mn documents and a curated agent library. It is used regularly by more than 70 per cent of employees.
“As we continue to scale the use of AI across the enterprise, we are embedding resilience, security and efficiency by design while delivering seamless, human centric banking experiences,” says Huang.
Central and eastern EuropeWinner: TBC Bank
TBC Bank has transitioned from a traditional lender to a digital-first operating model. With a 40 per cent market share in Georgia and 1.3mn monthly active digital users, the bank has reached a level of penetration that begins to blur the line between banking platform and everyday infrastructure.
A clear philosophy underpins this scale. Digital interactions are now the primary growth engine, dominant distribution channel and relationship platform. More than 80 per cent of retail sales are completed online, while real-time scoring has shortened lending decisions from days to minutes.
TBC’s recent innovations focus on removing friction from common financial tasks. A standout example is Instant Business Activation, which enables the rapid launch of a new company. Instead of repeating identity checks and manually re-entering company data, customers can reuse their verified biometric identity, select their company from the national public registry, and activate mobile banking end-to-end in around 120 seconds. Within a year of implementation, conversion rates rose from 11 per cent to 66 per cent, turning a former bottleneck into a near-instant process.
TBC applies a similar logic to lending. By introducing AI-driven income estimation, the bank has extended fast digital loans to self-employed customers who cannot provide formal income documentation. Decisions are based on transaction patterns and behavioural data rather than paperwork, allowing access without loosening risk controls. In 2025, this translated into 135.5mn laris ($50mn) in loans across more than 25,000 customers, many of whom would previously have fallen outside automated credit systems.
Another key initiative is the bank’s “instant-by-default” multi-currency and cross-border payments. Adoption of the new transfer type has been rapid, with 10mn instant transactions in 2025.
Judges praised TBC’s ability to deliver at pace, pointing to its “instant-by-default” model and high-velocity release cycle as evidence. With around 18,000 production changes annually and 99.86 per cent availability, the bank also won plaudits for its blend of speed and control.
Middle EastWinner: Abu Dhabi Bank
First Abu Dhabi Bank won the Middle East award on the strength of its AI innovations. Moving beyond the era of scattered AI pilots, the bank has built this technology into its digital infrastructure. The result is Gernas, an enterprise agentic AI operating system that embeds intelligent agents into banking, risk, trade, advisory and operational workflows.
The project’s starting point was a familiar problem for financial institutions. Over the past two years, FAB had experienced rapid growth in AI experimentation, but the model was fragmented. Multiple pilots ran in isolation, infrastructure was duplicated, and scaling proved challenging. In response, FAB made a strategic shift. Instead of scaling the disparate projects, the bank created a governed enterprise AI operating layer.
The system is an LLM-agnostic, hyperscaler-independent modular architecture, which allows FAB to switch the underlying models without requiring a structural redesign. Agents then operate within existing business applications, ensuring a unified user experience and minimising disruption to frontline teams.
Governance has also been rethought. Instead of retrospective oversight, controls are embedded as runtime behaviour with immutable audit logging, role-based access and human-in-the-loop safeguards supporting safe scaling. In practice, this shifts AI from a black box into a monitored utility.
That scale-up has been rapid. Within its first year, Gernas delivered 10 agentic solutions into production, with more than 25 in active development. Over 90 per cent of structured enterprise data has been integrated into the modern data platform, while more than 1,000 employees now use AI-assisted productivity tools. Output gains have followed, including a reported 15 per cent reduction in time-to-market for new capabilities.
The judges were impressed by both the impact and the innovation, commending GERNAS for successfully embedding intelligent agents into the bank’s fabric. The project also established a clear ownership model across business, technology and risk. As a result, AI adoption has become embedded into the bank’s operations, rather than dependent on isolated teams.
North AmericaWinner: JPMorgan
JPMorgan’s digital initiatives focus on modernising three operational pillars: procedures, compliance and document processing.
Across its asset and wealth management business, the bank has focused on reworking how employees access information, apply rules and process data in real time. The result is a shift away from fragmented, manual processes towards embedded, execution-ready systems.
SOP Buddy illustrates this progress. The platform transforms more than 3,500 procedural documents into usable, in-workflow guidance, allowing staff to retrieve citation-backed answers. This process cuts their average search time from around 10 minutes to 15 seconds. Now deployed across 12 business units, it handles more than 3,000 queries each month and has unlocked over 5,800 hours of capacity annually. Crucially, it also reduces interpretive variance by anchoring responses in a verified source.
A similar logic underpins the bank’s AI-enabled guidelines. This project modernises investment compliance risk management by embedding machine learning directly into the lifecycle of guideline coding, monitoring and exception investigation. One of its central features is the Automated Coding Engine, which uses natural language processing to translate guideline language into machine-readable compliance rules. Since implementation, the engine has reduced implementation timelines from more than a week to roughly a day.
Another key element of the guidelines is the SmartAlert system, which automates post-trade alert investigations by analysing trading data, security setups, cash flows and guideline rule outputs to identify root causes. It now investigates around 80 per cent of post-trade alerts with greater than 90 per cent predictive accuracy.
Support for both projects comes from EDDI, an enterprise-scale AI platform designed to transform high-volume document ingestion, classification and data extraction across banking operations. The platform automates the processing of millions of documents monthly, converting unstructured inputs into auditable data. Its resilience was demonstrated during an integration surge in 2025, when it absorbed increased demand without disruption.
The judges praised these initiatives for their consistency, scale and strong governance frameworks. Together, they have made complex operations faster, more consistent and easier to control.
Western EuropeWinner: BBVA
Spain’s BBVA aims to evolve from digital finance to intelligent, proactive and AI-native banking at a global scale. Over the past year, that ambition has centred on three priorities: embedding AI across the organisation, scaling a fully digital banking model in new European markets and reinventing customer experiences.
At the core of this is The Eight, an enterprise-wide AI roadmap. The strategy has embedded AI across BBVA’s entire operating model, from customer interaction and advisory to risk and software development. A strategic alliance with OpenAI, which won this year’s Bank/Fintech Partnership award, accelerates the roadmap through the co-creation of advanced AI solutions.
The digital initiatives have had a significant impact. In 2025 alone, BBVA acquired 11.5mn new customers, with 66 per cent onboarded through digital channels. This scale highlights technology’s evolution from a support function to a central engine for growth, customer acquisition and operational productivity.
BBVA has also rebuilt its mobile platform as an AI-powered financial companion. Moving beyond transactional utility, the app uses behavioural analytics to anticipate liquidity needs and automate savings. High-frequency tasks, such as accessing cards or performing instant payments, are now completed in less than 1.5 seconds via biometric authentication.
A critical milestone in 2025 was the launch of Blue, a generative AI-powered assistant for complex banking transactions, such as instant money transfers. Since its rollout in Spain and Mexico, Blue has reached more than 2.4mn unique users per month. BBVA has also continued its pan-European expansion, launching a fully digital bank in Germany in less than 12 months.
“BBVA has been recognised by The Banker as western Europe’s Best Technology Bank — an award that reflects how technology has become a key driver in delivering a more resilient, efficient and personalised service,” says Carlos Casas, global head of engineering at BBVA.
“We are advancing a more intelligent, data-driven banking model, integrating innovation and security into every solution to support our customers in their daily lives.”
A message from Carlos Casas, global head of engineering and Antonio Bravo, global head of data, BBVA
This video was produced and provided by BBVA, the winner of the Western Europe and Bank/Fintech Partnership awards.
AI & Machine LearningWinner: Banco BradescoProject: Bridge
Banco Bradesco has moved beyond disparate applications to build a generative AI operating system. The platform, named Bridge, connects AI models, internal systems, data and governance into a single operating layer for the bank. The result is a standardised infrastructure for developing AI solutions.
Bridge provides the foundations for a growing suite of applications, from conversational assistants and payments via messaging platforms to developer copilots and automated legal workflows. It underpins them with a blend of multi-LLM orchestration, reusable microservices and API-based delivery. Through the platform, individual departments build their own copilots and agents without recreating the underlying architecture.
The platform has lowered barriers to AI while enforcing consistency and safety. Bridge provides a controlled, auditable environment for deploying intelligent solutions with speed, standardisation and built-in governance.
For Banco Bradesco, the scale of impact is significant. Bridge supports more than 500 use cases spanning credit, customer service, operations and marketing. Its prowess is best demonstrated by the evolution of BIA, Bradesco’s digital assistant, which has added features including intelligent electronic transfers, secure conversational journeys via WhatsApp with multi-agent orchestration, and transactions through banking APIs. The assistant now boasts 10mn active users and an 87 per cent resolution rate.
Internally, the transformation is also impressive. Bridge has accelerated software development by 40 per cent, reduced AI integration cycles tenfold, and delivered 10 times faster deployment of informational agents. Every engineering team now uses GenAI. Their work has had a big financial impact on risk modelling, generating approximately R$250mn ($50mn) per year in value.
By embedding a corporate governance framework, Bradesco has also successfully reduced the risks of shadow AI. Furthermore, the platform’s multi-agent architecture and model-agnostic design allow users to select the best for a given task.
“Technology is the foundation of Bradesco’s strategy, enabling exceptional experiences for clients and society,” says Marcelo Noronha, the bank’s chief executive. “As an AI‑powered organisation, the Bridge platform scales generative AI with embedded governance and robust security.”
Bank/Fintech PartnershipWinner: BBVAProject: BBVA-OpenAI Agreement
BBVA’s partnership with OpenAI sets out to answer a question facing much of the industry: how can large, regulated financial institutions adopt frontier AI rapidly while maintaining security, governance and scalability? Its answer is to establish a controlled, enterprise-grade deployment model for generative AI.
The partnership eschews the traditional bank–fintech collaboration to establish a co-creation model. BBVA gains preferential access to OpenAI’s most advanced models and expert talent, while OpenAI works directly with BBVA’s engineering, research and business teams.
Working hand-in-hand, the two companies embed AI across customer engagement, risk, software development and internal operations. The approach narrows the distance between technology frontiers and safe deployment.
Together, the partners are developing AI robots for six use cases: client interaction, relationship management, risk analysis, software development, operational design and employee augmentation. They are also focusing on the scale of the deployments, including one the world’s largest corporate deployments of ChatGPT Enterprise.
During the pilot phase, 80 per cent of users engaged with the tool daily, saving them an average of three hours a week. These results led BBVA to extend ChatGPT Enterprise licences to more than 120,000 employees, embedding AI capabilities across the workforce.
Staff can also offload repetitive processes to OpenAI’s technology. Through a concept described as digital “alter egos”, they can delegate tedious tasks and instead focus on complex, high-value activities. For customers, meanwhile, the co-developed AI assistants support day-to-day financial management and personalised advisory interactions.
By blending co-creation, enterprise-scale deployment and customer-channel integration, the partnership offers a template for how banks and frontier AI firms can work together on technology initiatives.
“Our agreement with OpenAI represents a fundamental shift in how we innovate at BBVA,” says Antonio Bravo, global head of data at BBVA. “Through deep co-creation and dedicated joint teams, we stay at the forefront of innovation in a fast-moving environment, accelerating our AI-driven transformation strategy, scaling advanced technologies across the organisation, empowering our teams and delivering more intuitive, intelligent customer experiences.”
Cyber SecurityWinner: Standard CharteredProject: Fusion
Standard Chartered’s Fusion targets a structural gap in security operations: threats increasingly span cyber, fraud and physical security, yet institutions still manage them in isolation. Fusion addresses this by shifting from siloed detection to a connected, intelligence-driven model.
The project unifies each domain of the threat landscape into a single framework. At its core is the Fusion Centre in Malaysia, a 24-hour hub that brings together disconnected functions for threat monitoring and management.
Inside the Fusion Centre, analysts, investigators and security specialists work from a shared pool of intelligence. Instead of passing incidents between teams, decision-making is centralised, allowing threats to be tackled with greater speed and context. It is as much an organisational design as a technical one.
The architecture rests on three core elements. A unified data strategy aggregates hundreds of sources into one analytical environment, reducing noise and improving prioritisation. Decoy assets generate early danger signals, offering a glimpse of attacks before they reach critical systems. Machine learning techniques are applied to identify behavioural anomalies, complementing rule-based detection.
“By unifying our people, processes and advanced technologies into a single operating framework, we achieved greater visibility, swifter decision‑making and a more resilient, future‑ready cyber, fraud and financial crime unit,” says Cezary Piekarski, group chief information security officer at Standard Chartered.
The impact is measurable. Detection times for certain incidents have improved by around 80 per cent, while investigation speeds are up by more than 90 per cent. Tasks that once required a day of data gathering are now completed in an hour.
Standard Chartered estimates that the project has helped avoid losses of around $50mn in potential data breaches and $9mn in phishing-related threats.
“The model has materially strengthened our cyber resilience, helping to protect critical services, data and client trust across our dynamic markets,” says Piekarski. “It provides a strong foundation for continuous innovation. As threats evolve, we will further advance the model through greater automation, data‑driven intelligence and adoption of emerging security technologies.”
Digital AssetsWinner: DBSProject: Tokenised Structured Notes on Ethereum Public Blockchain
DBS has expanded its digital assets strategy by bringing tokenised structured notes onto the Ethereum public blockchain, building on its earlier work in digital bond issuance on private infrastructure and addressing constraints around limited investor access and the duplication of legal processes for each issuance.
By updating its $26bn Structured Note Programme in mid-2025 to allow issuance on a public blockchain, DBS has been able to scale distribution and broaden access to accredited and institutional investors beyond its existing client base.
The business case for the update was proven in the first half of 2025, when DBS clients executed more than $1bn-worth of trades involving these instruments, with volumes surging nearly 60 per cent between the first and second quarters.
The transfer from private blockchain to a public one is significant because it moves assets from a closed loop into an open, interoperable ecosystem.
Unlike private ledgers, which are restricted to a bank’s own customers, the public blockchain allows DBS to partner with external digital asset platforms to reach investors who do not have a DBS account.
A core pillar of this transformation is making complex financial instruments more accessible to everyone. Traditional structured notes typically require a minimum investment of $100,000. The high entry cost acts as a barrier to smaller investors, hindering their ability to diversify their portfolios.
DBS solved this by creating bite-sized tokens, with each representing a $1,000 share of the original note, helping investors manage their portfolios more effectively amid market volatility.
Beyond accessibility, the project significantly improved operational efficiency by reducing settlement times from around five days to two. DBS says further efficiency gains are expected as the platform evolves.
To support compliance on a public blockchain, DBS developed a modified ERC-20 smart contract, a widely adopted token standard on Ethereum. This contract supports essential compliance features such as on-chain whitelisting and token freezing to ensure adherence to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations.
Financial HealthWinner: NordeaProject: A financial health ecosystem
Nordea’s financial health ecosystem is built around the premise that banking should not only respond to financial stress, but prevent it. The project aims to do that by bringing together a suite of digital tools that support customers at different stages of life, from childhood education to small business management.
The approach reflects a broader shift in the industry. With 80 per cent of adults experiencing financial stress and 32 per cent citing money as their biggest worry, banks are under pressure to move beyond products and towards practical, everyday guidance. Nordea’s response focuses on solutions that deliver real impact with clearer financial insight, proactive guidance and greater everyday control.
The project focuses on three pillars of financial health: business, personal and youth. For companies, the business insights tool turns complex financial data into clear, actionable insights that support safer decision-making. Acting as a “digital CFO”, it provides intelligent cash flow predictions, scenario simulations and competitor analysis.
For individuals, a financial health check offers personalised insights that help customers identify areas needing attention. The tool has a 60 per cent conversion rate, meaning more than half of users have completed the full customer flow and received suggestions. Alongside this sits a subscription management service, developed with fintech partner Subaio, which gives customers visibility over recurring payments and the ability to cancel services in a single step. It is used on a monthly basis by around 70 per cent of digitally-active customers.
For young people, Nordea has launched a partnership in Norway and Sweden with Gimi, a pocket money app. The collaboration provides real life money management and interactive financial education, teaching practical skills that build financial confidence from an early age. Children interact with the app 2.2 times weekly (on average), showing high engagement. In Sweden, 75 per cent of parents said it made their children smarter with money.
Together, these three pillars form a powerful, connected financial health ecosystem. Instead of offering support after problems emerge, they embed insight, education and control into daily interactions.
“Financial wellbeing and health are about feeling confident, prepared and in control of everyday financial decisions, both today and over time. At Nordea, we help people and businesses gain a clear understanding of their financial situation and turn insight into action,” says Malthe Falck, head of group digital at Nordea.
“By combining trusted advice, intelligent digital tools and targeted financial education — developed together with our fintech partners — we support customers through life’s moments, strengthen financial resilience and contribute to sustainable growth across society.”
MobileWinner: Banco BradescoProject: Bradesco PDPJ
In Brazil, small and medium-sized enterprises represent 97 per cent of all businesses and generate up to 80 per cent of formal employment. But historically, they have faced significant barriers to accessing robust digital financial services. Banco Bradesco’s PDPJ platform directly addresses this disparity.
The project brings together financial services, management tools and business support resources inside a single app. It offers entrepreneurs and SMEs a complete, personalised and fully integrated experience that is built for speed and clarity rather than corporate complexity.
Inside the app, users can access essential solutions, such as accounts, payments and cash-flow management, alongside advanced capabilities including AI-driven recommendations, risk monitoring and state-of-the-art fraud-prevention tools. They support a simple but ambitious objective: strip away fragmented channels and give entrepreneurs one place to run their financial lives.
Built on a cloud-native, API-first architecture, PDPJ provides SMEs with digital sophistication that is typically reserved for large corporations, all delivered through a simple, intuitive interface. Adoption suggests the approach is working. Within months of its full launch in mid-2025, the customer base expanded from just over 1,000 to almost 98,000.
Engagement is also high, with users logging in 30 times a month on average. The data suggests that PDPJ has become embedded in routine business activity rather than an occasional touchpoint. Efficiency gains are equally notable. By automating onboarding, credit journeys and service requests, Bradesco has cut the cost to serve by around 83 per cent.
The platform also reflects a broader shift in banking design. Instead of asking users to adapt to financial systems, it reshapes those systems around user behaviour. Features such as tap-to-pay acceptance and in-app invoicing remove the need for external tools, tightening the link between financial management and day-to-day operations.
The judges praised the project for its utility, return on investment and adoption, commending its efforts to widen access to sophisticated financial services. By pairing technical depth with usability, Bradesco has shown that mobile services can evolve from conveniences to core infrastructure for economic activity.
Open BankingWinner: İşbankProject: API Portal — Platform-Based API Ecosystem
İşbank’s API Portal marks a shift from compliance-led open banking towards a platform model built for scale. Rather than treating APIs as a regulatory checkbox, the bank has built them into the foundation of its platform strategy, opening up its infrastructure for fintechs, corporates and developers to embed financial services directly into their own products.
Via the APIs, a wide range of external organisations can co-create financial services at scale with robust security, building trust with both partners and end users. The result is closer to a marketplace than a gateway.
With more than 420 APIs spanning real-time payments, lending, account management and data-sharing, the platform allows users to develop financial functionality in modular form. This reflects a broader industry trend as banks compete not only on products, but also on how easily those products can be integrated elsewhere.
What distinguishes İşbank’s approach is its attention to developer experience. The redesigned portal has simplified onboarding into a self-service process, supported by sandbox testing and detailed documentation. The aim is to reduce friction and accelerate time to market.
There is also a notable focus on control. By internalising SSL certificate provisioning, İşbank has taken ownership of a critical layer of security, reducing its reliance on external providers while streamlining integration for partners. The move reinforces the bank’s role as both platform operator and gatekeeper.
İşbank has also enhanced the portal’s user experience with a redesigned interface, comprehensive documentation, video tutorials, practical use cases and free certificate support.
“Consequently, we have streamlined our API integration processes, thereby accelerating the expansion and growth rate of our ecosystem,” says Sezgin Lüle, İşbank’s deputy chief executive.
“By leveraging generative AI, we will continue our efforts to secure our leading position in partner experience while further diversifying our API portfolio.”
The numbers suggest the model is gaining traction. By the end of 2025, the API Portal supported nearly 600 partners and processed API-driven transactions worth almost TL600bn ($13.4bn).
PaymentsWinner: Banco do BrasilProject: BB Voice Card
Banco do Brasil has focused its latest payments innovation on customers with visual impairments, a segment that remains underserved in everyday payments.
Its BB Voice Card, launched in early 2025, is designed to enable independent and secure card payments by integrating accessibility directly into the payment process rather than treating it as an add-on.
The solution combines a payment card, smartphone and Bluetooth technology to provide real-time audio feedback throughout a transaction. From confirming the purchase amount to announcing completion, each step is communicated directly to the user’s device, removing the need for assistance from merchants or third parties.
The BB Voice Card targets a longstanding accessibility gap in Brazil, where more than 6.9mn people live with visual impairments, many of them face uncertainty when entering PIN numbers or confirming transaction values. For Banco do Brasil’s own customer base, this challenge affects around 20,000 customers.
Rather than adapting existing tools, the bank has embedded accessibility into the payment instrument itself. The card connects via Bluetooth to the bank’s mobile apps, while NFC integration and system updates across point-of-sale devices enable seamless use in real retail environments.
The rollout required co-ordination across the country’s wider payments ecosystem, including software updates to all point-of-sale devices used by Brazilian acquirers and integration with Banco do Brasil’s mobile applications.
Early adoption has demonstrated practical impact, with customers able to complete transactions independently, improving both their confidence and security.
Judges highlighted the simplicity and scalability of the solution. By embedding accessibility directly into the payment experience, Banco do Brasil has moved beyond compliance-driven design to deliver a payments model which the bank says can be expanded across other financial products and markets.
Risk ManagementWinner: ProsperoProject: Active Defense: Autonomous Risk Infrastructure for Indonesia’s Merah Putih Ecosystem
Jakarta-based risk management company Prospero has developed an “Active Defense” platform that positions risk management as core financial infrastructure, removing the high costs and verification barriers that have long excluded Indonesia’s grassroots economy from institutional capital.
The platform was designed to bring the country’s Merah Putih co-operatives into the country’s formal financial system. These 83,000 community-based businesses form the backbone of Indonesia’s local economy, yet they have historically operated without any digital presence, relying instead on manual, paper-based ledgers.
Because their financial records are physical and cannot be verified remotely, traditional Indonesian financial institutions have struggled to assess their creditworthiness.
This lack of transparency has historically imposed a “trust tax”, where the co-operatives are either entirely excluded from formal credit or forced to pay significantly higher interest rates to compensate for the perceived risk.
Active Defense solves this problem by replacing manual processes with an automated monitoring system. Instead of relying on human data entry, the platform captures and verifies financial activity directly at source, even in remote areas with limited online connectivity.
Prospero’s platform differs from most regtech tools by working continuously rather than producing periodic reports for later review. Traditional systems often depend on clean, centralised data and require human checks.
By consolidating fragmented paper records into a single, verifiable digital dataset, Active Defense gives Indonesian banks a clear, real-time view of each co-operative’s financial health.
As a result, 11 top-tier Indonesian banks can now lend to the co-operative sector with the same level of confidence they enjoy with large corporate borrowers.
In January 2026, the platform had achieved full national deployment, connecting the country’s entire co-operative network and automating 93 per cent of their compliance and risk-scoring processes.
Active Defense currently generates around $11mn in annual recurring revenue for Prospero, demonstrating that improving financial transparency at the grassroots level can be both commercially viable as well as systemically important.
Digital TransformationWinner: ŞekerbankProject: Yerinde Kredi
Turkey’s Şekerbank has taken a novel approach to digital transformation by moving lending out of branches and into the daily commercial workflows of its rural customers through its Yerinde Kredi or “On-Site Loan” model launched in the third quarter of 2025.
Targeting farmers and agricultural micro, small and medium-sized enterprises — segments often constrained by seasonal income patterns — the bank has moved beyond simple digitalisation of existing processes to create a scalable, embedded rural finance infrastructure.
By integrating its credit systems directly into agricultural co-operatives and affiliated merchants, farmers and micro businesses can access financing instantly at the point of purchase.
Meanwhile, repayments are structured around harvest cycles, using agricultural registry data to align loan obligations with the timing of income generation.
As Deniz Kara, digital group head at Şekerbank, explains, the aim was to remove friction from the lending process entirely. “Within two months, TL200mn [$4.5mn] was deployed across more than 230 merchant locations, with 15 per cent of borrowers new to the bank completing the full process digitally and without paperwork.”
Kara says the model has delivered immediate benefits for customers. “Customers gain instant access to capital without visiting a branch, and satisfaction scores reflect this.”
As the model has scaled, the bank says it is significantly expanding access to formal finance, with around 50 per cent of the model’s users now classified as first-time borrowers.
Furthermore, the average loan size of TL800,000 matches the practical financing needs of agricultural production, rather than standardised consumer lending structures.
The Yerinde Kredi model has opened up new growth opportunities for Şekerbank. Kara notes that it has enabled market share gains in a segment where traditional acquisition has become increasingly difficult.
He adds that early results point to further expansion because the bank plans to extend the model to additional co-operatives and other underserved segments.