Fintech leaders go into 2026 with a familiar tension: customer expectations keep rising, while regulators, boards and auditors are pushing harder on resilience, data controls and operational risk. That pressure is showing up in global payments policy, too.

Against that backdrop, executives and vendors who shared their 2026 predictions with TechInformed point to practical shifts already reshaping fintech roadmaps. Agentic AI is moving from demos into regulated workflows, while “trust-by-design” controls, fraud and identity checks, and resilience engineering become gating requirements for real-time money movement.

ISO 20022 readiness work is hitting hard deadlines, APIs are expanding as regulations push richer data sharing, finance teams are tightening spend discipline, and digital assets are moving closer to the core as stablecoin policy firms up in the US and UK.

Agentic AI expands but data governance decides who can scale

“The defining force in fintech by 2026 will be the rapid, widespread rise of AI agents and embedded finance, automating everything from financial access to compliance. The era of basic mobile app digitisation will give way to true automation.”

By Brett Sievwright, Founder and CEO of Platcorp Group on TechInformed