Industry Outlook: Banking & Financial Services — Week of March 23, 2026

Market Outlook

• Nasdaq wins SEC nod for tokenized securities. SEC approval for Nasdaq to trade certain stocks as tokens is a watershed moment for regulated digital assets. It signals that tokenization is moving from proof-of-concept into supervised market infrastructure, with implications for how banks think about custody, collateral, and post-trade processing in a multi-asset, multi-ledger world.
• UBS gains US national bank charter. UBS’s conversion from a state-chartered industrial bank to a national bank unlocks “everyday banking” for wealth clients in the US. This underscores a broader convergence of wealth, retail, and digital banking, putting pressure on incumbents to deliver integrated experiences across deposits, lending, and advisory on unified platforms.
• Capital rules rethink favors largest US banks. Joint proposals from the Fed, FDIC, and OCC could lower capital requirements for the biggest banks by ~4.8% and by ~7.8% for the smallest. If finalized, this frees balance sheet capacity for growth in fee-based and capital-intensive businesses—payments, wealth, and embedded finance—but will also come with heightened supervisory scrutiny of risk, data, and model governance.

Discussion: This week tilts the strategic landscape toward regulated digital assets and universal banking models. CTOs should reassess digital asset roadmaps, core platform extensibility, and data foundations for more complex regulatory and capital optimization demands.

Headwinds

• Macro shock from Iran war and energy spike. Escalating conflict in the Gulf is driving oil and gas price surges, rattling stock markets and pushing up inflation expectations and sovereign borrowing costs, especially in the UK and Europe. Banks face higher credit risk in energy-exposed sectors, margin pressure from rate volatility, and potential stress on retail customers’ ability to service debt as energy and food bills rise.
• SVB collapse review and tougher supervisory tone. The Federal Reserve’s decision to commission an external review of the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank failure keeps supervisory focus squarely on interest rate risk, liquidity, and concentration exposures. Expect more intrusive questions on ALM models, stress testing capabilities, and the quality of data feeding risk dashboards, particularly in digitally focused and regional banks.
• AI-driven workforce cuts highlight automation risk. Crypto.com’s 12% layoffs “citing AI” and JPMorgan’s pilot to algorithmically monitor junior bankers’ working hours illustrate AI’s dual edge: productivity gains and heightened internal and external scrutiny. Poorly governed AI in HR, surveillance, or customer interaction can trigger regulatory, reputational, and employee-relations risk at scale.

Discussion: Defensive priorities should center on strengthening risk data pipelines, recalibrating stress tests for energy and rate shocks, and tightening AI governance—especially for workforce analytics and decision automation affecting customers or staff.

Tailwinds

• Agentic AI moves from concept to live banking. Starling Bank’s rollout of an on-app agentic AI money manager, alongside Aveni’s Agent Assurance Expert Council for oversight, shows that autonomous financial agents are entering production in regulated environments. Early movers are using agentic AI to differentiate personal and business banking through proactive insights, cashflow forecasting, and automated actions.
• Open banking extends into wearables and POS. Huawei and Yowpay’s launch of an open banking smartwatch POS app demonstrates how account-to-account payments are escaping traditional form factors. This opens new rails for low-cost, instant payments in retail and micro-merchant segments, and creates fresh data streams at the edge for banks that can integrate with these ecosystems.
• Visa consolidates payment intelligence via single API. Visa’s Intelligent Authorisation API, designed to smart-route and enrich authorization decisions, is a practical example of network-level intelligence abstracting legacy complexity. For banks and acquirers, this offers a path to improve approval rates, fraud detection, and user experience without a full rip-and-replace of aging payments stacks.

Discussion: To capitalize, CTOs should prioritize agentic AI pilots in clearly bounded use cases, invest in open banking and real-time payment connectivity, and selectively leverage network APIs to modernize payment decisioning while legacy decommissioning lags.

Tech Implications

• Tokenization demands new custody and core hooks. Nasdaq’s tokenized securities plan will force banks to support hybrid models where the same economic asset exists as both traditional book-entry and tokenized representation. This requires extensible core banking and securities platforms, digital-asset-aware custody layers, and standardized interfaces for on-chain/off-chain reconciliation, collateral management, and corporate actions.
• Agentic AI needs real-time data and guardrails. Starling’s agentic AI assistant and Aveni’s oversight initiative highlight that autonomous agents require low-latency access to transaction, product, and risk data plus robust policy constraints. Architecturally, this favors event-driven designs, fine-grained entitlements, and AI control planes that log, simulate, and constrain agent behavior for auditability and consumer duty compliance.
• Open banking and wearable POS test API maturity. The smartwatch POS launch via open banking APIs shows how third parties will increasingly orchestrate the front-end experience while banks supply regulated rails and data. Banks need secure, well-documented, high-availability APIs, strong consent management, and anomaly detection to handle higher-frequency, low-value, device-originated payment flows without elevating fraud risk.

Discussion: Engineering leaders should double down on API-first, event-driven architectures and introduce AI governance tooling as a first-class platform concern. Core modernization roadmaps must explicitly plan for digital asset support, richer consent and identity layers, and real-time risk evaluation at the edge.

CTO Action Items

This week, prioritize a cross-functional review of your AI portfolio: inventory where agentic or semi-autonomous behavior is emerging (customer assistants, surveillance, workforce tools) and ensure you have explicit guardrails, logging, and human-in-the-loop controls. Ask your architecture teams to produce a short briefing on what Nasdaq’s move into tokenized securities would require from your custody, core banking, and risk systems over a 3–5 year horizon. In parallel, stress-test your credit and liquidity risk models against an extended high-energy-price scenario and confirm that the underlying data feeds and assumptions are still valid. Finally, accelerate API hardening and observability for open banking and real-time payments, as wearable and embedded endpoints will increase transaction volumes, edge-originated risk, and expectations for instant, intelligent authorization decisions.