Some years bring steady evolution; others ignite transformation. For banking and payments, 2026 has been the latter. And not only that, but the pace change has accelerated. For example, last year, seemingly overnight, stablecoins looked to be finally gaining traction, but 2027 suggests a more nuanced future.
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Part preview, part advisory, Celent’s annual Previsory series delivers a forward look at the technologies redefining financial services and how to respond to them.
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Last year, Celent organised the Previsories in Banking and Payments around three key technology trends and imperatives, which also provided the backbone of its research agenda through 2026.
Celent believes these trends and imperatives remain valid long term and will continue to frame its agenda. However, for 2027, Celent decided to focus on five major developments that occurred in 2026 and will shape 2027 and beyond. Each of these imperatives impacts one or more of the long-term pillars of banking transformation.
The Celent 2026 series of Previsory webinars
- Corporate banking: 9 November 16.00 GMT
- Property and casualty insurance 10 November 15.00 GMT
- Life and Health insurance 10 November 16.00 GMT
- Capital Markets 12 November 15.00 GMT
- Retail Banking 12 November 16.00 GMT
- Wealth Management 13 November 16.00 GMT
- Risk 17 November 16.00 GMT
Celent’s Technology Trends Previsory, Corporate Banking and Payments: 2027 Edition is now available online for subscribers and can be accessed via this link.
Non-subscribers can learn how to access the full report via the contact us section of the site.
Colin Kerr, head of banking and payments, Celent, kicked off the corporate banking previsory webinar on 9 November by highlighting the four mega forces reshaping banking worldwide.
- Macroeconomic headwinds and geopolitical disruption;
- AI’s exponential advancements
- DeFi enters the real-world economy
- Attack vectors multiply
After Celent examined the megatrends, its Dimensions survey and recent client discussions, it selected five key trends it believes matter most to clients in corporate/transaction banking.
- Reinventing the commercial credit lifecycle
Embedding decision intelligence and enabling a flexible faster workflow
- Trade digitisation with AI, platforms and partnerships
Modernising the financial supply chain with AI-enabled trade and payments platforms and partners
- New strategies for a new era of transaction management
An explosion of options increasing complexity and requiring new operating models and tech
- Tokenisation of transaction banking
A surge in competitors and new business and operating models putting pressure on traditional financial institutions
- The AI era of corporate engagement
Channel step change is underway, opening new doors to differentiation and API edge.
Craig Focardi, principal analyst, Celent summarised the case for reinventing the commercial credit life cycle. He noted that commercial credit lending is one of the last big areas of banking that is running heavily on manual processes. The full Celent report makes the case for financial institutions to rebuild around shared data and governed AI: new operating models, architecture and decisioning. That means changes in the operating model and in investment priorities.
Focardi explained how financial institutions can reinvent around data and system integration and workflow, digital document management, governed AI, and enhanced IT architecture. The framework is meant for small business lending, commercial, corporate, and commercial real estate lending.
“Although most banks run different lending systems in those areas, so the path to reinvention may vary. But these areas do overlap, and this framework is more focused on automating each line of business with a common set of automation, integration, workflow, and AI capabilities.”
Banks will be able to measure success by four metrics: risk-adjusted returns, approval rates, time to decision and credit and fraud losses.
“Most banks run different lending systems in those areas, so the path to reinvention may vary. But these areas do overlap, and this framework is more focused on automating each line of business with a common set of automation, integration, workflow, and AI capabilities.
“First, change the operating model. Organise around process automation via document automation, integration, AI augmented customer engagement, decisioning, and workflow. Pick the highest value automation use cases in each product line and measure them the same way: risk-adjusted returns, approval rates, and revenue growth.
“Second, redesign the value chain and AI-enabled decisioning. In the middle is the redesigned credit value chain: onboard and spread, underwrite and decide, monitor and service. And today, those stages are not as fully connected as they could be. For today, I’ll just focus on how AI can further integrate the credit value chain and bring these processes together. LLMs augment employees’ activities by drafting credit memos, summarising periodic relationship reviews, and answering questions about lending policies, machine learning supports credit decisioning with risk scoring and cash flow analysis. Document AI handles document scanning, data extraction, automated system entry, and fraud reviews. And finally, agentic AI-powered workflow can automate the routine movement of files, tasks, and exceptions to the right people.
“Third, fraud and collateral controls: Commercial fraud is getting more sophisticated with synthetic businesses, falsified financials, and identity fraud. Catching these fraudsters takes integrated identity, entity, credit, and fraud data, along with analytics and decisioning systems. For example, machine learning and graph analytics flags synthetic businesses, identity fraud, and duplicate collateral pledging to multiple lenders. Graph analytics also exposes hidden connections between businesses, owners, addresses, and assets that no single app application could catch.
Enhance the IT architecture
“All of this requires IT enhancement: a unified data foundation with integrated sources, lineage, and quality controls, workflow orchestration that ties together models, rules, documents, and systems, and very importantly, a governance layer with explainability, audit trails, and compliance testing, and finally reusable decision services for credit, collateral, and fraud risk.”
“The banks that win in 2027 won’t just bolt AI onto today’s fragmented processes. They’ll rebuild commercial credit around an enhanced IT architecture, automated documentation, and governed IT.”
Trade digitisation with AI, platforms and partnerships
Kerr highlighted the three key shifts that will redefine trade in 2027.
- The shift to open account remains intact but documentary trade rises. The counter-trend in 2025-2026. As an established risk mitigation tool, documentary trade is favoured in high risk corridors and strategic sectors
- AI and automation raise capabilities for all banks
AI technology advances will show improvements across the trade finance value chain(s) in documentary processing, workflow automation and analytics
- Opportunity for regional banks
Kerr explained how regional and mid-size banks have an opportunity to gain market share through AI-enabled strategic partnerships and partnerships.
Celent’s take
“The turbulence of today’s trade environment, combined with increased fraud, makes digitisation of trade flows and operations an imperative. Leading banks will find new opportunities with platform offerings that combine digital, trade and payments strategies – with AI infused throughout”: Colin Kerr.
New strategies for a new era of transactions management
Gareth Lodge, principal analyst, payments at Celent, highlighted the dawn of a post-rail, post-payment era. Rail-choice used to be a back-office cost decision. It is now a key battleground and complexity will keep rising before it settles.
“The future means looking beyond todays’ traditional views of what rails and payments are. Being bound by traditional rails will increasingly limit banks capabilities”: Lodge.
In the past, payment services hubs was about decoupling existing processes. Going forward, Lodge said that it is likely that the service will become even more granular and not all services will be internal to the bank. But more choices does not help choose the right choices.
“Reimagining how the architecture and processes required will be critical.
“If you do what you always did, you’re likely always going to get what you’ve always got. So, it’s that rebuilding from the ground up, reimagining, rewiring for what’s coming next. Given the pace of change over the last 20 months, we can’t start to even think about what we might be talking about in two years’ time, and so building for today makes no sense anymore. You’ve got to build in such a way that you can agilely respond to whatever change is coming, bringing on the latest new form of money, taking those off as they don’t get traction, and having far, far more options than you’ve ever had before. And that’s just a fundamentally different way of thinking.
Tokenisation of transaction banking
Alenka Grealish, senior analyst at Celent, said: “Banks can lead tokenised money but they must commit. In our report we double-clicked on specifically tokenisation of transaction banking, so anything to do with payments, trade finance, liquidity management, and our quick take is banks can lead, but they must commit. How can they lead? They must have a robust mid-run strategy. They already are able to offer both stablecoins and tokenised deposits, as well as deposit tokens.
However, Grealish cautioned that banks will have to work for their success here. “They have to earn their primacy because a lot of other providers to corporations see an entree into capturing more of the financial supply chain. You have ERP and TMS providers that are incorporating stablecoins and neo trust banks such as Ripple that are pursuing managing stablecoin reserves and acting as wallet custodians for institutions. You have non-bank corporate card issuers like Ramp and PSPs like Stripe that see a new way to earn more of that transaction revenue flow.
“We believe within five years AI agents are going to increasingly have a role in choosing the routing. Banks have to make sure that they’ve got attractive economics here. There will be consolidation to a few winners. It was similar in card rails, consolidated debit card rails. We have seen this economic force happen before. We don’t expect more than a few banks to issue their own stable coins again because you’ve got to scale, and there’s only so much scaling that that’s going to happen, and we think that consortiums are going to be challenged.
“It’s very hard to create win-win-win-win economics across disparate participants with different objectives, all wanting to be competitive. So we think that’s going to be a bit challenging. So all in all, banks can’t stand still here. They have to decide: Am I playing defence or offense?
