The world’s best digital banks: The future of retail banking

This report is based on Euromoney’s assessment of over 300 retail banks globally as part of its annual research cycle. It combines written submissions from institutions with qualitative insights from interviews with senior executives – CEOs and other C-suite executives, heads of retail banking and digital banking, heads of strategy and transformation, among others. The research covers the capabilities of digital-focused incumbent banks and their digital-only subsidiaries, as well as standalone digital-only challenger banks.

The quantitative analysis is grounded in a proprietary scoring framework that evaluates each bank against six criteria driving excellence in the fiercely competitive and fast-changing world of digital banking for consumers. The world’s best digital banks MarketMap highlights 20 top-performing retail banks, across two central pillars:

1. Strategy, partnerships and ecosystems

This pillar examines the most effective and successful digital banking strategies, financial and technology partnerships, and infrastructure enhancements that support the digital transformation and growth of the banking industry:

• ​Strategic execution of digital banking strategies, including growth and financial success
• ​Ecosystem development including digital partnerships and open banking integration
• ​Innovative consumer benefits and rewards programmes promoting customer loyalty

2. Customer experience, financial health and inclusion

This pillar examines improvements to customer experience including onboarding and digital customer support tools, anti-fraud and banking security tools and initiatives, as well as products and services promoting financial empowerment and wellbeing, including savings, budgeting and financial planning features:

• ​Customer onboarding processes, digital support services, and initiatives promoting digital product use
• ​Banking security measures including cyber-resilience and anti-fraud measures, promoting trust
• ​Tools and programmes to foster wider financial-sector access and better financial habits

Due to its general-purpose nature, the adoption of AI – including generative and agentic AI – was considered within each section.

Each bank is evaluated using a consistent 0–100 scoring framework across all six criteria. Banks are benchmarked using evidence from documentation reviews, structured expert interviews, platform demos and usage data.

Based on their performance across the two pillars, the top-performing institutions feature in one of three tiers:

Leaders – which are ahead in both axes

Outstanding – which demonstrate excellence in one of these two axes

Distinguished – which offer strong capabilities across multiple digital fronts

There is not one but many routes to success in digital banking. What matters is how banks identify their unique selling points and competitive advantages in the digital world, and leverage on them in a way that is tailored to their social, economic and regulatory environments, and to their company’s specific situation.

The number of new customers is a key performance indicator for any mass-market digital bank. Revolut reached the milestone of 50 million customers in late 2024, less than a decade after its launch. This is largely the result of an unabashedly international strategy. Its proportion of customers in the UK, while still the most numerous, is a shrinking minority. Revolut has not just been agile and aggressive in its rollout of new digital products and services in the app. It has also built a digital brand that is especially appealing to internationally mobile consumers – thanks partly to plugs from social media by influencers, a curated approach to music and fashion partnerships, and the look and feel of the product design.

We’re not doing marketing the way other banks are doing it. We have our own identity

Antoine Le Nel, chief growth and marketing officer, Revolut

Global scale versus local relevance

Revolut stands out for the speed and ease by which consumers can buy financial products in its app. Its experience and brand are “slick and quick”, in the words of Antoine Le Nel, chief growth and marketing officer. Nevertheless, Revolut has increasingly recognised the importance of tailoring its services to individual markets, including offering local IBANs and integrating popular peer-to-peer payments services such as BLIK in Poland and Bizum in Spain. Moving to more local and regional management structures and acquiring a conditional banking licence in the UK last year has, in addition, helped it build a playbook for further licence applications around the world, from Colombia to New Zealand. 

Other banks – new and old – have executed effectively on very different digital banking growth strategies which may be equally appropriate, including limiting their growth to a particular region or even country, especially when that country is large. Rakuten Bank is a digital-only bank founded in the early 2000s and is essentially just in Japan. It has surpassed 17 million customers, growing at around a million a year over the past decade, and becoming a full-service bank.

Nubank, founded in Brazil, is leveraging scale in Brazil to grow in Mexico in Colombia. It had surpassed 100 million customers in Brazil by late 2024, more than half the population. By mid-2025, it had more than 15 million customers across Mexico and Colombia. Meanwhile, Bunq has become Europe’s second largest neobank by growing initially within the EU.

How incumbents can keep up

Sometimes out of financial necessity, too many legacy banks have approached digital banking as merely a way to take cost out of business originating in branches. The best incumbents have been able and willing to go further. They put digital investment at the heart of their group strategies in the previous decade, entrenching technological innovation and data within their culture, and instituting long-standing digital key performance indicators in areas such as the proportion of digitally active customers and app-store ratings.

DBS, China Merchants Bank and BBVA stand out in this regard. Compared to many European banks, DBS had the financial flexibility to ramp up spending on technology a decade ago and later moved to institutionalise data analytics and AI in the firm. It might operate in a relatively small retail market, but its Singapore mobile wallet PayLah! marked its tenth birthday with a record 41.6 million logins a month.

Meanwhile, at BBVA, the proportion of customers acquired through digital channels rose from 21% to 66% over the five years to the end of 2025. It saw an accompanying rise in new customers to 11.4 million in 2024 versus 7.1 million in 2019. BBVA’s number of mobile retail logins and transactions also doubled, to 437 million. And China Merchants Bank recorded 123 million combined monthly active users across its CMB and CMB Life apps.

Among other banks with relatively long histories, Emirates NBD recorded a 91% digital adoption rate on its mobile app ENBD X, while Bank of America recorded 58 million digital users in 2024. A majority of Bank of America’s retail and small business sales are now booked or initiated digitally. That’s partly thanks to heavy investment in its customer chatbot, Erica. Another AI-powered assistant, Kate, is serving a similar function in orchestrating customer interactions at KBC. In Indonesia, Erica also inspired a new digital assistant for BRImo’s 39 million users.

BBVA has largely justified its takeover bid for Banco Sabadell by arguing how bigger customer bases should be better able to compete in the digital and AI-dominated world, thanks to the scalability of IT investment. CaixaBank, while smaller than BBVA on a global basis, became Spain’s dominant bank after its late-2020 takeover of Bankia and has since seen its profitability jump, thanks to higher interest rates. The combined group has subsequently had the greater financial firepower to invest in technology and recently stepped up its three-year budget to €5 billion.

But the volume of cash alone is not decisive. Rather, it’s how it’s used.

The best banks see that digitalisation, including AI, is a means to maintain and grow market share over the longer term: increasingly in a wider range of products. Banks are moving deeper into ecosystems such as housing and mobility. They are partnering with popular app-based brands. And they are building their own financial and lifestyle super-apps. Itaú, for example, launched a new AI-focused app in mid-2024 to unify various older apps that it previously used to service products ranging from credit solutions to cards, payments, financial management, instant transfers and more. Engagement levels subsequently tripled, and it saw a nine-percentage-point increase in its Likert customer satisfaction measure.

As their apps have advanced, many banks are enjoying more frequent contact with their customers than they have ever had before. Users of Bank of America’s app logged in 14.3 billion times last year. At ING, the figure was 8 billion.

Having a sufficiently powerful and user-friendly app is increasingly important as the ease of onboarding increases the number of bank accounts individuals use. Incumbent banks have, up to now, been relatively assured that they could remain the primary customer relationship. But the neobanks are razor-focused on building up enough capability and trust to become the primary or salary bank – and on using their digital capabilities to foster loyalty in general. Asian players such as WeLab Bank use algorithms tuned to customer behaviour to adjust deposit rates, rewarding loyalty.

Neobanks still tend to stand out from the incumbents for the speed at which they can bring new products and features to the market, as well as for their capacity to make their product fun. N26, for example, offered cashback in the form of fractional stocks as part of a pre-Christmas account-opening campaign. Nubank launched 60 products and features between its 2021 IPO and the end of 2024. Nevertheless, the incumbents have emulated many of the neobanks’ most differentiated products and features, and many of them have adopted tech-style methods. More banks have moved to modular tech stacks and agile working methods.

One thing that is hard for incumbents to completely replicate is the lower running cost of branchless banking – something the neobanks can hand back to customers in the form of lower fees or higher savings rates, partly also thanks to the lower running costs of newer IT systems.

Another core advantage that neobanks like Trust Bank have sought to leverage is simplicity – even if it is at a cost of revenue volume and diversity – and consequently transparency. That has sometimes led to higher net promoter and app-store ratings. Some traditional banks have taken an axe to their product ranges to counter this. This may be especially important outside Asia, where iPhones are less dominant and larger mobile screens are common. It can also make digitalisation and migrations from legacy systems easier.

In savings, for example, Lloyds Banking Group essentially moved to three products: instant access, fixed term, and a restricted variable product in which customers get higher rates if they make fewer than a certain number of withdrawals.

Banco Santander has also been on a simplification drive, in its case together with a wider programme to unify its digital retail platforms globally. It cut its number of products by more than a third in 2024.

Translating growth into profitability

Higher interest rates over the past three years have helped boost banks’ profitability firstly via their deposit businesses, boosted by gaining more primary account business. Rakuten Bank increased its number of primary accounts to 5.4 million in 2024, compared to just 935,851 in 2018 – helping an increase in deposit balances from ¥2.1 trillion ($13.7 billion) to ¥12 trillion in this period. At BoursoBank, deposit balances reached €39 billion ($45 billion) at end-2024, while assets under management reached €82 billion.

Targeting younger customers, often well-educated people in urban areas, can naturally lead to higher deposit balances over time. Digital-only banks can also foster more loyal customers as they grow their product use from spending to saving, insurance, and investing.

In the longer term, digital-only banks can no more rely on deposit income and interchange fees alone than their incumbent cousins. Credit and investment products are vital parts of the equation. WeLab Bank, for example, reached its first month of profitability relatively earlier than expected in 2024 after integrating the WeLab group’s online lending arm earlier in the year, tripling its loan book. Subscriptions are adding further revenue streams for banks including N26, Nubank and Revolut, at the same time as locking in higher wallet share.

Basic business banking propositions, often aimed at freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs, is another factor boosting digital banks’ deposit and payments businesses. BoursoBank launched business banking focused on sole traders and owner-managed companies in 2024. Business banking has been core to Wio Bank’s business model from its outset in 2022.

Successful digital banks increasingly integrate a wide array of financial and non-financial services into their digital infrastructure, whether they own it or not. Instead of existing like a digital island – only visited by customers for basic transactions, as a replacement for a human cashier – the best digital banks today exist within a sort of digital high street, where customers might shop for a new television, or pass by the estate agent.
 
The best digital banks, in other words, do not exist in isolation.
 
Successful digital banks are consequently integrating a variety of third-party services developed by fintech players, while at the same time distributing banking services through partners via a banking-as-a-service platform. The latter is an increasingly important business for Japan’s Rakuten Bank, for example, thanks to partnerships with Dai-ichi Life Insurance and rail group JR East.
 
The development of digital channels as the primary channel for customer relationships, coupled with the move away from older monolithic core-banking systems, allows – and demands – that banks follow this ecosystem approach.

Growth beyond banking

Banks, especially in the agentic AI era, are concerned that they will lose contact with customers unless they do more to embed their services in customers’ everyday lives. At the same time, they see a growth opportunity beyond banking, especially when they already enjoy a high degree of market visibility thanks to the incumbency of their core businesses.
 
In Brazil, for example, Itaú has built a section of its app called Itaú Shop – selling everything from kettles to trainers and perfume – offering cashback, special discounts, instalment payments and free shipping on numerous consumer items. Its offers for Apple and Samsung smartphones have been particularly popular. The bank sold 3,500 iPhone 16s in the first 48 hours of the launch of the Apple device in September 2024.
 
In markets where products such as mortgages and auto finance are well developed, the best digital banks are increasingly seeking to connect to the digital consumer ecosystems in sectors such as housing and mobility as part of their efforts to maintain and grow their digital businesses. In Spain, CaixaBank is at the centre of these efforts – launching new used-car sales and property listings portals over the past year, with embedded financing offers.
 
KBC is following a similar approach. In addition to second-hand car listings, it has integrated its app and loan systems into one of Belgium’s biggest property search portals, called Immoscope, of which it owns 50%. In Mexico, meanwhile, BBVA launched a new digital platform for used-car sales in December 2024 – solidifying its dominant position in Mexico’s auto finance market. The platform reduces the risk in used-car transactions between individuals by providing not just listings and financing, but also physical, mechanical and legal inspections. 
 
At KBC, integral to this approach of deploying a wider array of digital products and services is the way in which that customers will be rewarded as they do so. In KBC’s case, that is closely linked to its AI-driven digital assistant, Kate, from which it has grown a rewards system using blockchain, called Kate Coin: a sort of money pegged at a one-to-one rate with euros which is accrued, for example, when buying from certain brands, or when accessing services including loans and insurance from the bank.
In 2024, customers spent €1.1 million in Kate Coins using their Kate Coin wallet, whether in the bank for investments, prepaid cards and insurance or through commercial partners. Karin van Hoecke, general manager for digital transformation and data at KBC Belgium, says the digital assistant serves as the orchestrator for the ecosystem, while Kate Coins are the glue that link all processes together.

The vision is for the bank to go beyond traditional financial advice and become a true partner – supporting customers as they access a broader range of products and services

Karin van Hoecke, general manager for digital transformation and data, KBC Belgium

Rewards for the digital era

Around the world, digital assistants and the ability to plug digital banking platforms into a wider range of consumer business have increased the potential for rewards programmes to foster loyalty, so that customers are more likely to stay with the bank and do more with it. For example, DBS’s Singapore mobile wallet PayLah! covers retail, entertainment, travel and rewards with different stamp card programmes, deals, and rewards.
 
Bank of America’s Preferred Rewards programme is one of the most important rewards programmes in the banking industry globally and continues to grow. Now a decade old, it reached 11 million members in 2024 and posted a 99% retention rate. With tiers depending on average balances kept with the bank, customer benefits include fee waivers and credit card bonuses, as well as discounts on auto loans and mortgages. Members also get cashback and discounts on major brands accessed via mobile or online banking. Bank of America’s digital assistant, Erica, helps customers use the programme, and directs them to the latest benefits and offers.
 
Although organisations like Bank of America have entirely national consumer banking businesses, consumer partnerships and rewards programmes – especially those touching on travel – are also vital for accelerating the expansion of regional and global digital banking businesses.
 
No bank is more alive to this than Revolut: a firm anchored in a digitally active and international mobile customer base. Its pan-European debit-card loyalty programme, RevPoints, gained 6.6 million users in its first six months alone after a launch in June 2024. It allows customers to accrue points on travel, accommodation and more, redeemable in part on the lifestyle section of its app.

Good banks, good partners

Banks like Revolut are successful partly thanks to technical and organisational capacity to launch new products quickly via the app, including from third parties – such as those in Revolut’s Shops and Stays features. NuBank’s NuViagens platform also offers hotel bookings and flight purchases directly through the app, combining with a new Global Account proposition, offering access to over 40 currencies, a debit card accepted in more than 200 countries and a free eSIM with 10GB of data valid in 195 countries. Dutch neobank Bunq offers services including foreign exchange, partner insurance, and user recommendations on places to visit.
 
At Revolut, a network of retail partnerships helps engage digital customers in the app. Yet the choice of partners further helps instil a sense of affinity with the bank. At Revolut, those partners include some of the biggest music festivals in Europe. Primavera Sound in Barcelona attracts travellers from across Europe – especially the UK. Revolut customers can buy tickets in its app, access an exclusive Revolut zone, and buy food and drink at merchants using Revolut Pay.

We see ourselves as a lifestyle platform that ultimately does banking. The brand is about banking and beyond. We are a bank, but also a platform for people’s day-to-day life, whether it’s banking or not

Antoine Le Nel, chief growth and marketing officer, Revolut

In Asia, digital banks are often successful firstly thanks to close partnerships with established retail groups – such as Rakuten Bank’s link to the wider Rakuten group, or Trust Bank’s joint ownership between Standard Chartered and the FairPrice group, owner of Singapore’s largest supermarket chain. Elsewhere, including the Middle East, established banks are reaping similar benefits on more of an arm’s length basis, such as Emirates NBD’s partnership linking its credit card business to the rewards ecosystem of noon, a local e-commerce player.
 
Integrating third-party services into apps can, and often must, include financial services. Offering access to local, global or regionally scaled digital payments service providers can often be decisive for growing business and attracting new customers. An example is Revolut’s localisation of its offering via popular national peer-to-peer payments schemes such as Spain’s Bizum and Poland’s Blik.
 
Neobanks are naturally at ease with a platform-style approach. N26, for example, launched stock and ETF trading in 2024 through German fintech firm Upvest’s Investment API and offers crypto trading via Austria’s Bitpanda. It has a longer-standing integration of Wise international money transfers on the N26 app, and partners with Stripe to allow users to top up N26 accounts using cards and digital wallets. UAE neobank Wio is also largely a product of partners: from Mambu for core-banking technology to Onfido, Feedzai, Paymentology, Xero, Wise, and Stripe for facial recognition, compliance, business card services, accounting software, e-commerce payments and services, respectively.

We are not afraid of working with partners. For us the right strategy is to start with the key product, the current account, and add services around it. There’s a certain element that needs to be owned by us, which is the core customer relationship and the core current account product, but beyond that we have a strong belief in a best-of-breed offering for our customers

Arnd Schwierholz, managing director and chief financial officer, N26

Open banking opportunity

The best digital banks see open banking and open finance not as a threat but as an opportunity. Lloyds Banking Group, for example, is the UK’s biggest retail bank and mortgage lender. It is at the forefront of banks using open banking capabilities to better target its products – anticipating what would be an appropriate mortgage or personal loan, for example, based on a credit score determined through information both with Lloyds and other banks. It can then better time offers to when the customer is most likely to want it, such as when they might have been using the bank’s mortgage repayment calculator or browsing its products.
 
Banks in Asia – including Hong Kong, notably HSBC – are following a similarly proactive approach to open banking adoption, in terms of account aggregation, credit assessments and loan approvals.
 
In Latin America, after the implementation of an open finance framework in Brazil in 2021, Nubank reported over 13 million active consents last year: almost as much as the entire industry’s open banking usage statistics in the UK, even after rapid growth in Europe. Nubank is subsequently giving customers a broader view of their finance that includes not just external balance information but also tools to help them avoid unnecessary fees, such as overdraft alerts, and idle cash notifications.

As digital banking evolves, banks around the world are adopting technologies to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency – putting them ahead of competitors, as customer service and sales become primarily a matter of banks’ capabilities in mobile, and now AI.

Onboarding excellence: Getting off to a good start

Banks globally are reimagining how they onboard customers and encourage early product use – increasingly using AI and automation to streamline and personalise the process. At the same time, cross-border onboarding is expanding access, and gamification is further enriching the onboarding experience. At best, these trends overlap: creating integrated onboarding journeys that are fast, smart, and engaging. Banks that successfully adopt these innovations are well-positioned to build stronger relationships and drive sustainable growth

Digital onboarding has already become the global standard. Banks now offer end-to-end account opening via mobile apps or websites, often completed in minutes. In Singapore, DBS integrated SingPass, the national digital identity system, enabling instant account creation. As a result, an overwhelming majority of new accounts were opened online in 2024, dramatically reducing customer effort. In Europe, seamless digital onboarding helped Revolut become the most downloaded financial app in the UK and Europe.

Traditional banks are catching up. Lloyds Banking Group in the UK has redesigned mobile onboarding to match neobank standards, co-designing and iterating the process with users, partly to ensure accessibility. Neobanks are upping their game in turn. Starling Bank, for example, offers round-the-clock human support during onboarding.

Banks like KBC similarly show that digital onboarding is no longer limited to basic products. It is becoming the default across banking segments. France’s BoursoBank also offers instant onboarding for loans and investment accounts, for example.

Banks such as RCBC in the Philippines and Pakistan’s HBL are, in addition, making it easier for nationals to open accounts back home while they are working abroad. Others are launching children’s accounts with instant digital onboarding. OCBC stands out in the latter case, helping build a strong market share among children’s accounts in Singapore.

Increasingly, automation can make onboarding more efficient, and more effective at managing credit or operational risk. In Taiwan, DBS’s use of rule-based AI to automate credit card onboarding vastly reduced the operational burden on local staff, allowing the business to maintain processing times despite volume surges after DBS’s acquisition of Citi’s Taiwan consumer business. Using AI for anti-money-laundering checks at Trust Bank Singapore helped it onboard 90% of customers without any manual review.

This is not just about cost, however. AI and automation can boost customer experience by making onboarding less stressful and quicker. It can also help subsequent sales. Partly thanks to its 2024 acquisition of Californian data analytics company Hyperplane, Nubank is among the leaders in using AI to analyse customer behaviour and anticipate needs, offering more relevant product recommendations during onboarding.

The fight for customer attention does not end once the account is opened. But if the onboarding phase is engaging – often plugged into wider gamification as well as lifestyle strategies – then customers are more likely to activate their accounts, explore additional services, and remain loyal.

Customer support: From self-service to AI

Once onboarded, AI is also becoming central to customer service, with chatbots and virtual assistants handling an increasing proportion of interactions. These tools operate constantly, managing routine queries, guiding transactions, and escalating complex issues to human agents when necessary. Banks report that AI-driven interactions today often surpass traditional call-centre volumes. The number of clients who have used KBC’s Kate, for example, grew to 5.3 million in 2024.

Bank of America’s Erica is one of the most emulated assistants in the industry globally. By the beginning of this year, Erica had surpassed 2.5 billion interactions since its launch in 2018, and other assistants are gaining traction. In addition to helping with customers’ inquiries, it provides proactive insights, monitors spending, and alerts customers to bill changes.

When we started, Erica acted as a concierge, helping customers find what they were trying to get to. Over time, we’ve added proactive insights to help empower our customers when it comes to their financial lives. Proactive insights have since become the majority of our client interactions

Nikki Katz, head of digital, Bank of America

AI-powered service is consequently shifting from novelty to norm. Advanced natural language processing enables chatbots to address detailed inquiries with personalised responses, such as tailored financial recommendations, or fraud warnings as banks such as Lloyds Banking Group experiment with AI voice and text interfaces to replace conventional call centres.

The trend points to an always-on model where AI augments or performs many service tasks, improving responsiveness and consistency across channels.

The launch late last year of Itaú Unibanco’s Inteligência Itaú points to a further trend around savings and investments. Inteligência Itaú uses gen AI to help customers transfer money and manage their finances, including benefits as part of the bank’s Minhas Vantagens (My Benefits) programme – using natural language and analytics based on customers’ financial habits. Itaú then launched a similar tool focused on investments, based on Inteligência Itaú, in mid-2024. Inteligência de Investimentos Itaú offers wealth-management guidance and decision-making support in a conversational manner, integrated the bank’s investment insights and knowledge bases.

Some incumbent banks with large domestic market shares, such as CaixaBank and Intesa Sanpaolo, mark themselves out by combining digital platforms with in-person service or video calls for more complex advice. Overall, however, digital tools are making services such as financial planning and investing more accessible and often more convenient: offering immediate, personalised advice, with an ability to consolidate financial information in a single view. Banks benefit by deepening relationships and retaining customers who might otherwise turn to fintech competitors.

Even when it does not involve customer-facing gen AI, self-service capabilities can put customers in control and allow them to complete nearly all their banking operations digitally, supported by automated back-end processes. ICBC reports that 98% of personal financial services are now completed through self-service channels. Banks have also introduced in-app service portals for tasks that once required branch visits. Mashreq Bank’s Service Hub, for example, offers over 40 straight-through-processing options, integrating a virtual assistant and self-help videos with a picture-in-picture mode.

More widely, banks are leveraging digital platforms and AI to provide services for customers looking to save and invest that might previously have been done in person or by phone, with an attendant cost.

In addition to the digitalisation of wealth management services, firms are responding both to the development of technology and demographic mobility on the payments side. Banks are offering faster, cheaper and more transparent cross-border payment solutions, often leveraging partnerships and new technologies – allowing them to win share from remittances firms and further strengthening their defences against fintech competitors. Transparency is improving through initiatives like Swift gpi, which can allow even retail customers to track international transfers. Banks are displaying upfront FX rates and fees, reducing uncertainty.

Cross-border QR payments are also gaining traction, notably in Southeast Asia, allowing customers to pay abroad by scanning local QR codes. Integration with foreign e-wallet services is also allowing customers to make instant transfers to services like Alipay or M-PESA. Multi-currency accounts and cards further simplify international spending. In the Netherlands, Bunq’s card that automatically charges the appropriate currency account based on location, is one example. Nubank’s Global Account, launched last year in partnership with UK fintech player Wise and offering access to over 40 currencies, is another.

Security: Five steps to beat bad actors

The rapid expansion of digital channels has increased bank customers’ exposure to cyber threats and sophisticated financial crime using technology. This has, in turn, compelled institutions to invest in advanced technologies and customer safeguards. Five key ingredients of banks’ defences are customer‑controlled security, fortress-style authentication, AI‑driven detection systems, multi‑layered cyber resilience, and – perhaps above all – a security‑first culture.

1. Put security in the hands of your customers

Banks increasingly empower customers to manage their own security, recognising that informed users form a critical line of defence. Self‑service controls allow immediate responses to risk, shrinking the time window in which fraudsters can operate. These measures – such as Revolut’s Lost Device lock, which lets users instantly block access to accounts – place responsive control directly in customers’ hands.

This customer control is now extending to payments and communications verification. Revolut and Nubank let customers set tailored transaction limits, providing guardrails for high‑risk contexts such as travel or suspected device compromise. Starling Bank’s Call Status Indicator feature helps customers confirm whether a call is genuinely from their bank, reducing impersonation fraud that often leverages social engineering. Reflecting situational risk, Nubank’s Modo Rua (Street Mode) enables lower spending limits when off secure wi‑fi, limiting exposure if a device is stolen.

Real‑time visibility and instant action are becoming standard. Banks from Germany’s N26 to Nigeria’s Access Bank deliver immediate transaction alerts and one‑tap card controls, allowing users to respond to anomalies without relying on call centres. These experiences align with modern expectations for convenience and autonomy.

2. Take authentication and identity verification to the next stage

Authentication is evolving to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks, with banks adopting robust, layered identity verification. Multi‑factor authentication (MFA) has become standard; device binding and app‑based tokens are replacing vulnerable SMS codes. Nordea’s integration of national e‑ID systems like MitID and BankID exemplifies secure access built on trusted digital identity infrastructure, reducing unauthorised entry risks.

To guard high‑risk journeys, banks are using real‑time identity checks. In the UAE, Wio Bank pairs live facial recognition with Emirates ID verification for onboarding and sensitive transactions, delivering both speed and accuracy against synthetic and impersonation fraud. At the same time, weaker methods are being phased out. DBS in Singapore has shifted away from SMS one‑time PINs towards phishing‑resistant authentication. Emirates NBD disallows money transfers during active calls to thwart coercion in real time.

3. Use data and AI to prevent criminals from winning

AI is reshaping fraud detection and response, enabling faster and more precise identification of suspicious activity. Scaled, continuous monitoring is essential. HSBC’s AI screens hundreds of millions of transactions monthly, detecting two to four times more financial crime than before and cutting false positives. Bank of America is also using AI to flag anomalies in real time, enabling immediate interventions.

Behavioural analytics extend detection beyond static rules. BBVA and KBC use behavioural biometrics – such as typing cadence and swipe patterns – to identify account takeovers that traditional controls might miss.

AI is also augmenting investigations. WeLab Bank, for example, uncovered a deepfake loan fraud using AI‑powered identity verification, helping dismantle a local fraud syndicate. With greater power, however, comes governance. ING and CaixaBank emphasise explainable, ethical AI to ensure transparency and fairness. Bank of America retains human oversight for judgement‑heavy decisions and focuses AI on objective, high‑volume fraud detection.

4. Build multiple walls to ensure cyber resilience

Robust cyber resilience requires multiple lines of defence and operational continuity plans that withstand and recover from attacks. Rakuten Bank and WeLab Bank showed how this can span network firewalls and endpoint detection, as well as formal compliance frameworks.

Operational resilience to attacks is a core differentiator and IT architecture modernisation programmes to the cloud and microservices underpin these gains, by reducing blast radius, streamlining patching, and embedding resilience into everyday operations. Lloyds Banking Group and China Merchants Bank report near‑perfect uptime enabled by back-office technological modernisation. Banks are also modernising detection and response capabilities. AI‑enabled security operations centres and daily vulnerability scanning at institutions like ICBC accelerates identification and containment of emerging threats.

5. Breed a security-conscious culture

Cybersecurity is as much cultural and collaborative as it is technical. On the customer front, DBS, as well as Banco Santander and RCBC in the Philippines, stand out for public awareness campaigns around things like digital literacy workshops. Emirates NBD and Nordea also embed contextual education into their digital interfaces, helping customers recognise scams quickly.

Inside banks, workforce readiness is being institutionalised with firms like ING and Lloyds Banking Group flagging schemes to embed fraud awareness into their organisational cultures. Cross‑industry collaboration and collaboration with law-enforcement agencies is also crucial, bringing a wider social benefit to banks’ data investments.

Do well by doing good. Digital banking offers lower fixed costs, potentially greater transparency for consumers and, today, much more personalised proactive advice, nudges and alerts using AI.

Emerging technology and the digitalisation of banking services can, as a result, help to bring marginalised communities into the formal economy in a financially sustainable way. It can help ordinary people to manage their finances better, and ultimately to grow wealth. But this is not automatic. Banks need to make responsible but proactive use of the available technology. They need to pass on at least some of the cost savings from digitalisation, especially to lower-income groups. And they need to make their digital banking services easily accessible for all segments of society: not just for well-educated and internationally minded middle classes in the city.

How neobanks breed new customers

In Latin America, Nubank is a prime example of how digital banks have gained traction by targeting customers that incumbent banks have previously neglected. It estimates it has brought more than 21 million people into the formal financial sector. A study by Nubank and Mastercard found that after accessing the service for the first time – most commonly via prepaid cards – around 67% of customers went on to take out loans, with 36% later making investments. 

Spurred on by a more accommodating regulatory environment for bank licences, newcomers in other jurisdictions have taken note. Neobanks such as Trust Bank in Singapore and Wio Bank in UAE have sought to win over customers across all levels of society by offering an easy onboarding process, simple user experience and transparency around fees and rewards. Even in a market as saturated with banks as continental Europe, neobanks like N26 have gained favour with people starting out in their careers, young families, students, freelancers, and people who have just arrived in a country. That’s largely because its processes are simpler and involve less paperwork, and because it’s relatively easy to interact with the bank in English, compared to most traditional banks.

Future-focused digital banks can also help banks to lend to segments of the population which might previously have struggled to borrow, for example because of a lack of formal credit history.

Nubank’s 2024 acquisition of the Californian data intelligence company Hyperplane was made partly with this in mind – a belief that it can use gen AI principles to build proprietary models to predict credit risk, for example. Nubank’s AI technology can subsequently help make use of deeper insights from spending and transaction histories, and from customer interactions with the bank. In Hong Kong, WeLab Bank has also focused heavily on using AI to extend credit to underserved borrowers. The bank recorded a 15% year-on-year drop in delinquencies for 2024 as a result, at a time when the wider market in Hong Kong saw a 7% year-on-year increase.

The innovations boosting financial health

Incumbent banks are also deploying digitalisation in innovative ways, including to help customers improve their financial health. ING, for example, launched a Mortgage Check tool to help Dutch customers assess how their affordability could change over time, with special relevance for interest-only mortgage borrowers. Itaú has also launched a new spending control feature that not only categorises expenses but also allows customers to set limits on how much they spend on a particular category and alerts them when they near or exceed the amount. Like Lloyds, Itaú is also using open banking as part of a credit profile section of its app, helping customers understand and improve their individual borrowing capacity.

As part of the More Money in Your Pocket section of its app, Lloyds Banking Group launched a Benefit Calculator in late 2024 to help customers find out if they are eligible for benefits like council tax discounts, or when improving the environmental sustainability of their homes. It also has a credit score checker in its app which alerts customers to changes in the score and offers them tips on how to improve it. More than 11 million customers had signed up to the latter by early 2025, making it a powerful engagement tool.

Improving app functionality is no good if customers can’t use it, however. Meeting regulatory standards on digital accessibility for diverse abilities is a minimum requirement. As part of a range of initiatives to help older customers, CaixaBank gives elderly people training sessions to help explain how to use its digital capabilities, whether viewing transactions or sending money by Bizum, the Spanish mobile peer-to-peer payments scheme. Digital literacy programmes can be part of banks’ corporate social responsibility programmes, too. DBS’s digital and AI literacy workshops have reached hundreds of thousands of people Singapore. Similarly, making apps available in minority languages – whether English in Rakutenbank’s app or Spanish in Bank of America’s app – works both for the customer and the bank.

Digital banking via USSD services for feature phones is vital for people who lack smartphones or internet access, notably in Africa. Agency banking has spread around the world, from BBVA in Mexico, to Nigeria’s Access Bank and Indonesia’s BRI.

From better habits to greater wealth

Innovative tools and features to help people manage finance better are an essential part of the customer proposition at a time when the threat from disruptors remains ever present. Starling Bank has set out to be better at helping people manage money than the incumbents via tools such as AI-powered spending insights. Yet many incumbents are following suit – and not just in the UK, where Lloyds and HSBC have launched features allowing customers to set savings goals or round up transactions. BBVA, ING and Nordea have all rolled out tools to help customers control expenses, budget, and set aside more money, within the app.

Particularly in markets experiencing rapidly growing levels of wealth, these tools can also help banks earn additional fees through wealth management as digitalisation serves to democratise access to investment services previously reserved for an elite.

This has been a key part of DBS’s strategy. Its mobile banking NAV Planner helps retail customers in Singapore to budget and keep a tab on their bills and spending across categories, sending out personalised nudges. It might flag, for example, how much you are spending on coffee, or warn about overlapping subscriptions. The same app then offers investment tools that seek to mirror an offline consultation with a wealth manager: starting with a questionnaire on their objectives, risk preferences, and financial situation, before shortlisting and recommending investments.

DBS found customers who engaged with the nudges and used the wealth-planning tool saved twice as much as others, were investing five times more, and were nearly three times more insured.

Others are following a similar path. Wio Bank is a rare example of a UAE bank offering cashback on debit as well as credit card transactions. It then offers the option to sweep the cashback into a savings space or to an investment app, allowing people with as little as $1 to invest in ETFs or fractional shares at market-beating commissions. WeLab Bank has similarly built a goal-based digital wealth adviser in partnership with Allianz Global Investors, with a low minimum investment and fee-free transactions. And the corollary of Itaú’s spending control features is its Cofrinhos (piggy banks) tool, which allows customers to allocate as little as BRL1 (20c) to personalised reserves, earning daily interest, as a step towards investing.

By the end of 2024, Bank of America had counted 17.8 million users of its digital Life Plan service since its launch in 2020. The service allows banking and investments customers at Merrill to set and adjust goals for things like retirement or just a holiday, allowing them to track progress and use checklists for popular goals – along with content from its Better Money Habits digital financial education library around what buying a home might involve, plus a home affordability calculator, and free credit-score copies.

At the same time, more banks are launching feature-rich digital accounts for children: boosting financial knowhow among a next generation of bank customers, using technology. At best, these also factor in an onboarding process so that customers can transition seamlessly from child to student accounts and beyond. In 2024, Bank of America, for example, launched a zero-maintenance-fee account for children in 2024 as part of its zero-overdraft SafeBalance product: giving parents real-time alerts and allowing them to set daily spending limit and to lock and unlock the card.

Elsewhere, Nubank’s under-18s product has gained more than 3 million users, offering fee-free debit cards and savings tools. Erste Group launched George Junior, a gamified app for children aged 7 to 14, combining financial education with parental oversight. Emi rates NBD launched its Liv Lite app for children offering goal-based savings and spending alerts for parents. In France, BoursoBank launched a new Freedom account for teenagers, with customisable controls, savings pots, SMS payments and rewards.

 We have seen real cases of customers who have moved from a net-negative balance at the end of the month to net positive. And they can use the same app that they use for their day-to-day financial planning to talk about what they hope to accumulate, which we can useto give suggestions as to how they should deploy savings

Shee Tse Koon, group head of consumer banking and wealth management, DBS

Banking has changed dramatically over the past 15 years. Banking apps have become the focal point for trust, and for banks’ ability to retain customers and grow wallet share. The emergence of smartphones as the dominant channel has consequently created a new set of leaders. In a sense, decade-old digital banks like Revolut and Nubank are today incumbents: the ones that dominate the digital world of retail banking.

But in the years ahead, banking may be about to change again.

The next stage is for banks to consider in more depth the potential impact of gen AI and of stablecoins on their business. Even before the US passed the Genius Act of mid-2025, the most future-forward digital banks were exploring issuing their own stablecoins, and they have since accelerated those projects.

The industry, meanwhile, have been rightly cautious about deploying customer-facing use cases of large language models and agentic AI without close human oversight. Yet, banks cannot ignore how AI is already bringing the signs of another dramatic shift in the sector – perhaps more radical than mobile banking.

If banking is increasingly done by agents in the background, banking products could become even more commoditised. User-friendly digital capabilities that are effectively plugged into wider financial and consumer ecosystems – and trusted by customers to handle their data safely – will be even more important.