Meniga Team
13.08.2025
Staying tied to legacy systems and slow innovation cycles can affect both your relevance and revenue.
In fact, the Digital Banks market alone is projected to generate $1.61 trillion in Net Interest Income in 2025, with a 6.80% CAGR through 2029, reaching $2.09 trillion.
That’s growth traditional banks can’t afford to ignore.
Read on to learn more about key digital banking trends so that you can rethink and reshape your strategies and stay relevant.
Here are the key digital banking trends that every bank should be watching closely.
| Trend | Description |
| Hyper-personalisation and AI-driven experiences | Use of advanced AI/ML to deliver tailored, real-time financial services and proactive guidance |
| Embedded and connected banking | Integration of banking features within daily platforms like shopping, travel, messaging, and the growth of super-apps |
| Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) and cloud transformation | Adoption of cloud platforms and open APIs for modular, agile, and scalable financial services |
| Autonomous and live banking | AI-managed savings, payments, investments with real-time decisioning and instant financial services |
| Real-time payments and digital wallet boom | Surge in real-time payment systems and widespread mobile wallet usage |
| Enhanced cybersecurity | Integration of AI-powered cybersecurity, fraud prevention, biometric authentication, and behavioural analytics |
| Open finance and API ecosystems | Promoting transparency and customer control over financial data via open banking and API-driven ecosystems |
Banks use advanced AI and machine learning to deliver hyper-personalised financial services by tailoring products, advice, and interactions in real time to each customer’s specific needs.
AI chatbots provide instant, conversational support, handling routine queries, guiding through loan applications, and even detecting customer sentiment.
This results in a 24/7 personalised customer service experience that feels intuitive and human-like.
AI analyses spending habits, income flow, savings goals, and life events to offer proactive, tailored financial advice and budgeting recommendations.
For example, a banking app might alert customers about overspending in certain categories, allowing timely corrective action.
With the help of AI, customers can anticipate financial events, such as upcoming large payments or declining balances, weeks in advance.
This way, your bank can offer customised strategies to avoid overdrafts or manage cash flows.
Worth Knowing:
Meniga Insights is an AI-powered platform that enables hyper-personalised engagement and real-time customer intelligence.
By analysing behavioural and transactional data, banks can understand and respond to customer needs with precision and immediacy.
At the same time, customers can trigger tailored notifications, in-app insights, and dynamic user interfaces.
This smart, data-driven approach restores the personal touch in digital banking, boosting trust, customer retention, digital sales, and long-term growth.
AI systems can consider broader data beyond traditional credit history, including real-time salary flows, rent payments, and spending patterns.
As a result, they create more comprehensive credit profiles, enabling smarter lending decisions and expanding financial inclusion for underserved segments.
AI automates internal processes such as analysing complex financial documents, prioritising credit file review based on risk, pre-filling loan applications, and dynamically managing workloads.
Generative AI models create custom-tailored communications and investment advice, enhancing engagement and decision-making quality.
These models support financial advisors and robo-advisors in delivering scalable, client-specific wealth management services.
Generative AI enables high levels of personalisation, automation, and real-time decision support.
| Aspect | Description |
| Automated and personalised plans | GenAI autonomously creates tailored financial plans that analyse income, expenses, goals, and risk tolerance, and update dynamically with changing circumstances. |
| Enhanced client engagement | Produces personalised, clear communications and reports in natural language, improving client understanding and trust. |
| Improved decision-making | Combines generative AI with predictive analytics to forecast markets, identify risks, and recommend proactive portfolio adjustments. |
| Cost-effective accessibility | Automates routine tasks (data entry, risk evaluation, reporting), lowering costs and expanding access to personalised advice for underserved clients. |
| Real-time scenario simulation | Creates "financial twins" that simulate “what if” scenarios, helping clients visualise the impacts of financial decisions and events. |
| Regulatory and compliance | Ensures transparency in AI decision-making with necessary human advisor oversight to manage risks and maintain trust. |
Worth knowing:
Meniga is currently developing a Conversational Financial Assistant, an LLM-powered tool tailored for banks that provides real-time, natural-language financial insights.
Customers can ask questions like “How much did I spend on groceries?” and receive accurate, personalised answers.
Built with enriched data and banking-grade security, it enhances digital engagement, reduces support needs, and positions banks as trusted, modern financial advisors.
Embedded and connected banking integrates banking functionalities directly into non-financial digital platforms.
This means that customers can access banking features, such as payments, accounts, cards, lending, and expense management, within apps and services they already use.
They don’t need to switch or open separate banking apps.
And benefits work both ways.
Businesses embedding financial services see significant market advantages, including 2 to 5 times higher customer lifetime value and 30% lower acquisition costs.
Embedded finance can generate substantial additional revenue through transaction fees and improved retention.
The ecosystem relies heavily on modern fintech infrastructure, especially APIs that enable seamless embedding of financial functions.
Open banking regulations enhance security and efficiency, allowing you to build more personalised and interoperable services.
| Key functionalities and benefits | What does it mean? |
| Seamless integration | Banking services are embedded into non-financial digital platforms, enabling customers to access banking features without leaving the app. |
| Expanding scope beyond Payments | Includes embedded lending, such as buy now, pay later, bank accounts, and expense management integrated into platforms beyond simple payments. |
| Revenue growth and customer loyalty | Embedded finance drives 2-5x higher customer lifetime value, 30% lower acquisition costs, and adds significant revenue through fees and retention. |
| Technology enablers | Reliant on APIs, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), and open banking regulations that allow secure, interoperable embedment of financial services. |
| Enhanced user experience | Provides frictionless, intuitive financial services directly within the apps users already engage with. |
Some practical cases include:
Branded debit cards within mobile apps,
Instant driver payouts in ride-sharing apps,
Small business loans directly through accounting software, or
Direct payment gateways in online retail.
Regardless of the case, they all have a common goal: to eliminate redirects and streamline flows.
For example, Meniga’s flexible APIs enable seamless integration with cloud services and third-party fintech applications, facilitating open banking, embedded finance, and composable financial services.
The global XaaS market is rapidly expanding and is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 20-24% over this decade.
The main ‘culprit’ for such growth is demands for cost efficiency, agility, and remote accessibility through cloud-based service delivery models.
Banks and financial institutions adopt cloud platforms to move away from legacy infrastructures to modular, API-driven, cloud-native architectures.
This enables rapid innovation, faster time to market for new products, and on-demand scalability.
Everything from core banking software, payment processing, compliance tools, and AI analytics, to customer engagement platforms is delivered as a service, allowing financial institutions to pay for what they use without heavy upfront capital expenditure.
3 key benefits of the XaaS model:
Agility and scalability: Cloud and XaaS models enable dynamic scaling of resources and services up or down based on demand. This capability is useful for handling peak transaction volumes or adapting to market changes.
Cost efficiency: Subscription and usage-based pricing reduces capital investment and operational expenses.
Automation and AI integration: AI-driven workflow automation, risk management, and customer personalisation capabilities are integrated into XaaS platforms, enabling banks to improve operational efficiency and customer experience.
Meniga’s solutions are designed with modularity and micro-services fluency, which align perfectly with the XaaS model.
This allows you to implement new features quickly, scale services on demand, and adapt to evolving customer needs and market trends without heavy infrastructure investment.
Also, you can modernise your legacy systems into scalable, cloud-hosted services while delivering personalised, real-time, and adaptive financial services with improved operational agility, cost efficiency, and customer engagement.
Autonomous and live banking represents a major transformation in banking services, where financial systems use advanced AI and real-time data to act independently and proactively on behalf of customers.
Autonomous banking systems make decisions, optimise financial outcomes, and execute complex tasks with minimal human input, creating a seamless, intelligent, and live banking experience.
Key functionalities include:
Autonomous banking involves AI-driven systems and algorithms that respond to customer commands and also take initiative. For example, they can proactively manage savings, payments, investments, credit adjustments, and alerts.
These systems use real-time data and predictive analytics to monitor accounts, detect potential overdrafts, optimise fund allocation, automatically pay bills, and change credit limits dynamically based on income flows and spending behaviours.
AI-driven autonomous agents act almost like personal CFOs, handling repetitive tasks, providing personalised financial advice, and anticipating customer needs before they arise.
Autonomous banking cuts operational costs by automating labour-intensive processes like fraud detection, compliance reporting, customer verification, and credit assessment.
Banks can leverage autonomous finance to create new revenue streams via premium automated financial management services, personalised product offers, and subscription models that bundle intelligent saving, investing, and tax optimisation tools.
Meniga’s Smart Savings lets customers create dedicated savings pots for specific goals, such as buying a home, a car, or planning a vacation.
A great perk is that you can create automated or manual saving rules, which provide more flexibility while helping you save.
Real-time payments and digital wallet usage are becoming one of the key digital banking trends.
Real-time payments (RTP) eliminate delays associated with batch systems.
Instant payroll deposits, insurance payouts, B2B settlements, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, and merchant payments are handled in seconds.
As a result, it improves cash flow for businesses and boosts customer satisfaction.
AI and machine learning support real-time payment systems, providing instant fraud detection, risk assessment, and dynamic workflow automation to keep up with transaction speed and prevent abuse.
A little fun fact before we say more about digital wallets.
Did you know that the Middle East is the world’s fastest-growing real-time payments market, with transactions projected to rise from $675 million in 2022 to $2.6 billion by 2027, driven by a 30.6% CAGR?
When it comes to RTP transaction volume, India leads in the APAC region
At the same time, in Europe, SEPA Instant should enable payments in ten seconds or less where supported. However, adoption across the EU remains low, with only 11% of euro transfers processed instantly.
Digital wallets account for over 50% of all global eCommerce transaction value, up from just over 40% in 2021.
Wallets now facilitate both online and physical payments, handling $41 trillion in digital wallet spending worldwide in 2024, and are on track to reach $55.9 trillion by 2029.
Apple Pay stands out with $10 trillion in annual transaction volume and a 92% share of mobile wallet transactions in the U.S..
Still, Google Pay, PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and a growing host of regional players, such as Bizum in Spain and Swish in Sweden, are also experiencing rapid expansion.
Asia-Pacific, especially China, dominates, but Latin America, Africa, and Europe are catching up.
These statistics present clear opportunities for banks to leverage real-time payment capabilities.
Combining RTP systems with digital wallets gives consumers instant access to funds at all times, removing ‘banking hours’ boundaries and allowing global financial flows to happen in seconds.
With this, you can:
Enhance customer satisfaction by providing instant access to money, which is critical for consumers, gig workers, small businesses, and enterprises needing fast cash flow. Digital wallets facilitate seamless, convenient payments embedded within mobile devices, making banking more accessible and user-friendly.
Free up working capital immediately, allowing businesses and consumers to use funds right away rather than waiting for traditional batch processing or checks.
Launch premium or tiered real-time payment services, charging for instant settlement, or create innovative products like instant payroll, same-day merchant payouts, or request-for-payment features. Digital wallets can become platforms for integrated financial management, payments, loyalty programs, and new business models.
Provide access to a range of financial services besides payments, such as savings, investments, credit, and insurance through digital wallets. Integrating these with real-time payments creates unified, user-centric platforms supporting comprehensive digital banking experiences.
Cybersecurity remains one of the biggest challenges of digital banking, so it’s no surprise that it’s a trend that remains relevant.
It combines advanced AI, behavioural analytics, biometric authentication, and integrated fraud detection to protect banks and their customers from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
This enables immediate automated response to potential fraud or breaches, minimising damage and downtime.
AI helps identify subtle behavioural deviations that traditional systems miss, such as unusual spending or login patterns.
| Capability | What does it do? |
| AI-powered real-time threat detection | Continuous monitoring with AI/ML detects anomalies and suspicious behaviour instantly, enabling automatic response to fraud or breaches. |
| Advanced biometric and continuous authentication | Use of biometrics combined with behavioural analysis for frictionless, secure, and adaptive user verification throughout sessions. |
| Zero trust security architecture | Strict access controls and identity verification with least privilege principles minimise risks in distributed digital banking infrastructures. |
| Quantum-resistant cryptography and privacy enhancements | Adoption of quantum-safe encryption and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to safeguard data privacy and future-proof security. |
| Automated risk and compliance monitoring | Continuous AI-driven compliance checks and audit trails ensure adherence to regulations like GDPR, PSD2, and DORA. |
| Supply chain and 3rd-party risk management | Secure management and monitoring of vendor and partner environments minimise risks from outsourced services and fintech collaborations. |
| Customer education and trust building | Ongoing awareness programs and transparent communication empower customers to protect accounts and reinforce trust. |
Open Finance goes further than traditional Open Banking by integrating a wide range of financial data and services, such as payments, investments, insurance, and credit, into unified ecosystems.
In other words, banks, fintechs, payment providers, and various third-party apps collaborate through APIs, delivering integrated and user-centric financial services.
APIs act as a backbone for secure data sharing and service interoperability, allowing different systems to communicate and enabling banks to offer modular, composable financial services.
With open finance, banks leverage AI models on cross-domain financial data accessible via APIs to provide:
Hyper-personalised financial advice,
More accurate risk assessments,
Real-time fraud detection, and
Dynamic product offerings tailored to individual behaviours and contexts.
Meniga’s Enrichment Engine unifies internal, open banking, and third-party data to provide financial institutions with a complete, enriched view of customer spending and finances, setting the basis for true personalisation.
Meniga provides digital banking solutions to more than 30 large financial institutions worldwide.
We help banks modernise their digital banking platforms, boost customer engagement, and accelerate growth by turning transaction data into hyper-personalised insights.
With Meniga, you can:
Seamlessly integrate our solutions into your existing systems to modernise your digital environment, no matter the underlying architecture.
Gain deeper customer understanding by segmenting users based on spending behaviour, cash flow, and financial goals.
Deliver dynamic, context-aware content tailored to each segment for more meaningful engagement.
Easily create custom events using intuitive conditions and dynamic data points.
Provide timely financial insights and alerts to help customers stay on top of their finances and avoid unnecessary fees.
Encourage healthier financial habits with personalised, goal-driven recommendations.
Use advanced analytics to match the right products with the right customers, at the right time and in the right context.
Ready to explore more?
Contact us today to discover how you can modernise your digital services and keep up with the latest digital banking trends.
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