It's obviously welcome to see savings rates go up. Albeit from a low enough base. Several new providers such as Moco, Monzo, and Bankinter are all now quite active in the savings space in Ireland, so this is perhaps a response to increased competition.
Launching a fund used to be a real test of endurance, with timelines often stretching across many months. The process demanded patience that many ambitious founders found difficult to sustain.
Leading US banks are not just going digital; they are realizing that digital savings and loans alone do not ensure sustained engagement or profitability. These services must connect to the banks' core strengths: trust, scale, and long-term financial relationships.
The problem was not growth or demand or even competition. It was settlement. Payments took days to clear. Reconciliation took weeks. Cash piled up in the wrong places. Finance teams spent their time explaining why the numbers did not match instead of planning what came next.
I'm the general manager of Paze, one of the business units of Early Warning Services. The mandate is really to take Paze and bring this new payment checkout system to the masses - both on the consumer side and on the merchant side - really making sure that our goal of becoming one of the top three wallets for checkout in the next five years becomes reality.
The new battleground in banking is intelligent operations and scalable execution. In 2026, banking is about moving money smarter, faster, and with fewer humans in the middle. Across corporate finance and global retail operations, banks are experimenting with technology and operational design in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about scale, speed, and control. Three recent developments exemplify what's happening in money movement: Goldman Sachs deploying AI agents, Truist automating corporate receivables, and Nubank expanding abroad with a lean digital model.
For most of modern finance, one number has quietly dictated who gets ahead and who gets left out: the credit score. It was a breakthrough when it arrived in the 1950s, becoming an elegant shortcut for a complex decision. But shortcuts age. And in a world driven by data, digital behavior, and real-time signals, the score is increasingly misaligned with how people actually live and manage money.
