Published: January 22, 2026
With digital offerings now ubiquitous across the banking sector, banks will need to evolve these services beyond the basics – not least by making savvy use of AI.
Until recently, digital channels were seen as a key differentiator for banks. The promise was clear: offer the right kind of digital offering, and you would attract a growing base of tech-savvy consumers, particularly the younger generations often categorized as millennials and Gen Z. In an industry still so reliant on legacy infrastructure, the banks that were best able to modernise would be the standouts.
According to Emma Heathcote, managing partner at consultancy firm 4most, this is no longer the case. In her view, 2025 marked the point at which digital banking stopped being a nice-to-have and started to become the norm.
“Adoption reached critical mass, with close to 90% of UK adults now using mobile or online banking, alongside major banks completing long-overdue platform upgrades,” she tells EMEA Finance. “Crucially, digital also became the primary engine for innovation, efficiency and customer engagement, not just an access channel.”
Recent statistics underline Heathcote’s comments. According to a report by Vention, 93% of UK adults in 2024 used at least one form of remote banking, which included telephone banking too. That’s up from just 27% in 2005. A third of Brits now use mobile banking daily, and 40% have a digital-only bank account such as those offered by Monzo and Starling. The figures are similar elsewhere in Europe. According to Finastra, nearly 70% of European consumers use digital banking tools for routine transactions.
“In practice, digital has become the primary way banks operate and engage with customers,” says Heathcote. “For customers, that translates into faster, more reliable and more personalised experiences, supported by real-time insights, stronger security and digital tools that actively help people make financial decisions, rather than simply processing transactions.”
Shifting expectations
Given these shifts, the nature of the conversation is changing. If digital banking is the default, then the question is no longer ‘does digital work?’ or ‘is digital necessary?’. It’s more about how banks use these technologies to deliver genuine value. After all, even if every bank offers a mobile banking app, there are still huge disparities in their capabilities. And not all banks know how to use tools like AI to their advantage.
Ben Goldin, CEO of fintech company Plumery, believes consumers’ appetite for digital makes perfect sense.
“It's not just the picky consumers coming up with new ideas for how they want to get banking services,” he tells EMEA Finance. “No, that's what they're used to today by interacting with other companies that are digitally native.”
Goldin points out that customer expectations are “completely different” today. In 2026, many people use their phones for everything, including banking. They compare their banks to other apps on their phones. And they will gravitate towards providers that allow them to conduct all their interactions digitally.
“Five years ago, it was enough to provide some payments services and account balance online,” he remarks. “For anything else, customers would need to go to a branch. This is no longer acceptable. Banks need to look at customer journeys end-to-end holistically, and provide service that is that is consistent with how people experience other digital-native services.”
Of course, that’s no easy task for banks. In comparison with other industries, the financial sector is tightly regulated and beholden to a lot of legacy systems. Goldin estimates that out of around 50,000 banks or financial institutions worldwide, only around 5% currently “do the job well”. He thinks another 20% fall into the bracket of “somewhat capable”. That means for the remaining three-quarters, there is still a lot of work to be done.
While Goldin doesn’t mention any particular banks by name, he notes that the big players shouldn’t rest on their laurels. “Sometimes the leaders in the banking space are not necessarily leaders in the digitisation space,” he says. “Being a leader overall in terms of assets under management and the number of customers they serve, versus actually being leaders as perceived by consumers, is a fundamentally different thing.”
As Tom Merry, managing director and head of banking strategy at Accenture UK, explains, banks are at an inherent disadvantage compared to digital-native sectors. “In many cases, maintaining legacy systems and meeting ever-growing regulatory demands consumes around 70% of their IT spend, which inevitably crowds out innovation,” he tells EMEA Finance.
Shattering limits
For banks that are performing well in the digital space, what is it that sets them apart from the pack? Increasingly, the answer seems to be savvy use of AI. According to a report by Accenture, which lists the top banking trends of 2026, ‘the convergence of gen AI and agentic AI, digital assets and new business models is not only challenging [the industry’s] limits, but shattering them.’
In practical terms, this means today’s chatbots will evolve into something much smarter: truly responsive AI assistants that can help customers with their financial decisions. It also means the rise of ‘agentic money’, in which AI agents act on behalf of users to manage funds automatically. As well as shaking up consumer purchasing patterns, the report communicates that big changes could be on the way in corporate banking as well. For example, AI could hold the power to disrupt the way trade finance is conducted and ‘make correspondent banking obsolete’.
“Agentic money will evolve significantly, moving from something akin to ‘chat about my balance’ to much more intelligent ‘delegation with guardrails,” says Merry. “We anticipate individuals will increasingly entrust AI with routine actions while naturally reserving final approval for higher-stakes financial decisions.”
Another report, by S&P Global,