2026 FinTech Predictions: Insights from Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer of Blackwired

We spoke with Ruth, Head of European Markets at Blackwired, a cyber security innovator leveraging technology and deep intelligence experience to prevent cyber-attacks.

Over to you Ruth - my questions are in bold:

What's the biggest shift you expect across financial services in 2026?

The rapid digitisation of the financial services industry has resulted in significant operational resilience gaps, which in combination with the rise of AI enables cyber-attacks is going to push the industry towards a rethink when it comes to seamlessness, embeddedness and real-time. Early signs of reintroducing friction into the financial services proposition are already being observed.

2026 will be the year of bifurcation. There will be those institutions that continue on the technology side to introduce more novel solutions but could risk to detrimentally impact resilience and operational stability. And there will be those that will try to find ways to slow down certain processes to be able to regain more control in the fight against financial crime and fraud. Ultimately, resilience will be survival, but some institutions might find this out the hard way. We need to move away from 'detect and respond' and instead embrace 'predict, prevent and defeat' cyber threat.

Which emerging technology will have the most practical impact on banks and the FinTechs that support them?

Agentic AI, a buzzword for some time, is gaining traction. The deployment of AI agents has many use cases, customer service and payments being the obvious ones but also areas such as risk management, cross-sell and general embedding of AI in value chains are going to have significant practical impacts on banks and FinTechs that will leverage this technology.

Again, AI agents having the benefit of automating many processes and as a result increasing efficiencies whilst potentially decreasing headcount, will also be contributing to the extension of organisations' vulnerabilities.

Tokenisation of digital and physical assets as well as smart contracts in the broader context of blockchain adoption will also have long term significant impacts on the industry, capable of becoming the backbone of a new financial market infrastructure landscape altogether. However, this takes time, regulation and standards – hence the practicality is not immediate.

The potential of a continuation of the stablecoin hype will push some players to get involved; e.g. European banks' initiative for Euro stablecoins and role of large US banks in this space.

What customer behaviours or expectations will most challenge banks and financial service providers?

The customers' expectation of instant, always on, seamless and embedded service and transactions will continue to provide ample attack surface for fraudsters. The still rising App scam landscape in the UK combined with significant consumer protection means that losses will continue to rise. Innovating around the customer and combining this with awareness raising, particularly when it comes to phishing attacks, data sharing etc will be crucial to reduce fraud. Industry information sharing in this regard, encouraged by legislation such as the Data Use and Access Act adopted in the UK this year, will hopefully soon become more effective.

What risks or blind spots do you think the industry is underestimating as we move into 2026?

A significantly increasing vulnerability that is largely overlooked but will rise in importance in 2026 is shadow AI, when employees feed corporate information into open source and commercial large language models (LLMs) for the purpose of rapid report generation, corporate presentations, analyst reports, etc. Sensitive data, such as confidential corporate information, intellectual property and personally identifiable information, can be put at risk of being exposed. Such risks are also evident when it comes to software development and testing using LLMs.

In addition, a prominent vulnerability is materialising due to the accelerating work force reduction as a result of the availability of AI. As financial services organisations develop their AI strategy and policy in order to streamline their business and unlock efficiencies, doing so extensively and rapidly will take the human out of the loop when AI is not yet ready to fully take over intelligence analysis.

If you were advising a bank's leadership team today, what strategic priority should they focus on to stay competitive in 2026 and beyond?

A strategic imperative would be to run and grow the bank with cyber resilience at the core. Clarity around and protection (secure backups) of the most valuable data assets, continued innovation and technology embedding in a cyber secure way, especially AI – are going to be vital for competitiveness and maintaining client trust.

Regulatory changes around operational and cyber resilience, AI and the digital asset and payments space should be seen as enablers and in some areas baseline necessities to allow for compliant and robust operations that can deliver growth.

Thank you to Ruth for sharing these insights with FinTech Profile.

You can connect with Ruth on LinkedIn and learn more about Blackwired here.