2026 FinTech Predictions: Insights from Nadish Lad of Volante Technologies

I spoke with Nadish, Global Head of Product and Strategic Business at Volante Technologies, the trusted cloud payments modernisation partner to financial businesses worldwide.

As banks navigate an increasingly complex payments landscape, Nadish shares his perspective on the infrastructure and technology shifts that will define competitive advantage in the year ahead.

Over to you Nadish - my questions are in bold:

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

In 2026, the biggest shift will be how banks approach payments availability and resilience. Multi-cloud continuity will move from an experimental architecture to a strategic priority, driven by the growing recognition that outages are no longer theoretical risks.

Following several public cloud disruptions, financial institutions increasingly understand that distributing workloads across environments is one of the strongest ways to safeguard payments availability. The focus will move towards architectures that are explicitly designed for failure points, traffic distribution, and service isolation. The objective is clear. Payments must remain available even when one provider experiences disruption — availability is now fundamental to customer trust and confidence.

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

AI-driven payment orchestration will have the most practical impact in 2026. AI will become deeply embedded in payment operations, orchestrating payments rather than supporting isolated tasks. Banks will increasingly use AI to coordinate liquidity decisions, reduce exceptions, and detect anomalies earlier across the payment lifecycle.

This shift will be accelerated by hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling banks to run on the platform that best meets their needs. Rather than experimentation, AI orchestration will become a core operational capability for banks and the FinTechs that support them.

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

Customers will expect payments to be consistently available, increasingly real time, and capable of operating across borders without added friction. Real-time payments will continue to evolve beyond domestic boundaries, and customer tolerance for delays or manual processes will continue to decline.

At the same time, customers will expect greater transparency and consistency in cross-border transactions. The continued adoption of ISO 20022 will allow banks to automate sanctions screening, fraud checks, reconciliation, and reporting at a global scale, helping meet these expectations while maintaining control and compliance.

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

A key blind spot is the assumption that resilience can be achieved through uptime alone. Infrastructure resilience is no longer measured by availability statistics, but by the ability to reroute activity in real time. Institutions that do not design payment systems with this in mind risk significant disruption to payment availability.

Another underestimated risk is the operational challenge of scaling real-time and cross-border payments without structured data standards. As a structured, cloud-independent data standard, ISO 20022 is the foundation for truly instant cross-border payments, and without it, automation and consistency at scale become increasingly difficult.

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

The priority should be to modernise payment infrastructure in a way that supports resilience, intelligence, and scale. Banks that prioritise multi-cloud resilience, AI-driven operations, and data-rich standards will be best positioned to lead the next phase of payments innovation.

This also includes taking a practical view of emerging payment instruments. Regulated stablecoins will begin to play a more meaningful role in everyday business operations, particularly by streamlining cross-currency liquidity management and enabling near-instant settlement between businesses. Their role is not to replace existing rails, but to complement them with programmable capabilities that remove long-standing friction in treasury operations.

Institutions that invest in these capabilities alongside resilient, cloud-agnostic architectures will be better equipped to support always-on payments and future cross-border growth.

Thank you Nadish! You can connect with Nadish on their LinkedIn Profile and find out more about the company at www.volantetech.com.