By Deya Innab, Deputy CEO, Eastnets
The past year marked a turning point for the global financial sector. Artificial intelligence became embedded in daily operations, digital currencies moved from the margins into mainstream pilots, and global trade networks faced intensified scrutiny as sanctions regimes fluctuated.
The changes witnessed throughout 2025 didn’t simply introduce new tools — they reshaped the foundations of how financial risk is identified, managed and controlled.
As we move into 2026, these shifts will no longer be emerging trends. They will become the baseline conditions under which financial crime prevention, payments and compliance operate. The real challenge for financial institutions is not just understanding what has changed, but recognising what these changes set in motion — and what it takes to adapt responsibly.
1. AI in Compliance Will Move from “Powerful” to “Prove It”
AI has rapidly expanded its role across financial crime compliance, supporting alert triage, transaction monitoring and sanctions screening. While efficiency gains are clear, 2025 exposed a critical weakness: many institutions still struggle to explain how AI-driven decisions are made.
In 2026, that gap becomes a regulatory priority.
Following guidance and supervisory warnings from the European Banking Authority (EBA) and other regulators on the risks of poorly understood RegTech, expectations will shift decisively. The key question will no longer be:
-
Is the model effective?
but rather -
Can you demonstrate why it reached this conclusion?
Explainability will define next-generation compliance technology. AI models used in AML and sanctions monitoring must be auditable, interpretable and clearly documented — enabling institutions to justify outcomes, challenge anomalies and maintain meaningful human oversight.
In 2026, efficiency alone will no longer be enough. Institutions must be able to prove the reasoning behind AI decisions, not just the speed of the output.
2. Payments Integrity Will Become a Competitive Advantage
Instant payments are now the norm. But 2026 will mark a shift in how success is measured — from how fast payments move to how safely they do.
As ISO 20022 adoption deepens across domestic and cross-border payment systems, regulatory scrutiny will intensify around transaction-level integrity. Fraud prevention, sanctions screening and anomaly detection must operate in real time, at the same speed as the payment itself, and consistently across multiple rails.
The challenge is clear: institutions must identify risk early, apply controls intelligently and maintain resilience — without adding friction to the customer experience.
In this environment, payments integrity becomes the benchmark of performance. Speed remains important, but confidence — that payments move as intended, without compromise or hidden risk — will define leadership. In 2026, true payments innovation will be measured by the strength of the safeguards beneath it.
3. Trade Finance Will Become the Next AML Battleground
Global trade entered one of its most volatile periods in decades during 2025. Geopolitical tensions reshaped supply routes, sanctions expanded rapidly, and controls on dual-use goods tightened under evolving FATF guidance.
What these pressures revealed is a growing weakness: traditional, document-based trade finance checks can no longer keep pace with today’s complex risk environment.
In 2026, trade-based money laundering (TBML) and broader trade-based financial crime (TBFC) will move to the forefront of regulatory focus. Supervisors now expect banks to go beyond static documentation and gain deeper visibility into the reality of trade activity.
This includes analysing:
-
Vessel behaviour and trade corridors
-
Cargo and pricing anomalies
-
Ownership structures and counterparty relationships
Detecting illicit flows hidden within legitimate trade requires a shift from fragmented checks to unified trade intelligence — connecting value, goods and physical movement across the entire trade lifecycle.
4. Crypto and FinTechs Will Face a Compliance Reckoning
Digital assets moved decisively into the mainstream over the past year. Stablecoins gained traction as payment instruments, tokenised deposits entered early pilots, and FinTechs accelerated digital-currency offerings to meet demand.
But adoption has outpaced safeguards.
As MiCA supervision matures and national regulatory frameworks tighten, 2026 will bring heightened expectations for crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) and FinTechs. Regulators will expect operational maturity as standard — including risk-based onboarding, traceable transaction flows and continuous monitoring.
This marks the sector’s compliance reckoning.
Many firms rushed products to market in 2025. In 2026, they will need to strengthen — or retrofit — the controls that were deprioritised during early growth. Those that lead will be the ones embedding AML and compliance safeguards directly into the architecture of their digital-asset ecosystems.
No digital payment model — from stablecoins to tokenised deposits — can scale sustainably without strong, transparent and unified controls at its core.
5. Trust Will Become the Defining Differentiator in Financial Services
Across AI, payments, trade and digital assets, the forces shaping 2026 converge around a single theme: trust.
As financial systems grow faster and more interconnected, trust becomes the competitive frontier. Customers expect transparency, regulators demand evidence, and partners rely on consistent, reliable safeguards.
Institutions that can demonstrate:
-
How decisions are made
-
How risks are managed
-
How controls operate in real time
will command greater confidence — and a clear strategic advantage.
This is as much a cultural shift as a technological one. Trust must be designed into systems from the outset, not layered on after deployment. When safeguards, data and decision-making are connected across the organisation, trust becomes measurable — and scalable.
In 2026, that will be the real differentiator.
The Thread That Ties It All Together
Across every domain, the message is consistent: the future of financial systems will be shaped not by how quickly they evolve, but by how responsibly they are built.
The institutions that lead will treat safeguards as core architecture — embedding explainability, transparency and resilience into every layer of decision-making. As regulatory expectations rise and digital complexity deepens, success will be measured not only by capability, but by the trustworthiness of the systems behind it.
That is the foundation required to operate securely — and confidently — in 2026 and beyond.