Another year, another Global Annual Meeting, this time bringing the industry’s bankers, corporates, fintechs, market infrastructures, and technology providers together in sunny Orlando, USA.
Despite being just up the road from Disney’s Magic Kingdom and discussing a number of futuristic technologies, there was broad recognition at this year’s GAM that there is going to be no magical solution to the challenges facing the industry. Geopolitical fragmentation, tariffs, cyber threats, supply chain disruption, fragmented data environments, and increasingly sophisticated financial crime risks were just some of the terms used over the course of the 3-day event to describe the present reality for the institutions supporting global trade and payments flows.
At the same time, the pressure to innovate is only increasing. Instant payments, always-on settlement, AI, tokenization, interoperability, and digital infrastructure all seem to be top of mind and top of boardroom agendas. But unlike in years past, many more of these discussions this year were based on real experience in live environments rather than hypothetical technological speculation alone.
On the whole, this year’s GAM presented an industry that is modernising some long-embedded and oftentimes antiquated processes and infrastructures, all while adapting to a world that is becoming more fragmented, volatile, and yet interconnected all at the same time. No small task.
Missed some sessions? Check out some of the session highlights.
Opening Keynote: Fireside Chat
Unsurprisingly, geopolitical fragmentation and supply chain disruption were firmly at the centre of the conference’s opening fireside chat. The global operating environment, it would seem, is becoming increasingly transactional, with countries reassessing their trade relationships and economic security priorities in response to rising geopolitical tension.
It is easy to foist blame on the conflict in Iran and the disruption surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, but many of these trends predate the conflict itself. Tariffs, trade restrictions, and industrial policy shifts had already started pushing companies to rethink how and where they source goods and manage supply chains long before the initial strikes.
One result of this has been the continued growth of “local for local” strategies and South-South trade corridors between regions such as ASEAN, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. For banks, these shifts create new demands around corridor knowledge and the kind of local expertise that can help clients navigate what, for many, are new and unfamiliar markets.
Seamless Global Transfers: Trends and Opportunities in Cross-Border Payments
What of cross-border payments? As has been the case for several years now, driven, at least in part, by client expectations, payments are under pressure to be faster, more transparent, and available around the clock. At the same time, initiatives such as the G20 roadmap and ISO 20022 are pushing the industry toward greater interoperability and richer data standards.
These efforts around ISO 20022 and structured address requirements are intended to improve efficiency while also bolstering other, perhaps more important aspects of the process, such as fraud detection, sanctions screening, and AML controls. The future of cross-border payments will likely involve a mix of old and new, with traditional infrastructures and newer payment models coexisting as institutions find a way to balance their clients’ simultaneous demands for speed, resilience, and interoperability.
Tokenization, Digital Assets & the Programmable Future
Tokens and digital assets have made their way back into the payments conversation. Particularly in areas such as cross-border payments and liquidity management, the focus today in this area is less about cryptoassets and more about using this nifty bit of technology to solve a number of the practical problems that exist inside the financial systems.
Today’s payment systems – while able to move large amounts of value across borders, currencies, and time zones – still rely heavily on sequential processes and multiple intermediaries, which is really just economic jargon for risk of delay and added costs. Tokenization, so the technologists promise, may offer opportunities to improve how information and value move between participants by reducing some of that friction and enabling more synchronized settlement models.
Widespread adoption, however, will depend heavily on a mix of interoperability and regulation. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits may eventually support new forms of always-on settlement and treasury management, but institutions are still trying to determine where these technologies can improve client outcomes relative to existing infrastructure. Expect plenty of changes and new ideas in this space in the months and years to come.
Financial Crime, Threat Intelligence & Global Resilience
Let’s remember that there are two sides to every coin. As financial systems become more digital, interconnected, and increasingly real-time, the risks associated with fraud and financial crime keep getting more complex as well. Fraudsters and other bad actors are often exploiting the same technologies and faster infrastructures that are being introduced to improve efficiency and client experience.
One of the best weapons in the fight against these risks is data, especially when it is shared. Anyone wanting to detect suspicious activity cannot expect to be any good at it if they are doing it in isolation because the name of the game, even more so than it ever was in a pre-digital world, is identifying patterns, behaviours, and anomalies across much larger flows of information. Naturally, this creates new demands around data quality and interoperability, all in the pursuit of being able to respond quickly to emerging threats.
As payments become faster and more interconnected, firms will need to continue strengthening governance and information-sharing efforts if they want to have any hope of keeping pace with increasingly sophisticated forms of financial crime.
AI as an Industry Inflection Point
Of course, it would not be a transaction banking conference in 2026 without several conversations around AI, specifically agentic AI and the seemingly endless number of possibilities that these systems bring.
But amidst the awe and wonder, there was also a strong undertone of caution around the pace of adoption. AI does not magically fix broken processes or poor governance, and it is not an end-all solution for fragmented data environments. In fact, many institutions are finding that the success or failure of AI initiatives depends less on the sophistication of the models themselves and more on the quality of the underlying infrastructure and controls supporting them.
Data fragmentation across legacy systems is one of the largest barriers to scaling meaningful AI adoption inside financial institutions. And while intelligent agents may eventually help accelerate areas such as compliance and customer servicing, there was broad recognition that stronger governance frameworks and human oversight are just as, if not more, critical. After all, the same technologies capable of accelerating decision-making can also accelerate mistakes.
A Treasurer’s Panel
Remember corporates? The folks that are ultimately the end users of many of the banking systems and services being discussed throughout the event. We wanted to make sure that we heard from them too, and they had a lot to say about the environment they find themselves in, riddled with geopolitical instability, tariffs, shifting trade flows, and market volatility.
Unsurprisingly, then, one major theme from this panel was the need for agility. In a world where disruptions can come at a tweet’s notice and ripple across supply chains and markets almost immediately, treasury teams have no choice but to think more dynamically about liquidity and risk management. Long-term uncertainty, many suggested, is now an embedded feature of the global environment.
At the same time, corporates care a lot more about practical outcomes than they do about technological hype. While treasurers are certainly interested in developments around AI, digital assets, and faster payments, their priority is having systems that are reliable and interoperable, so they can operate smoothly across multiple banking partners and jurisdictions.