Aggregate losses across Hong Kong's digital banks narrowed sharply, while two leading players, ZA Bank and livi Bank, moved into profitability, supported by an improving revenue mix and tighter cost control, signalling growing progress towards break-even across the sector after more than six years in the market.

Leading global banks are deploying AI to enhance cash visibility and liquidity forecasting. However, adoption remains uneven, with predictive capabilities such as cash forecasting advancing rapidly, while execution-layer functions including funding optimisation and liquidity orchestration remain fragmented and less mature.

The Federal Reserve's 2026 supervisory stress test cleared every large US bank against a scenario modelling $708 billion in projected losses, but the cleanest aggregate result in six years was driven by a rising interest rate floor in the scenario design rather than any improvement in underlying credit quality.

CIMB Niaga has expanded its foreign exchange (FX) and digital payments capabilities in Indonesia, focusing on operational resilience and client-centric service delivery as market volatility and demand for digital banking services increase. The bank has addressed challenges related to execution, customer adoption and client engagement while pursuing a more integrated approach to transaction banking. Its efforts highlight both the opportunities and constraints faced by banks in delivering digital financial solutions at scale.

Consumer banking in the Philippines has become highly commoditised, with credit cards becoming widely available and digital-first challengers raising expectations on experience and relevance. In response, Chinabank has launched a credit card product linked to household needs, with performance measured through adoption, engagement and portfolio impact.

VPBank has been recognised with three major awards at The Asian Banker Vietnam Awards 2026 for its achievements in digital banking, artificial intelligence and sustainability. The accolades highlight the bank’s success in scaling its mobile banking platform, delivering AI-driven customer experiences and embedding climate risk management into its governance and lending practices.

Across 10 banks tracked from 2021 to 2025, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Asia and Bank of China (Hong Kong) led retail loan expansion with four-year compound annual growth rates of 9% and 5%, respectively, while Nanyang Commercial Bank and China Construction Bank Asia recorded sustained contraction at -7% and -4%.

HSBC announced an expanded AI partnership with Google Cloud in June 2026, prioritising use cases estimated to return more than $100 million in revenue or efficiency gains. At its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, chief executive Georges Elhedery named generative AI the bank's single largest new technology investment area.

Malaysia's first licensed digital bank has built a number of in-house AI tools to manage surging transaction and lending volumes. Caroline Chong, Head of Data at GX Bank, discusses the FrAIdy and TrAIdy fraud detection framework, the GuardPlus document forensics tool and the BI Bytes self-service analytics chatbot.

This year’s awards show how Hong Kong banks are embedding AI into mainstream operations, strengthening cross-border capabilities and redefining customer experience as sources of competitive advantage.

AI pilots are becoming common across banking. The institutions that pull ahead will be those that turn experimentation into industrial operating capability.

As banks across Asia Pacific accelerate AI deployment in customer operations, the strategic question is no longer whether to adopt agentic solutions, but whether underlying processes, governance and human judgement are designed to support them at scale.

Trade fragmentation is changing how MNCs organise financing, liquidity and risk across South and Southeast Asia. As supply chains become more distributed, clients are increasingly looking for integrated banking solutions that connect treasury, trade finance, foreign exchange and capital markets across multiple jurisdictions.

Indonesia is right to pursue greater value from its natural resources. The harder question is whether it is trying to solve two fundamentally different problems with the same set of policies.

Banks are no longer asking whether to deploy AI. The harder question is whether governance, controls and lines of accountability are being redesigned at the speed at which AI now participates in decisions and acts inside the institution.