TNEX, VietinBank, BIDV, and Vietcombank were recognised for achievements in digital banking, SME services, wealth management, transaction finance and AI adoption in The Asian Banker Vietnam Awards 2026.

The Asian Banker has recognised ABA Bank as Cambodia’s leading retail bank in 2026, highlighting the institution’s performance in digital innovation, customer engagement and operational resilience in a sector facing post-pandemic stress and market challenges.

Agentic AI is increasingly embedded in fraud detection and payment workflows at major banks. The Financial Stability Board's June 2026 consultation report sets out its first operational framework for governing these systems, with its human oversight recommendations shaped by the limits of what human review can achieve at scale.

Affin Group’s transformation of enterprise risk management reflects how banks are repositioning risk from a compliance function into a more intelligence-led capability embedded directly into strategic decision-making and institutional resilience.

Gerald Goh, co-founder and CEO of Sygnum Asia Pacific, argues that banks should treat crypto and real-world asset tokenisation as a single infrastructure agenda spanning custody, wallets, compliance, settlement and distribution.

Intesa Sanpaolo has launched a bid to acquire Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in a transaction that would create the Eurozone's second-largest bank by market capitalisation.

As payment initiation shifts into digital ecosystems, transaction banks face a more strategic question than transaction processing itself: whether they still control enough of the customer relationship, data and adjacent commercial opportunity to capture meaningful value.

Banks across Asia Pacific have proven that artificial intelligence (AI) works through pilots and early deployments. The unresolved question is whether their people, processes, and organisational structures can absorb it at enterprise scale — a gap that, alongside legacy systems and fragmented data, is now shaping the pace of adoption.

As real-time payments, artificial intelligence (AI) and rising customer expectations reshape banking, technology infrastructure has moved from a back-office concern to a strategic one. Banks are moving towards cloud-native, modular and resilient platforms, though approaches vary due to legacy complexity, regulatory context and organisational readiness.

Former US Congressman Patrick McHenry argues that AI, digital assets and a more politically responsive regulatory environment will reshape how banks compete.

Mapping deposit growth against loan growth across the world's 1,000 largest banks reveals that 54% expanded lending faster than deposits between 2022 and 2024. When funding structures and liquidity buffers are also considered, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia emerge as the markets with the most vulnerable banking sectors. This underscores the structural challenge of building strong customer deposit franchises in high-growth emerging markets.

A new Citi Institute report projects the tokenised asset market will reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, driven by US equities, treasuries and money market funds rather than private assets, as DTCC, NYSE and Nasdaq embed tokenisation into core issuance, trading and settlement workflows.

As payment execution becomes faster, broader and increasingly standardised, financial institutions are under pressure to rethink where transaction banking creates differentiation, shifting focus from basic movement of funds towards orchestration, resilience, intelligence and value-added services.

Bank Negara Indonesia is repositioning its wholesale banking franchise around transaction flows, operational deposits and ecosystem integration, combining operating model redesign with BNIdirect-led digital capabilities to deliver more sustainable growth across corporate, commercial and SME segments.

A more volatile business environment, shifting trade patterns and rising expectations around responsiveness are changing what multinational corporations require from treasury, pushing the function beyond execution and control towards a broader strategic role.