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.

Change control gaps are the leading cause of non-malicious ICT incidents at banks, ahead of design and testing failures, capacity issues and external dependency failures, according to a new Basel Committee on Banking Supervision report drawing on a survey of 16 jurisdictions, 12 of which contributed incident observation data covering 2022 to 2024.

Mizuho Bank is strengthening transaction banking as a strategic pillar of its Asia Pacific franchise. Its adoption of SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity forms part of a broader effort to connect clients across the region's growing trade, capital and treasury flows.

Malaysia's Islamic banks face pressure to lower acquisition costs and serve younger customers. Hazrizal Hassan, director of digital banking at Bank Muamalat Malaysia Berhad, discusses the bank's cloud-native ATLAS platform, its early customer acquisition results and how it embeds Shariah governance alongside Islamic lifestyle services.

Digital banks with loan balances above $250 million are significantly more likely to be profitable, as scale and product diversification strengthen revenue. Most reach breakeven within three to six years. For those still unprofitable past the seven-year mark, N26 in Germany, Varo Bank in the US, Lunar Bank in Denmark and CIMB Bank Philippines among them, face an increasingly difficult case for continued investment.

Malaysia’s second-largest lender by assets reported steady income growth and lower costs, while net interest margins showed early signs of stabilisation amid a challenging macroeconomic backdrop.