I have spent a good part of my career tracking trends, but these days I am far more interested in topics: the things banks are actually spending their time, budget and attention on. Trends make for lively conference slides. Topics tell you where the money is going.

So when Rik and I hosted our recent LIVE webinar with special guest Dharmesh Mistry, a financial services veteran with more than 40 years in the industry, fresh back from Money20/20 in the United States, I opened with a simple question:

“If you were sitting in on a bank's executive committee as it planned for 2027, what would genuinely be on the agenda?”

His immediate answer was neither glamorous nor full of hype: “Keep the CEO out of jail. Keep the lights on. Keep the regulator content”. In practice, that means cost optimisation, compliance and a measure of modernisation along the way. The hot topics, he suggested, mostly stay on the conference stage.

That might disappoint a few people. Yet the more interesting part of our conversation was the gap between what banks will prioritise and what they arguably should, because Dharmesh believes the business model of banking is facing more pressure now than at any point in his career.

Quantum-Safe Banking: The Topic That Ranks Lower Than It Deserves

Asked which topic bankers will underrate in 2027, Dharmesh did not hesitate: quantum safety.

There is, as yet, no regulation in the EU forcing banks to act, but the timeline is moving quickly. A year ago, the expert advice he was hearing was to become quantum-safe by 2035. Less than a year later, following rapid progress in quantum computing, partly accelerated by AI, that guidance has shifted to 2030. He noted that government task forces in the UK and the US are now working with banks on getting critical systems quantum-safe by that date, while some of the leading tokenisation players are aiming for 2029.

That last point deserves more attention as he believes that the organisations that could become tomorrow's competitors to traditional banking rails are trying to get ahead of the curve. Strong guidance without a regulatory deadline is exactly the kind of item that slips down an executive agenda dominated by mandatory work, which is precisely why he believes it belongs higher up.

Bank Strategy Starts With a Thesis, Not a Technology

Anyone who has been around long enough has seen a few technology waves come and go. Some arrived early and transformed the industry; others, and I am thinking of banks in the metaverse here, simply fizzled out. 

So how do you tell a bank that is early from one that is plainly wrong?

Dharmesh's view, shaped by successful exits and one venture that did not fly, is that the winners start with a thesis about how customers and economics are changing, build a game plan around it, and only then ask what technology can do. The banks that start with "the board says we need AI" will make some gains, but that is not the same as success.

The opposite risk is dismissing something too soon. I once sat in a boardroom where PayPal was waved away as "that thing a few people use on eBay". By the time anyone revisited it, the threat was very real. Dharmesh's remedy is to name an individual accountable for the multi-year plan, set clear measures and tie them to remuneration. He cited Barclays' choice of a chief AI officer whose background is chief of staff rather than technology as a sign that the bank sees AI as an organisational transformation, not a model-selection exercise.

Turning Regulatory Burden Into a Competitive Moat

Without giving away too many spoilers from our community survey, the regulatory burden has consistently ranked second across every cohort as a top-of-mind topic for 2027. That is hardly surprising as Benelux banks are absorbing DORA while PSD3, the PSR, and the AI Act all converge on them.

Dharmesh has real empathy for the volume of work involved. But he draws a clear distinction. Treat compliance as a project, implemented to the letter, and it will crowd out everything else. Treat it as the foundation of what a bank is for, safeguarding money and executing transactions people can trust, and it starts to push you in the direction you wanted to travel anyway.

There is a strategic upside too. Each new layer of regulation raises the bar for new entrants. A bank that excels at compliance, drawing on decades of data and experience, builds a moat that a challenger cannot cross simply by doing a slice of compliance slightly better.

Benelux Banking: Not a Leader or a Laggard, but Different

Is the Benelux a leader, a laggard or simply a different case? Dharmesh settled on different. High digital penetration, a concentrated market with a handful of large banks and digitally native customers give the region the ability to move faster than most, if it chooses to. Rik was quick to add that, according to a recent ranking shared within our community, four of the world's top ten banking apps are Belgian or Dutch!

What should the region borrow from elsewhere? From the UK, the open banking framework, which is now becoming the template for secure data sharing across property, utilities and healthcare through smart data initiatives. From the Nordics, collaboration on digital identity, an area where Dharmesh freely admits the UK has stumbled more than once. He also pointed to India, where a single national identity scheme, tied to access to benefits and government services, helped bring hundreds of millions of people into the financial system within a decade.

Making Open Banking and Open Finance Pay

Our recent white paper on “Open Banking & Embedded Finance in Europe” surfaced a recurring frustration: for many banks, open banking has delivered less commercial value than expected. Dharmesh's diagnosis is that the data has been opened but never exploited at meaningful scale. What changes the equation now is AI, which can interpret data far beyond simple categorisation and, with the right permissions, act on it. The catch is that banks see only a sliver of the picture. On his figures, a bank typically holds two or two and a half products with a customer, while that customer has around fifteen financial relationships in total, before you even consider context such as health, travel or lifestyle.

I pushed back on the line between “creepy and cool”, particularly for privacy-conscious Europeans. 

Dharmesh was unconvinced that privacy is the real barrier. People keep using platforms that clearly use their data, because those platforms are useful. Relieve customers of the tedious work of juggling cards, savings and current accounts, and he believes they will happily share more. Discovery Bank in South Africa, which rewards healthier customers with better savings rates, shows what that utility can look like.

AI Agents in Banking and the Responsibility Gap

If customers bring their own AI agents to deal with their bank, why should they care which bank sits underneath? Dharmesh expects this to reshape relationships, but more slowly than the hype suggests.

The reason is responsibility. The AI Act regulates a bank's own use of AI: when a bank's agent acts on a customer's behalf, the bank carries the risk. It does not, in his reading, cover a third-party agent sitting in front of the bank. That gap means the customer may end up bearing the consequences if something goes wrong. Most people will accept that for everyday spending, but few will hand a mortgage deposit or a large investment to an agent on those terms.

The near-term opportunity, then, lies in automating low-risk, day-to-day behaviour. Whoever owns that customer journey gains real influence, because the platform, not the bank, starts to make the decisions.

Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits and the Digital Euro

Are stablecoins, tokenised deposits and the digital euro a threat to bank deposits, an opportunity or a distraction? Dharmesh's answer: the risk of deposit flight is real, but blunted. The digital euro is expected to carry a holding limit of around 3,000 euros, and stablecoin issuers will be regulated and must offer competitive returns, which becomes harder if rates fall.

More broadly, he sees a growing menu of options, each suited to different use cases: central bank digital currency for low-value payments that feel private, much like cash; stablecoins for corporate treasurers managing funds across dozens of countries at a fraction of today's cost. Horses for courses, as he put it.

On European payment sovereignty, Dharmesh sees a genuine strategic advantage. Europe's regulatory head start with MiCA leaves the US playing catch-up, even with momentum building there. Rik offered a helpful sharpening: sovereignty is less about European solutions winning in Asia or America, and more about ensuring they are competitive at home.

The Board Question for 2027: Platform or Pipe?

My final question was the one I find most revealing. If Dharmesh sat on a Benelux bank's board as an independent non-executive director, what would he insist was on the agenda?

One question, to be answered unequivocally within 18 months: “Are we a platform or a pipe?” 

He thinks it might be a short conversation, but stresses that the decision must be followed by full commitment. 

He firmly believes that platforms that own the customer relationship, use the data and stop pricing product by product will win. Banks that are not going to be one of them should aim to be an efficient pipe, or even a super pipe, competing on scale and cost.

Why now, when we might have asked the same question a decade ago? 

Because of convergence. Richer data lets others manage money better than a bank with a partial view. Agents can act on that insight without the customer's effort or emotion getting in the way. Tokenisation removes the cost of moving money. Together, these forces mean that whoever builds a platform over the next three to five years will accumulate data that is very difficult to displace.

The compliance and cost agenda will rightly dominate 2027, but the strategic decision on being a platform or a pipe cannot wait for a quieter year, because there will not be one! 

The conversation with Dharmesh contained far more insights and nuances than we were able to summarise in the article above, so having a watch below or listening on your favourite podcast platform here is highly recommended to get the full picture.

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