AI Banking Leadership and Digital Expansion

Are robots a new market for banks?

How would you feel on finding out that your newest customer is a robot that lives in Argentina and runs its own business? For all the talk of AI agents,  and – the online robots still can’t freely roam their domains and buy things. Some things are still limited to humans. Payments company Stripe is among the businesses seeking ways to allow AI agents to make payments, especially for small items such as online articles or data. As Stripe notes on its website, “the tools of the current financial system were built for humans, so agents struggle to use them. Making a purchase today can require an agent to create an account, navigate a pricing page, choose between subscription tiers, enter payment details, and set up billing—steps that often require human intervention.” But with the current enthusiasm for AI agents, companies are racing to find ways to allow robots to shop. Whether this is entirely a good thing is attracting the attention of philosophers, presidents, and president-philosophers.

“Agents are rapidly growing as content consumers on the internet: reading text, calling APIs, and querying databases,” said Kevin Miller, head of payments at Stripe. “This presents new opportunities for businesses to monetize their valuable content and data while empowering agents to make more informed decisions.”

Giving agency to AI agents is a major theme of 2026. In the FT recently, Argentinian president Javier Melei proposed the creation of a new corporate category in Argentina: the “non-human corporation”. “Milei said he is committed to keep AI unregulated ‘so that it is free to be developed without the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation’,” the Buenos Aires Herald reported. These corporations would be operated by AI agents or robots, with human participation as shareholders allowed but not necessary. “Where these systems exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments, their actions entail real risks. Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence,” the president said. Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari (who is quite a doom and gloom type), warned against Melei’s move, arguing that handing legal status to corporations run by non-human agents would be the equivalent of handing them “a master key” to gain dangerous access to financial, economic and political systems.

Africa’s leading telco taps China’s leading payments company

MTN is tapping China’s Ant International to deepen its fintech ambitions, planning to draw on Ant’s expertise to add a platform of mini-apps to its MoMo mobile money service. MTN said in a statement that it plans to begin rolling out the new service in Nigeria in the third quarter. “The initiative forms part of MTN Group’s broader Ambition 2030 strategy,” reports Ecofinagency.com. “Under its fintech roadmap, MTN identifies digital financial services as a major source of medium- and long-term growth. The strategy focuses on two priorities: expanding the fintech ecosystem and accelerating the rollout of advanced financial services.” It’s not proved straightforward in the past: Vodacom tapped Ant International in South Africa in 2021to develop VodaPay, which didn’t gain the traction it hoped for. But Safaricom’s Mpesa has superapps ambitions as does Orange, which rolled out Max It as an app combining a plethora of services including ecommerce, gaming, news and ticketing for events and travel. Ant’s domestic success in China came from its expertise in serving small businesses, and its payment services have gone global. It’s become common to see Ant’s advertising at big sporting events alongside Visa and Mastercard.

Ghana’s rural banks are to become community banks under a new guideline from the central bank. The central bank says the move is aimed at strengthening financial inclusion and integrating the sector more deeply into the national financial system. All rural banks will now become community banks, and will have to complete statutory name changes, re-branding and other changes by the end of this year. According to the Central Bank, rural banking was introduced in 1976 to bring financial services to rural areas, and now comprises 147 banks with around 1,000 branches serving eight million customers.

The mandate will expand banking services in some ways, adding an urban mandate to the bank’s previous rural mandate, which could help them attract younger customers who might see rural banks as old-fashioned. Community banks will have to meet a higher minimum capital requirement of GH¢5 million, compared with the previous GH¢1 million. They will also have to meet local ownership requirements with at least 30 percent of shareholders required to be from the community where the bank operates. To catch up with modern banks, ARB Apex Bank will serve as a central services hub for community banks, which will lower costs and help the smaller banks to compete in an increasingly digital financial system.

Jamie Dimon casts admiring glances at Revolut

He might be fond of complaining about regulation in Europe and the UK, but JPMorgan’s chief executive also speaks with admiration about Revolut, the digital bank that is now one of Europe’s most valuable financial technology companies. But Jamie Dimon and the JPMorgan leadership believe that unlike many of Europe’s banks, they can compete. The US bank launched a standalone digital Chase brand in the UK in 2021, and added Germany as a new market last month. Insiders told the FT that Chase will add a number of European markets in the next years, potentially including Spain, France and Italy. But unlike digital challengers such as Revolut or Monzo, JPMorgan won’t – and can’t – pitch itself as a challenger to traditional banks. It’s the biggest bank in the US and has been in existence since 1871. “Unlike neobanks such as Monzo and Revolut, which pitch themselves as digital challengers to traditional banks, JPMorgan executives believe they can leverage the bank’s established brand and large balance sheet to attract customers,” writes Ortenca Aliaj, quoting an unnamed insider that Chase is trying to find a middle space where it can be “a more innovative and digital-forward bank, but really lean on the brand of JPMorgan.” Could Chase begin tempting away Revolut customers? The combination of established bank plus digital challenger is already proving a success in many markets. “JPMorgan, which has $2.6tn in deposits in the US, has to navigate a more fragmented market in Europe in terms of regulators and competitors,” says the FT. “But executives are betting they can overcome the regulatory and technological challenges that contributed to a five-year gap between its first and second overseas launches.”

Bankers queue up to become Chief AI Officers

A year ago, one quarter of businesses had Chief AI Officers. This year, it’s three quarters, according to a report by Bloomberg, as business grapple on what exactly to do with AI. The study on “Rewiring the C-Suite” comes courtesy of the IBM Institute for Business Value, which surveyed 2,000 chief executives in large organisations across 33 countries in 21 industries. One thing that stands out is there’s not much agreement on what a Chief AI Officer should actually do. “The role serves several purposes at once, said Pei Ying Chua, head economist for Asia-Pacific at LinkedIn. ‘The first is someone to actually make sense of what your company’s AI strategy is,’ she said in an interview.” The story quotes several people who believe that the Chief AI Officer role will exist only for a few years until AI is ‘invisible’, becoming part of the technology stack like computers and smartphones. “We don’t have a head of mobile devices,” said one CEO. While Daily Briefing has written this year about several banks that have now hired Chief AI Officers, including UBS, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and JPMorgan, we estimate that the number of banks with Chief AI Officers is far below 75 per cent. (We should note that IBM has a major consulting wing that advises clients how to adapt to AI infrastructure and tools, and it has a strong presence in regulated industries such as banking.)

So, Chief AI Officers may be responsible for a surge in AI agents working in a business, but who is going to have to take responsibility for those agents? Apparently its going to be the Head of Human Resources, making us think there’s going to be a new role called Head of HAIR, or Head of AI and Human Resources. Today’s FT has an interview with Matt Prebble of Accenture Ireland and UK, who suggests that this work will fall to the HR department, and that businesses will have to re-think leadership in the age of AI. “Integrating AI agents was hard work and required careful management, he added. ‘For the small number of clients that have managed to get an authentic agentic AI working in their organisation... you have to onboard agents, you have to train the agents... that could be the HR director’s job. As AI takes on more execution, for example, the COO role is evolving’, he said, with ‘operational leaders increasingly accountable for AI-driven outcomes.” Prebble suggested that companies may also need to create a role along the lines of a ‘chief trust officer’ as AI puts trust under strain.

Accenture, one of the major global consulting firms, has been re-organising itself in the face of fears that AI tools will be able to replace much of the work offered by the consulting industry, as it tries to persuade investors that it will benefit from AI rather than suffer. “Its shares have more than halved in value in less than 18 months and its market value at one point fell below $100bn for the first time in six years,” writes the FT. “The decline has been driven partly by fear that AI could replace many of the tasks carried out by its 786,000-person workforce and force it to slash prices.”