Banking Leadership Payments and AI Strategy

Citi’s Jane Fraser is Fortune’s ‘Most Powerful Woman’ in business

Three of the top six women in Fortune’s magazine’s 2026 list of the 1000 Most Powerful Women are bankers, with Citibank chief executive and chair Jane Fraser topping the list for the first time. Named chief executive of Citi in 2021, Fraser is credited with turning the bank around, as Citi recently reached its highest quarterly revenue in a decade – and the share price is up 83 per cent since her ascent. “In October, the board named Fraser chair, uniting the role of CEO and chair for the first time in two decades at Citi and issuing a vote of confidence in her turnaround plan,” writes Fortune. “For Fraser, the first—and still the only—woman to run a Wall Street bank, the fix-it era of Citi’s comeback has nearly reached its end. The next one belongs to growth.” Two other bankers make the top ten. Santander’s executive chair Ana Botín is at number five, after delivering four consecutive years of record profits for the Spanish bank. The newly appointed DBS chief executive and director Tu San Shan, who took over the role from Piyush Gupta last year, comes in at number six, serving as an inspiration for retail bankers everywhere, male or female. “The bank’s market capitalization crossed $100 billion for the first time last year; it’s now among the world’s top 25 banks by market value,” writes Fortune. “Before taking the CEO role, Tan oversaw DBS’s consumer, wealth, and institutional divisions, which together contributed roughly 90% of the bank’s revenue.”

Blik will expand out of Poland

Blik, the highly successful Polish payments system, will expand to euro payments. “The operator of Polish mobile payment system Blik expects at least three large Romanian banks to begin integrating its technology later this year, while positioning Slovakia as a hub for wider euro zone expansion, its CEO told Reuters. Such integration can take from several months to a year and a half, Dariusz Mazurkiewicz, the CEO of Polski Standard Platnosci, said on Monday at the annual European Financial Congress in Sopot.” Blik is jointly owned by the major Polish banks. “PSP views Slovakia as the euro zone hub for Blik after acquiring a local platform and starting cooperation with Tatra banka. It is also working with other local banks like VUB. Following Romania and Slovakia, the company could develop its presence in Hungary in parallel with further markets such as Austria and the Czech Republic, Mazurkiewicz said. ‘We want to build this and it's important not to let the train leave the station,’ Mazurkiewicz told a panel, warning against ceding the payments market to U.S. tech giants like Apple or Google.”

Yet another pretender to the Visa/MC crown

The new UK Payments Initiative has gone live, in a new challenge to Visa and Mastercard, and backed by the major UK banks including Barclays and NatWest. “The development comes after a group of 31 fintechs, high street banks, challenger banks and payment providers in May agreed to put up initial funding for the new entity that will be wholly owned and run by industry,” reports Finextra. “Other participants in the scheme include the likes of Nationwide, Monzo, Revolut, Starling, Santander, GoCardless, and Wise. The initiative arrives at a moment of heightened focus on European dependence on US financial infrastructure. US card payment networks today process 95% of UK card transactions and a similar majority across Europe.”

CBA’s Matt Comym on AI: “AI doesn’t replace jobs. Leadership does.”

AI doesn’t replace jobs. Leadership does. That observation is credited to CBA’s Matt Comyn, who has been offering compelling arguments about the role of AI in banking and society. The head of Australia’s Commonwealth Bank said earlier today that companies will scrutinise AI work more carefully in the coming year because the cost of more complex tasks are rising exponentially. “Unlike most consumers, who use free or fixed-cost AI services, corporate users pay by the amount of text processed, referred to as tokens,” notes Reuters. “In early rollouts of AI in companies, token costs stayed modest because tasks were relatively simple.” Comyn observed that as models have evolved, with more “reasoning, the access to tools, the amount of context that you can put into it – your token costs do not scale on a linear basis”. Comyn has previously noted that the most important capability CBA will build is “with people who know the customers, understand the systems and exercise judgment,” and not the algorithms. “CBA, Australia's second biggest company which writes a quarter of the country's mortgages, has been positioning itself as a keen AI adopter,” added Reuters. “Last week, it hosted its own AI summit featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and hired what it said was the country's first chief AI scientist at a bank.”

Comyn told the Australian Financial Review conference that one benefit of the rising costs of AI may be the reduction of ‘work slop’, where AI tools are being used to create more material that doesn’t add to productivity. The term was introduced last year by Harvard Business Review to describe work that at first appears polished but lacks real content. Some tie this to the concern that AI pilots in businesses are often failing to produce any return on investment. Writer Chris Sotraidis illustrates how workslop operates in what he calls the Workslop Feedback Loop. Boards may decide that they need to become an ‘AI-first organisation’. Senior executives start using GenAI to produce polished strategy decks that they send down to middle management. Middle managers recognise that these decks are shallow and use AI to add bulk and complexity to the decks before sending them down to staff. Staff recognise, consciously or unconsciously, that the directives are digestible but vague, and then increase their own use of GenAI to produce polished but meaningless reports for middle management, who add complexity and send them up to the leadership. So now everyone is using AI to add more volume but less meaning. It begins to look like smaller teams can produce greater volumes of work than larger teams previously produced. Sound familiar to anyone?

AI drives Softbank to the top of Japan’s charts

Softbank, which is not a bank, has overtaken Toyota as Japan’s biggest business by market value following a surge in the value of its AI investments. Masayoshi Son’s business is a major investor in ChatGPT and owns chip designer Arm. “The car manufacturer and industrial giant has been Japan’s biggest company by market capitalisation for more than 20 years, and its ousting from the top slot reflects rising global investor interest in AI and semiconductor companies,” writes the FT. “‘Japan Inc cannot escape the current zeitgeist — charismatic leadership and daredevil risk-taking beats out stubborn focus on incremental improvement and fortress balance sheets,’ said Jesper Koll, a director at brokerage Monex Group. SoftBank shares closed at an all-time high on Monday, rising more than 14 per cent after the company pledged to invest up to €75bn in a vast network of AI computing clusters in France. The stock is up more than 85 per cent since the start of the year. SoftBank, with its massive exposure to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and wider ambitions in the world of AI, has transformed itself into a vehicle for the mania gripping Japan’s markets.”