global finance names 2026 ino
Global Finance’s 2026 winners reveal how top banks are taking advanced technology into production.
Annual industry benchmarks provide a clear view in developing corporate strategies. global finance The Innovator Awards 2026 – spanning banks and fintech – confirm that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (Gen AI) have transformed the technology from speculative technology to key drivers of operational efficiency.
To enable faster, safer, and more programmable financial transactions, leading institutions are combining these technologies with APIs, real-time data, digital identities, and regulated infrastructure.
“As the pace of adoption of innovation increases, so does competition,” said Joseph Giarraputo, founder and editorial director of Global Finance. “The Innovator Awards 2026 acknowledges the leaders in their fields and their game-changing offerings.”
Creation of high efficiency banks
All three global winners of this year’s Most Innovative Bank awards have a common goal: to deploy AI to optimize customer delivery while reducing costs.
Spanish and Latin American bank BBVA is using AI to make interactions with each customer faster, smarter and more personalized.
“This is not a choice between AI and human advice, but a model that combines AI with human expertise, to give customers scale, trust and the right support at the right time,” Antonio Bravo, global head of data at BBVA, told Global Finance.
Fellow winner BNY is using AI and cloud computing to integrate investment and accounting data, streamline client-system integration, and maximize large-scale data processing efficiency, while remaining winner DBS uses human-AI synergy to eliminate low-value operational drudgery and redirect labor toward higher-margin advisory and risk management.
“The real measure is whether AI frees up our people… so they can focus on higher-value work,” says Nimish Panchamatia, the bank’s chief data and transformation officer.
Meanwhile, regional winners are incorporating AI into their core operations, digitalizing their operating models rather than redesigning them, replacing standalone products with customer-centric platforms, and improving risk management and strengthening security.
infrastructure overhaul
This year’s most innovative fintech companies, DeltaBlock, Ambate and Hawkish Capital, are targeting inefficiencies in B2B infrastructure. By addressing hidden pain points such as liquidity, fragmented treasury data and opaque project transparency, these companies optimize capital efficiency. Regional winners reflected this focus, driving the expansion of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) and the development of advanced decision-support tools.
Programmable Finance
2026 winners of the Best Financial Innovations, Intuit, JPMorgan and Saudi Arabia’s First Bank (SAB), are making institutional finance programmable. Intuit has enabled its non-technical employees to query enterprise data without coding assistance through its Conversational Analytics Response Agent (CLARA). JPMorgan is enabling institutional clients to access their bank deposits on public blockchain rails through its deposit token, while SAB has tokenized Islamic repurchase agreements as collateral and is automating repo transactions using smart contracts.
Regional innovations echo these themes, delivering quantitative advancements in fraud detection, compliance automation and treasury management.
Financial innovation is no longer about front-end digital channels. The new innovation mandate is clear: Rebuild the financial stack using AI-enabled, API-connected and compliance-aware platforms that operate in real-time and at scale.
See all the winners of the 2025 Innovator and Innovation Awards here.
