The new baseline for financial services.

What happens after technology finishes emerging? 

Financial services is entering an era where the technologies that once signaled innovation have become the foundation of everyday operations. Leaders now face a complex question: How quickly can you operationalize what’s now assumed without adding risk? Our latest whitepaper, "2026: The year the baseline moved," explores how shifting market structures, evolving client expectations, and maturing technologies are resetting expectations for speed, control, and resilience across financial services. 

Key insights

• Embedded finance and platform distribution are reshaping product design. Platform distribution, embedded finance, and API ecosystems are transforming how financial products are designed, impacting features, pricing, data strategy, and risk management. 
• Wealth management is shifting to goals-based, balance sheet-driven planning. Wealth management is evolving beyond portfolio construction toward goals-based financial planning that incorporates assets, liabilities, taxes, and life events—especially in high-net-worth and advice-led segments.
• Fund administration is becoming an end-to-end ownership and controls layer. Fund administration is expanding beyond accounting and reporting into a full lifecycle ownership, onboarding, and entitlements platform, enabling faster reporting, automated distributions, and improved operational governance.
• Financial services convergence is accelerating across banking, wealth, insurance, and asset management. Convergence across banking, wealth management, insurance, and asset management is driving ecosystem-based business models, hybrid products, and integrated value chains across financial services.
• Fragmented customer journeys are driving consolidation in data, identity, and risk platforms. As customer journeys fragment across specialized touchpoints, financial institutions are consolidating data, identity, and risk into centralized platforms to orchestrate end-to-end client relationships.