Agentic AI is fundamentally changing the role of AI in banks—from assistance to autonomous execution. This article shows how banks can use AI agents to redesign processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
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Hybrid business models are an effective approach to exploiting open source commercially. Careful coordination of licensing, governance, and integration into existing processes is crucial. With increasing digitalization, the importance of such models will continue to grow as they promote efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness.
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Increasing efficiency in Swiss wealth management: This article highlights how open banking and the standardization of data and calculations are laying the foundation for innovative portfolio management infrastructures—and why this foundation is essential for the successful use of artificial intelligence. An outlook on the future of Switzerland as a financial center.
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Actively shaping the future: corporate foresight as a start-up advantage
Many start-ups rely on agility—but in uncertain, complex markets, that is not enough. If you want to identify opportunities early on and better assess risks, you need a structured view of the future: corporate foresight.
Corporate foresight allows weak signals and new trends to be identified at an early stage. Open foresight expands this approach by involving external partners and communities, creating collective intelligence for better decisions.
Lean startup and foresight are not contradictory: while lean startup enables rapid validation of ideas, foresight provides strategic orientation. Together, they reduce uncertainty and strengthen innovative power.
In our latest blog post, Simon Dummel shows that future competence is not a luxury for startups, but rather the foundation for sustainable success.
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How can banks expand their relevance in customers’ daily lives? How can banks redefine their role in their customers’ everyday lives? In our latest blog post, we use selected examples to show how institutions are creating real added value across connected living environments through innovative services – from mobility budgets and ETF-based rental deposits to health incentives through interest rate models. The article by Dr. Stefanie Auge-Dickhut explores:
• how Customer Centricity is enabled through positioning of financial serivces in netwerks,
• the growing importance of Embedded Finance and Platform Banking,
• and why financial services are becoming part of connected, everyday experiences.
Based on an extract form over 80+ international use cases, the article offers tangible inspiration for financial players aiming to drive relevance through innovation.
The financial IT system of tomorrow is modular, open, and networked. It enables customer-centric service bundles and embedded finance within ecosystems, leverages data and AI broadly, and ensures compliance automatically. The core remains as a critical piece of infrastructure, but in a slimmer and more invisible form. Those who think “service-first” today, orchestrate real-time data, and embrace DevOps operations are laying the groundwork for scalable business models in a connected financial world of tomorrow.
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Artificial Intelligence offers enormous transformation potential along the entire mortgage value chain. Whether in property search, application processing, property valuation, or credit decisions, AI can not only accelerate and streamline processes but also improve them qualitatively.
What matters is a responsible approach to these technologies. Explainable models, robust data quality, and clear regulatory frameworks form the foundation. In addition, the principle of the human in the loop plays a central role, since in critical phases, human judgment remains indispensable.
Those who manage to combine technological innovation with trust, transparency, and customer value can help shape the mortgage world of the future.
I look forward to continuing the discussion and to developing concrete solutions together with partners.
Stablecoins and Deposit Tokens are transforming financial market infrastructure and are rapidly gaining momentum in Switzerland. In our latest article, we unpack what these forms of tokenized money mean for payments, settlement, and the broader banking ecosystem.
What truly distinguishes stablecoins from deposit tokens in practice? Which Swiss milestones matter most for moving from pilots to production, and what can we learn from recent bank and industry initiatives? Most importantly, what steps should banks take now on strategy, processes, and technology to stay compliant and competitive?
Open Finance is transforming the global financial industry and is becoming increasingly important in Switzerland as well. In the first part of our blog series, Stefan Knaus exam-ined the current state of Open Finance within Switzerland. In this second part, Friedrich-Philipp Wazinski takes the discussion beyond national borders.
How far have other countries come in implementing Open Finance? What lessons can be learned from international initiatives? And what steps must Switzerland take to ensure it remains competitive in the global marketplace?
Open finance is becoming increasingly important in Switzerland, but is still at an early stage compared to other countries. A recent survey by OpenBankingProject.ch shows that the maturity level of open finance in Switzerland is currently rated as low to medium. At the same time, pressure is growing due to new European regulations (including PSR, PSD3, FIDA) and innovative business models, which will also influence the Swiss market in the long term. In this article, Stefan Knaus provides an overview of the current status, key challenges and the opportunities that open finance presents for the Swiss financial industry.
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From the next major LLM release such as ChatGPT 5 to autonomous agents, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). However, the expected benefits often cannot be fully materialized in practice. In many companies, data and AI initiatives do not make it past the pilot phase, while others fail completely (Estrada 2025; Haefner et al. 2023) .An important reason is that the current enthusiasm often focuses too much on technologies and ignores fundamental business problems.
Ultimately, the goal of any data and AI initiative should be to create strategic business value that pro-vides companies a competitive advantage (Grover et al. 2018). This requires a shift in perspective to-wards the fundamental data assets and the exploitation of their inherent potential, regardless of the analysis technologies used, such as business analytics, traditional or generative AI, following the max-im: AI as a means and data value creation as an end.
In this blog post, Nick Kakuschke introduces the research area “Value Creation from Data and AI” at the Competence Center Future Financial Services, where we develop applicable tools that support compa-nies to realize strategic value from data and AI.
The first version of our AI Radar for the DACH region from fall 2024 clearly showed how intensively banks are already using artificial intelligence (LINK). Based on publicly available information, we analyzed the largest banks in the DACH region to determine which AI use cases they have already implemented and systematically structured them according to various criteria.
But how has reality changed since then? Stefanie Auge-Dickhut describes our current AI Radar survey, in which we conducted qualitative interviews with partner banks and IT providers of the Competence Center Future Financial Services to identify deeper insights, experiences and new strategic challenges in dealing with AI in the financial industry.
The environmental and social challenges of our time clearly show that conventional economic activity is not enough. We need new ways of doing business that not only avoid damage but also actively contribute to building and renewing our natural and social foundations. Regener-ative finance, or ReFi, is such an approach which is not a passing trend from the tech world, but a movement that aims to fundamentally rethink and redesign financial systems.
In today’s blog post, Friedrich-Philipp Wazinski provides an overview of ReFi and outlines how digital technologies can be linked to the principles of regenerative economics to enable new forms of common good-oriented economic activity.
In this concluding article of a two-part blog series on business process automation (BPA), Din Hida builds on the basic knowledge of BPA provided in the last post. Here, he introduces readers to the concept of hyperautomation, its areas of application, and its benefits. Hyperautomation offers enormous potential for optimizing business processes and remains a promising field that continues to gain importance and deserves ongoing attention and strategic investment.
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In this first blog post of a two-part series, Din Hida provides a clear introduction to the topic of business process automation (BPA). He shares fundamental knowledge about the development of BPA, introduces key technologies, and explains the different types of automation. This provides a structured foundation for a deeper understanding of modern process automation.
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Quantum computing is seen as a potential revolution in the financial services sector: it promises to handle complex analyses with a level of performance that is not available to traditional computers (Dietz et al., 2020; Bova et al., 2023). Potential fields of application for quantum computing are di-verse and include, for example, portfolio management, risk analysis, corporate finance or customer-oriented analyses (Dietz et al., 2020). Anyone who ignores quantum computing today risks being left behind in the long term. In this blog post, Benjamin Schaefer explains the basics of quantum compu-ting, sheds light on its diverse potential and areas of application in the financial services sector and discusses the associated technological, security-related and personnel challenges.
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Technological innovations have always been catalysts for social change – but never before have business ecosystems been so visibly at the center of attention. Whether we are making contactless payments, consulting chatbots or entering virtual worlds – often, business ecosystems are based on platforms, which are an important part of orchestrating value creation. Platforms are purpose-built organizational and transactional infrastructures of business ecosystems.
A change in key technological foundations often has an impact on how the business models of business ecosystems change via the platform. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technology and the emerging metaverse act as turbochargers – they not only connect objects, but also markets, communities and entire business models. In the following blog post, Stefanie Auge-Dickhut outlines some thoughts on the impact of innovative technologies and data on the technological basis of business ecosystems.
Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) in particular. Beyond the hype, executives have agreed for some time that data and its analysis (such as through AI) play a key role in the transformation of entire business models (Gartner, 2018) and are seen as an in-vestment focus for companies worldwide (IBM, 2023) . However, to date, many companies have struggled to successfully implement their data and AI activities due to a variety of associated chal-lenges. Due to the complexity of the perspectives to be considered, companies are constantly faced with the challenge of identifying the specific use cases that are best suited to them and promise the most value potential, whether classic AI, GenAI or data sales.
Accordingly, one research focus of the Competence Center Future Financial Services (CC FFS) is to provide companies with guidance on how to create value from data and AI. This blog post is dedi-cated to the decision factors that support the choice of the right data and AI use cases and presents excerpts from a scientific paper that was written as part of the CC FFS research (see Kakuschke et al., 2025) .
Switzerland will provide electronic proof of identity (E-ID) for Swiss citizens in spring 2026. The underlying trust infrastructure is based on the Self-Sovereign Identity architectural approach. These developments offer significant opportunities but also challenges for the various economic sectors in Switzerland.
In this second part of a series of blog posts, Stefan Knaus describes the proof of value of the OpenBankingProject.ch on the topic of “Use of Swiss E-ID”. The focus of this article is on the business implications of using the Swiss E-ID for the business architecture of the project participants and the options for Swiss banks regarding participation in the Confederation’s trust infrastructure.
The Swiss Confederation will provide electronic proof of identity (e-ID) for Swiss citizens in spring 2026. The underlying trust infrastructure is based on the Self-Sovereign Identity architectural approach. These developments offer significant opportunities for the various economic sectors in Switzerland but also challenges in the effective implementation and use of verifiable credentials. In addition to the use of the Swiss e-ID as proof of identification for opening a bank account, participation in the Confederation’s trust infrastructure offers further potential for Swiss banks. The e-ID can be used in other customer processes and significantly improve the customer experience. In addition, banks can also issue their own proof of identity on the Confederation’s trust infrastructure (Source).
This is the first part of a two-part blog post series on the Proof of Value of the OpenBankingProject.ch on the topic of “Use of Swiss E-ID”, which took place from October 2024 to February 2025.
The world of digital assets is developing rapidly – and with it, regulatory requirements. But what does this mean for financial institutions in concrete terms? What opportunities and challenges arise from MiCA, DORA or stablecoins?
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Wealth management is at a turning point. Never before have challenges and opportuni-ties been as closely linked as they are today. While the number of high-net-worth individ-uals (HNWI) and ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) in Germany and Switzerland continues to grow [1-3], their expectations are also rising: individual advice, the urge for more self-determination, customized investment strategies and digital services are more in demand than ever [3-5].
In cooperation with Commerzbank AG, the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen has published the white paper “Leading with Innovation in Wealth Management”. It high-lights key developments and trends in wealth management with a particular focus on application programming interfaces (APIs) and distributed ledger technology (DLT). This article summarizes the key findings and shows why innovation can contribute to sus-tainable competitiveness in wealth management.
The digital transformation is forcing banks to modernize their IT systems. Openness, modularity and real-time data processing are crucial for competitiveness and customer expectations. In this article, we analyze the key architecture of a future-proof banking platform and its design implications.
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The digital transformation has profoundly changed the way banking services are used. Banking advice is no longer limited to visiting a branch – customers now expect a seamless, cross-channel experience when accessing banking products. Decentralized identities, also known as Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI), could play a crucial role in this and further change the relationship between banks and their customers. In this article, we will take a closer look at the most important aspects, challenges and opportunities of this development.
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The financial industry is beginning to undergo a profound transformation through the use of AI. In particular, the use of generative AI opens up the possibility of creating new content such as texts, images, videos or music. In autumn 2024, we started building an AI radar that systematically analyzes use cases of banks in German-speaking countries. This blog post offers an overview of use cases and maturity levels in the banking sector and provides exciting insights into the status quo.
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