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Becoming quantum-safe before it becomes necessary: FINMA reorders the quantum agenda for banks

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Becoming quantum-safe before it becomes necessary

With Guidance 05/2026, FINMA has reset the quantum agenda for Swiss financial institutions. Its survey of 60 institutions reveals an asymmetry: the cyber risks arrive earlier than the benefit – and 72% have taken no measures yet toward quantum-safe encryption.

Why “harvest now, decrypt later” makes protection a problem for today, why the real work lies in a cryptographic inventory, hybrid schemes and crypto-agility – and what FINMA expects by mid-2027: Benjamin Schaefer explains it in his new article.

For financial institutions, quantum computing has moved from a future topic to a leadership task with a deadline.

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Securities Business in Transition: Why Automation, Integration and Modularity Determine Competitiveness

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The securities business in the DACH region is now technologically mature. An anonymised provider survey on service design shows why competition is shifting all the same: interfaces, automation and modular architectures have become standard equipment. The distance between providers opens up elsewhere.

Three findings from the analysis:

– Most providers share a solid, comparable technological base. It has become a hygiene factor. The gap is created by depth of automation, integration quality and modularity.

– Automation tends to cover individual steps rather than the full process. The bottleneck is exception handling: incomplete data, regulatory warnings, special cases in savings plans. Without structured exception handling, automation reaches its limits as volumes grow.

– Interfaces exist almost everywhere, but their usability differs widely. Providers that run their APIs as a product, with a clear scope and stable data models, connect partners faster and scale services more efficiently.

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Banking-as-a-Service in Switzerland: Between growth driver and market reality

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Banking-as-a-Service is often described as a major growth market. But building a profitable business in it is harder than it first looks.

Dr. Roger Heines looked into how BaaS is actually developing in Switzerland, and what determines which providers make money from it.

A few things stood out:
1. The lines between bank, technology provider and service partner are dissolving. Many providers are now all three at the same time.
2. The difference rarely lies in the product range. What matters more is integration into existing systems and solid operational execution.
3. Without scale, the business stays difficult. Standardisation and automation are a basic requirement here.

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Sovereignty in the Age of AI: What Banks Can Actually Decide

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How sovereign are banks really when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence?

Many institutions are investing heavily in AI. But the real question is no longer which application to implement, but where genuine strategic freedom still exists.

Our latest article explores:

• Why banks are becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of providers for chips, infrastructure, and standards
• Why dual sourcing may reduce outages, but does not create strategic independence
• Why proprietary data has become the most important lever for differentiation
• What role European AI models, cloud providers, and regulatory initiatives can play

The key distinction is no longer “make or buy”, but:
A redundancy strategy against outages — or a sovereignty strategy against loss of control?

How high is AI sovereignty currently on your institution’s agenda?

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The (R)Evolution of Core Banking Systems: Transformation Strategies of Providers in Switzerland

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How are core banking vendors like Finnova, ERI, Finstar and TCS BaNCS preparing their platforms for a modular, cloud-native, and AI-ready future?

Dr. Benjamin Schaefer, Research Fellow at BEI St. Gallen, summarises key insights from the Core Banking Radar 2025 and provides a strategic perspective on current shifts in the Swiss core banking landscape.

Covered in the post:

– Trends in platform architecture and operating models
– API-first, microservices, and headless design in banking IT
– Balancing innovation with regulatory resilience

Read now – a compact, well-structured summary for decision-makers.

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What SMEs really expect from banks today and why context is more important than the next product

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The expectations of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are shifting: from product portfolios to real contextual relevance in day-to-day business.
In his latest blog post, Simon Dummel, Research Associate & PhD Candidate at the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen, explains:
– Why payment services are essential but underutilised
– How advisory must evolve into contextual, ongoing processes
– Why contextualisation is a key capability for future banking
– The positioning potential for banks as service partners in the SME segment

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Agentic wallets – the next building block for autonomous AI assistants

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In his latest blog post, Dr. Roger Heines explores how AI agents equipped with agentic wallets, stablecoins, and the x402 protocol can act autonomously – making decisions, booking services, and executing payments.

Highlights :

– Why traditional payment rails fail for machine-based transactions
– How x402 turns HTTP into a payment layer for APIs
– What “Know Your Agent” means for banks, compliance, and governance

An essential read for financial innovators looking to shape the emerging machine-to-machine economy.

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OpenAI Agents SDK – A Guide for Financial Institutions

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The OpenAI Agents SDK enables financial institutions to implement complex AI workflows in a standardized, secure, and scalable manner.
Since 2025, the SDK has provided an integrated framework for agentic AI that combines agents, tools, delegation (handoffs), context, memory, and guardrails in a single library.
Using practical examples, this article shows how agents can act autonomously, use functions and subagents, respond context-sensitively, and meet regulatory requirements. New developments through early 2026—including TypeScript support, human-in-the-loop approvals, and improved observability—make the SDK particularly attractive for productive enterprise scenarios in the financial environment.

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Hybrid Business Models for Open-Source Software

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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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(Open) Corporate Foresight: The Potential of Strategic Future Analysis in Start-ups

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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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Digital Customer Proximity: How Collaboration Increases Customer Benefit

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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.

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The IT Financial System of Tomorrow: From Pure Banking IT to a Connected Business Architecture

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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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From Data to Decisions: AI along the Mortgage Value Chain

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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.

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Transformation of the Financial Market Infrastructure in Switzerland: The Role of Stablecoins and Deposit Tokens

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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?

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Open Finance in International Comparison – Insights for Switzerland

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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?

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Creating Value from Data & AI: Strategy, Options, Prioritization Insights into research findings on strategic value creation from data

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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.

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AI Radar 2025: Why technology alone is not enough – insights from banks and IT providers

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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.

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“Work smarter” – Business process automation for optimizing workflows and increasing operational efficiency (Part 2)

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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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“Work smarter” – Business Process Automation for optimizing processes and increasing operational efficiency (Part 1)

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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 in the financial sector: fundamentals, potential and challenges

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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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Identifying the right data and AI use cases – the Assessment Framework

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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) .

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Potentials and challenges of the Swiss E-ID (2/2)

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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.

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Potentials and challenges of the Swiss E-ID (1/2)

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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.

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