Author: Charitarth Sindhu

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Primary bank loyalty is collapsing across North America. At FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego last May, EMARKETER Principal Analyst Tiffani Montez delivered the line that defined the week. Her verdict: “Banks no longer own the customer.” Consumers in the region now hold an average of 7.1 financial products and services, according to Montez’s keynote analysis. More than half sit outside their main bank. The fragmentation is no longer a theory pushed by neobank founders. In addition, McKinsey, Accenture, J.D. Power, Capgemini, and the Federal Reserve now publish data telling the same…

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Bank AI overhaul moved from boardroom talk to disclosed numbers this month. Three of the world’s banks revealed sharply different angles on the same shift. Axis Bank in India confirmed a workforce reduction of roughly 3,100 staff over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, U.S. Bank expanded its AWS deal to move hundreds of mission-critical systems into a cloud-and-AI operating model. In parallel, NatWest unveiled a 2026 FinTech Programme cohort made up entirely of AI-focused founders. Together, the three announcements showed how the bank AI overhaul now spans headcount, infrastructure, and external…

Author: Charitarth Sindhu, Fractional Business & AI Workflow Consultant Paytm Payments Bank licence cancellation took effect on 24 April 2026 when the Reserve Bank of India invoked Section 22(4) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. The order ended the Paytm Payments Bank licence at the close of business that Friday. From then on, the bank could not accept deposits, run customer accounts, or call itself a bank at all. RBI also said it would file a winding-up petition in the High Court. Yet the order described the bank as having enough liquidity to repay every depositor. So this was less…

By Raul Tudor, Fractional Chief Technology Officer, Tudor Software House Expense management workflow design at most companies still follows a strangely outdated pattern. An employee pays out of pocket, uploads a receipt, waits for approval, and finance reconciles everything days, or often weeks, later. The whole process feels administrative, slow, and oddly disconnected from how money moves through modern systems. What makes this surprising is that, behind the scenes, financial infrastructure has evolved dramatically. Payments authorise in milliseconds. Card networks provide rich transaction data in real time. Yet inside organisations, expense visibility remains delayed, fragmented, and manual. The expense management workflow…

By Marcel Syriani, COO, DATABASICS, Inc. Expense management problems rarely surface where finance leaders look for them. A few months ago, I sat with a nonprofit finance director who described what she thought was a recurring approval issue. Her employees kept submitting expenses that should never have been approved. So her team proposed a fix: penalize the approvers when non-compliant claims slipped through. That fix solves nothing. By the time an expense lands on an approver’s desk, the money is already gone. The flight is flown, the hotel is booked, the card is run. What you get instead is documentation theater.…

Embedded supply chain finance now drives a sharp split across global logistics. We asked four industry leaders how cross-border payments are shifting inside operational workflows. Their answers reveal who is genuinely transforming and who is polishing old plumbing. Some shippers programme money around physical container events. Most still wire dollars and pray. That gap will define winners in 2026. Embedded Supply Chain Finance Goes Programmable Walmart Canada built the clearest case study on the planet. Through its DL Freight system, the retailer routes GPS and IoT data from 70 carriers through Hyperledger smart contracts. Payment auto-releases on verified delivery events.…

Card surcharge ban deadlines have a way of creeping up on small builders. From 1 October 2026, Australian tradies lose the right to add 1.5% to a card payment on quoted jobs. The Reserve Bank confirmed the change in its Conclusions Paper on 31 March 2026, and the rule covers eftpos, Mastercard and Visa across debit, prepaid and credit. So that “+ 1.5% card surcharge” line at the bottom of every invoice goes. That sounds simple. On the ground, it reshapes how every quote, deposit and progress claim gets priced. For a fencing crew taking a $25k deposit by card,…

Author: Callum Gracie, Founder, Otto Media Fintech AI Overviews now decide which brands consumers meet first when searching for a savings account, credit card, or personal loan. Google’s AI summaries appear on roughly 91% of educational finance queries, per BrightEdge data. Meanwhile, Pew Research found only 8% of users click any link when an AI summary shows, versus 15% without one. The math is brutal for challenger fintechs. Even worse, the brands cited inside those summaries rarely change. NerdWallet shows up in over 90% of personal finance answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, per Goodie’s 5.7M-citation study. Bankrate clocks…

By Kriszta Grenyo, Chief Operating Officer, Suff Digital Stablecoin payroll has crossed the line from fringe experiment to operating decision for distributed teams. When you manage a workforce across multiple countries, payroll becomes a surprisingly complex operational challenge. International wire transfers carry fees that compound with team size and arrive on unpredictable timelines. They also require recipients to navigate local banking infrastructure that may not be reliable or accessible. Currency conversion adds another layer of friction, particularly when exchange rates move significantly between payroll calculation and disbursement. So these operational problems pushed us at Suff Digital to take a serious…

Author: Kriszta Grenyo, Chief Operating Officer, Suff Digital B2B payments fraud is no longer a tail-risk problem. According to the 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 76% of US organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025, with business email compromise hitting 74% of respondents. So the question is no longer whether your business will be targeted. It is whether your accounts payable workflow has the verification steps to catch the attack before money moves. A business owner I know recently received an email from what looked like a long-standing supplier, claiming a banking change and listing new…