The first Trump administration issued interpretive letters approving banks to offer crypto services, including holding reserves backing stablecoins.

Circle’s USDC stablecoin is widely used in crypto-institution finance, says David Easthope, head of fintech at Crisil Coalition Greenwich. In contrast, Tether’s USDT is favored by businesses preferring to transact in US dollars rather than volatile local currencies. Both USDC and USDT are tied to the dollar.

Ripple’s XRP has enabled cross-border payments for several years, but most still travel through a network of correspondent banks. Mike Johnson, EY Americas Financial Services Solutions leader for Digital Assets and Tax, says complex cross-border wire payments that currently take one to three days could be settled nearly instantly using stablecoins.

“Transactions costs could decrease from traditional $10-$50 wire fees to less than $0.01,” he says.

Johnson also notes that stablecoins could enable instant intercompany transfers and more agile liquidity management, adding, “Stablecoins could also offer faster, lower-cost options for cross-border payroll, contractor payouts, and remittances.”

However, according to Easthope, it remains unclear whether the advantages of a jointly issued bank stablecoin would draw companies away from those they may already be using or even from conventional technology integrated into their existing platforms.

“Banks would test and learn within the parameters of the GENIUS Act,” he adds, “and clients will vote with their stablecoins.”

Simo, 39, is already a veteran of Silicon Valley. A graduate of the French business school HEC Paris, she began her US career as an intern at eBay. She then spent a decade at Meta before taking the helm of Instacart in 2021, where she navigated the end of the Covid disruption for the online grocery app and prepared its 2023 IPO.

She anticipated staying several more years at Instacart; but when Altman called, she says, “The ability to lead such an important part of our collective future was a hard opportunity to pass up.” Introduced to Altman by fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, she joined the board of OpenAI in March of last year and helped Altman complete a recent $40 billion fundraising led by Japan’s SoftBank.

Leaving her position at Instacart on good terms, she participated in the selection of her successor, Chris Rogers, who will officially become CEO after having served as the company’s chief business officer.

Along the way, Simo has acquired a reputation as a turn- around expert, adept at leading large teams. That skill set will not be out of place at OpenAI, which has grown exponentially—it attracts 5.1 billion monthly hits—but is bleed- ing cash. Simo must figure out how to turn the company profitable in the coming years and then help it go public.

AI’s insatiable appetite for computing power, coupled with the current demand/supply conditions for cloud-based AI workflows/use cases, has supercharged the pace of investment and development of data centers. A data center is a facility housing cloud computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of software applications, the training of AI, and any number of additional processing and production applications.

Currently, the US is leading the AI power race, having built the largest number of data centers in the world. Statista reports that as of March, the US was home to 5,426 facilities, followed by Germany with 529, the UK with 523, and China with 449. By 2030, these numbers are expected to increase by about 30-40%. Globally, investment in data centers is forecast to reach $7 trillion.

How does the investment needed to build a data center break down?

“If someone owns a land parcel where data-center development is feasible, then the value of that land is significantly higher than it would be absent that demand,” says Tim McGuire, senior director of Project Finance at Rowan Digital Infrastructure, a developer and builder of data centers in the US. “For example, we see land in core markets like Northern Virginia exceed $2.5 million an acre, and to fit a hyperscaler development—Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft—we’re typically buying a hundred acres plus.”

Energy and water are both crucial cost components, and energy has been the gating issue in most geographies, McGuire adds.

“Data centers are very energy intensive,” he notes, “and even if the energy infrastructure is there to power them, building an interconnection can take months if not years. The cost of building those interconnections can be high. We’re therefore seeing more and more utilities—particularly utilities where the data center boom has really put strain on them—require some form of security for them to undertake the interconnection work.”

Well-capitalized developers that can afford to meet those requirements, have the advantage he says.

The dynamics related to power availability are different for data centers, observes Gordon Bell, principal at EY-Parthenon Digital Infrastructure. “Europe is particularly challenged with respect to power availability, given some of the local regulatory hurdles around expanding the power infrastructure,” he says. “The same thing is also true in North America, whereas in Asia it is relatively fast to build out that infrastructure.”

Graphic processing units (GPUs) are essential for all things AI, and some countries face further restrictions to data center development depending on how many GPUs they can import at any one time, Bell adds.

“Countries like Canada, Japan, Australia, and many in Europe don’t have restrictions on GPU imports,” he says, “which has created another catalyst for growth in the market in those regions.”

Also, different countries will offer specific incentives around the development of data centers. Some Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates, are aggressively incentivizing data center development within their borders, he adds.

Because building a data center is extremely capital intensive, backers are typically global companies like Blackstone, notes Claus Hertel, managing director at Rabobank, an active lender in the space and developer of its own green data center in the Netherlands. A lot of investors and lenders have relationships with these big firms and have assembled large project finance teams that are active in renewables, clean tech, and digital infrastructure.

“At the basic level, you have project financing, which incorporates construction, financing, and term financing,” Hertel says. “Once the data center is complete, you have a certain amount of time—typically a three- to four-year period—where the sponsor can decide how to access permanent capital or permanent financing. That could be in the form of asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities, or a private placement to long-term investors. So there are different pockets of capital, short-term or longer term.”

Like many of its peers, Rowan Digital Infrastructure is sponsored by a private equity firm, Tim McGuire says.

“Typically, a private equity investor will front some of the pre-development costs, which could include acquiring the land parcel and doing some of the horizontal development,” he notes. “Rowan doesn’t put debt financing in place for projects until we have a signed lease, because at that point, we’re able to obtain very attractive terms. The hyperscaler customers are large, well-capitalized, profitable public companies with high investment-grade credit ratings. After signing a long-term lease with them, it opens low-cost debt capital that provides 80% to 85% of the capital needed to build the project.”

“The context for all of this is that the industry has grown tremendously over the last couple of years, and it’s expected to accelerate going forward,” says Gordon Bell. “That just requires more and more capital—more capital than a lot of the existing owners of these assets originally underwrote. They’re looking for ways to raise new capital as well as recycle capital.”

One of the possible solutions that is starting to percolate in the market, he says, is the introduction of dedicated funds that hold a portfolio of stabilized assets.

“That would then provide some diversification of risk and allow various investors looking to get exposure into the space to invest in a fund that holds a portfolio of assets across different markets and different customer,” he says.

“Typically, the stabilized asset deals that we’ve seen are for individual facilities or a handful of individual facilities,” he adds. “Those facilities provide exposure to very specific markets and within each of those facilities there’s oftentimes only a single customer. So, you’re placing a concentrated bet on a single customer and a single market. The private equity deals that have been made thus far have been more one off in nature, a handful of assets, or single assets. It’s not been anything that can programmatically scale globally, which is really what the industry eventually needs—a fund that would hold all these stabilized assets. Investors looking to get exposure into stabilized assets would then just be able to invest into this fund.”

Whatever the mechanism that gets it done, McGuire sees continued strong demand for data center development going forward, driven by continued investment from hyperscalers. AI will be a catalyst, but so will demand for cloud services.

“There’s a lot of support for the data center business for the foreseeable future,” he predicts.

“CATL’s Hong Kong listing is a significant milestone, not just for the company but for the broader regional market,” said Joshua Chu, a Hong Kong-based lawyer at CITD.

“The scale of the IPO, given the current global macroeconomic headwinds and the cautious investor sentiment in Asia, is impressive,” he added.

The advisers also managed a complex dual-listing process, underscoring Hong Kong’s growing capability to handle large strategic offerings. After all, these were some of the most seasoned global and regional financial institutions and law offices, according to Anandaday Misshra, managing partner of Indian law firm AMLEGALS.

“It is clear that CATL has leaned on deep institutional and sectoral expertise to structure a deal of this magnitude,” Misshra added.

Also, CATL’s Hong Kong listing “shows growing confidence in zero-carbon technologies and the companies building them,” Kapil Dhiman of Quranium said.

“As a company building secure digital infrastructure for the future, we see this as a sign that Hong Kong is ready to play a leading role again in supporting bold, forward-looking industries,” Dhiman adds.

CATL reported a 40% year-on-year increase in EV battery deliveries in the first quarter of the year. Seoul-based SNE Research suggests it also acquired a 38.2% global market share.

CATL’s Hong Kong listing proceeds would be utilized for factory construction in foreign markets—accounting for 30% of its total revenue.

“For now, it looks far more like a war chest. The large earning to spending suggests China will take up any new technologies slowly anyway,” said economist Dr. Bryane Michael of Oxford University.

CATL’s IPO also reflects a broader shift in global capital flows.

“As US-China trade tensions ease, Chinese equities have rebounded strongly, while ongoing US-EU tariff disputes and political uncertainties continue to weigh on US markets,” Chu said. “Hong Kong’s mature market infrastructure and strategic positioning make it an increasingly attractive destination for international investors seeking stability and growth in Asia.”

APIs continue to provide banks with ways to increase efficiency and improve customer experience, lowering the entry barrier for creating new services and introducing new business models. This year’s winners include API-based embedded-finance and open-banking solutions.

AI remains a critical enabler, driving innovation in areas such as chatbots, risk monitoring and detection, algorithms, automation, and internal GenAI customer service assistance.

Banking-app enhancements include budget management, onboarding processes, and the use of telemetry to enhance business management and data utilization.

Digital assets, encompassing a broad spectrum from conventional bonds to instruments backed by unique items like violins, are the rare emerging field that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional finance. Expanded use of digital assets is transforming payment processes. This year’s winners have been active in such areas as tokenization, integration of assets typically financed with bitcoin, and development of crypto-custody services.

Banking innovations are opening doors to expanded opportunities. Hyper-personalized lifestyle banking can now encompass services such as mobile phone access, insurance, mortgages, and even estate-management support. Broader applications of finance, including the linking of operational weather forecasts with commodity prices and improved monitoring of ESG performance, demonstrate how technology is expanding finance’s remit. Innovations addressing financial accessibility, unclaimed benefits solutions, and simplified access to credit underscore how financial inclusion remains a hotbed of innovation. Among our nonbank winners, meanwhile, are firms that support banks in everything from compliance to payments.

Banking innovation is by no means confined to the largest and most mature markets. Indeed, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East reported the highest number of financial innovations this year, thanks to a focus on meeting unmet needs, the ability to leapfrog legacy systems, a strong mobile-first culture, and a potentially supportive regulatory approach. These regions are likely to remain fertile ground for financial innovation as they strive for greater financial inclusion and leverage technology to address their specific economic and social challenges.

Innovation is proving a process of evolution for all banks, wherever they are located, leaving no margin for complacency if they want to remain competitive. Innovation for innovation’s sake, however, should be avoided as it is only by understanding user needs that banks can adopt and integrate new technologies that deliver innovations to genuinely benefit users and improve the customer experience.

Quipu’s work is just one example of the growing importance of AI to financial institutions. According to Statista, the financial sector “exhibit[s] one of the highest adoption rates across industries.” In fact, Statista estimates that in 2024, the financial services industry invested roughly $45 billion in AI technology. Concurrently, NVIDIA found that more than half of the companies represented in its global State of AI in Financial Services: 2025 Trends report view AI as “crucial to their future success.” Of the 600 financial services professionals surveyed, 98% of managers say that their organizations plan to increase AI infrastructure spending this year.

Many banks have already deployed AI to automate internal processes such as customer onboarding, credit scoring, fraud detection, and loan processing. Increasingly, FIs consider AI a pivotal tool for efficiency and cost-effectiveness in meeting evolving anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations.

As these innovations become more commonplace, some banks may wonder what’s next for AI? That’s where innovations arising from the world’s best fintech labs come in.

AI capabilities continue to mature. Enhanced AI capabilities will help FIs generate new business value, but only if those institutions follow the advance from AI to generative AI (Gen AI).

The term “artificial intelligence” is used for technologies that can perform tasks previously requiring human brain power. Relying on historical data and rules-based systems, these capabilities recognize patterns, understand language, and detect anomalies—notably, the types of anomalies that can indicate fraud.

Gen AI is a specialized branch of AI that exceeds content analysis to actually produce content. Gen AI can write. It can simulate human conversation. It can code. It can generate images and videos.

The difference between AI and Gen AI can be seen in chatbots. Imagine this: A customer asks a chatbot, “Why was my credit card application denied?” An AI-powered chatbot may return a list of common reasons for the bank to deny credit, followed by a customer-service phone number for the user to call. A Gen AI-powered chatbot may respond with, “Your credit card application was denied because your credit score is too low. Your credit score is too low because a $2,000 write-off appears on your credit report. This write-off seems to be related to an auto loan from ABC Motors. Repaying this debt will help you improve your credit score. You may want to contact ABC Motors to settle this debt. Consider negotiating a ‘pay-for-delete’ arrangement.”

“Loan sharks were these businesses’ only solution. We’re an alternative to that.”

Mercedes Bidart, CEO and Founder, Quipu

Chatbot improvement is just one way Gen AI can improve business for FIs. It can study customer data to more closely tailor marketing strategies and financial services to individual needs. It can improve loan and investment strategies by generating “what if ” scenarios to help banks chart, for example, how changing interest rates affect customers’ willingness to take out new loans, and customers’ ability to repay those loans. And, as the innovations discussed below indicate, AI and Gen AI can help banks and their clients hasten international trade. They can help spot and stop previously unknown threats to bank infrastructures and data. And they can provide a financial lifeline to the underbanked.

Bancolombia Ventures partners with startups, focusing on topics such as fintech, climate-related technology, and cybersecurity. One of those startups, Quipu, has developed a new credit-scoring system tailored to what Bancolombia calls the “informal” nature of business in Latin America.

According to El Pais, a leading Colombian newspaper, close to 95% of all businesses in that country are microenterprises—defined as operations with 10 employees or less. While employing 65% of the Colombian workforce, these organizations tend to suffer from “business dwarfism,” or an inability to grow. Why? They lack access to capital. Traditional credit scoring methods paint them as a bad risk.

This is a problem that Mercedes Bidart, Quipu CEO, is trying to solve. The MIT graduate notes that most microentrepreneurs in the country operate as freelancers. “They have their digital wallet or bank account as a person, not as a business,” Bidart says. “They come in for an SME [small or midsize enterprise] loan at the bank, but they won’t get that. There’s no information about their business behavior.”

The Quipu system finds new ways to detect business value. It looks at business location, social media posts (including videos, pictures, and customer comments) and other nontraditional sources of information to determine business health. Even Google Maps can indicate whether a business is growing—showing, perhaps, the physical expansion of a home-based garage over time.

Quipu uses this information to develop its own credit scores for microbusinesses. Potential new clients are often referred by Bancolombia, from its pool of declined applicants. Quipu has offered many of these microbusinesses loans ranging from $100 to $2,000—for a total of $3.5 million in loans granted over the past 18 months. While these are personal loans, rather than business loans, Bidart believes that these small infusions of cash will help some businesses grow to the point where they eventually qualify for more-traditional SME loans.

“The people we serve—before us the only financial solution they had was the predatory lender. We have loan sharks. They charge abusive interest rates, and they’re violent,” Bidart says. “They operate from Mexico to Argentina. In Colombia, loan sharks were these businesses’ only solution. We’re an alternative to that.”

Let’s take look at innovations arising at other fintech labs around the world.

Paul Brody: The ability of people to pay each other in dollars is hugely valuable. And to give you a sense of how big stable- coin dollars have become, last month the ethereum blockchain ecosystem did $2 trillion in stablecoin payments, over 99% of which were in US dollars.

GF: Who is actually using them?

Brody: By far the most popular initial use case for stablecoin is in emerging markets. Countries without independent central banks often experience high inflation or even hyperinflation, and so demand for US dollars is really high among the local population.

GF: And they’re being used for cross-border remittances too?

Brody: A lot of traditional cross-border systems take days to execute, and they cost a fair amount of money. If both participants have smartphones and cryptocurrency accounts, you can send dollars across borders in a matter of seconds for almost nothing.

GF: Lately, the US Treasury Department seems to be saying that the US doesn’t need a central bank digital currency [CBDC], i.e., a digital dollar. It can use stablecoin. Is that your read too?

Brody: What we need is well-regulated stablecoin. We need some regulatory safeguards to make sure that if you say there’s a dollar on-chain, there’s also a dollar in the bank account to back that up, or its equivalent in assets.

CBDCs have been flopping, mostly because central banks don’t really know why they’re doing them. I’ve talked to many central bankers, and they generally have no idea why they’re doing this other than Facebook wanted one.

GF: How will blockchain technology change things for corporate CFOs and treasurers?

Brody: CFOs and treasurers have some questions to ask themselves: Am I plugged into the crypto and blockchain system? Can I make stablecoin payments? Should I include bitcoin in my corporate treasury alongside US dollar-denominated bonds? Going further, can I automate my business contracts? My procurement? How can I run my business operations more efficiently? And if a customer wants to pay me in stablecoin, can they do so? The answer for most companies today is, no, they can’t.

GF: If you’re a stablecoin issuer, how do you make a profit on that business?

Brody: You make money with transaction fees and, potentially, your float on the interest rate. But that depends on interest rates. If rates go down really low, it’s going to be a painful business. Fees are pretty small because it’s such a competitive environment.

GF: What does all this mean for banks generally going forward? Is it going to lessen their importance?

Brody: It’s going to change banks’ role, and may diminish it. It depends on how a bank makes its money.

Banks that make their money processing credit card transac- tions are the most at risk because blockchains represent a new, more efficient way to process transactions. You swipe your credit card in a store, and you don’t see the cost of the payment, but it’s real and it’s substantial, like 3% to 4%. International wire trans- fers are usually a fixed fee, as much as $50. Stablecoin transfers cost almost nothing by comparison.

But if you’re a regional bank that does a lot of corporate finance, blockchain probably doesn’t change your business that much.

GF: What about major custody banks, such as BNY Mellon, JPMorgan, etc.? Is their business at risk?

Brody: Major custody banks are in an interesting place. They have a ton of assets, and if you’ve got assets and you control and custody those assets, you’re then in a position to help people tokenize them.

So, this new technology is certainly a threat, but it’s also potentially a substantial opportunity. At the end of the day, if you’re custodying assets and you’re now helping people tokenize them or manage them in different ecosystems, that represents the additive potential to your business.

GF: In your book Ethereum for Business, you highlight the importance of blockchain-based smart contracts. With these, one can define not only dollars but all sorts of things, even coffee mugs. Why aren’t more corporations using smart contracts?

Brody: The answer is that blockchains don’t yet have privacy built into them, and this is a huge problem. But it’s being fixed. It’s like the early days of the internet, when we didn’t have encryption. Most companies don’t feel comfortable doing business without privacy.

It’s why private blockchains have never worked. If companies had a private blockchain, they thought it ensured privacy. What they didn’t realize is that inside that walled garden there’s still no privacy. If you’re a big company and you have all your suppliers in your private blockchain, you still can’t run your procurement process there, because supplier A can see how much you’re paying supplier B, and also how much you’re ordering from them.

GF: How deep are banks going to go in providing blockchain services?

Brody: Every single bank is going to offer some kind of DLT [distributed ledger technology] service. You have stocks, you have bonds [to offer clients], and now you may add crypto. Other institutions may send cash to an ethereum address for you, instead of setting up a wire transfer to a bank address. There will be new versions of money transfer and payments, and some of them are going to be quite sophisticated.

GF: Skeptics are asking when they will see blockchain’s “killer app”: meaning an application that’s universally used, along the lines of what email did for the internet?

Brody: Stablecoins are the killer app, the one that gets everybody on-chain. The stablecoin market is about to get crazy competitive, and yield-bearing stablecoins will be widely available soon.

“CFOs and treasurers have to ask themselves: If a customer wants to pay me in stablecoin, can they do so?”

GF: All in all, is blockchain a niche innovation—useful but not earth-shattering—or is it something that can fundamentally change global finance?

Brody: It’s not only going to change global finance, but it will transform all global commerce.

Blockchain is going to become the plumbing by which all B2B transactions are done.

And the reason it’s so transformational is that historically, money, contracts, and “stuff” [i.e., goods] all were in different systems. Companies still spend huge amounts on reconciling money, stuff, and contracts. For example, it costs the average large company about $100 to pay a bill. And the reason is, somebody in procurement has to say, I’ve got this bill. Does it match the purchase order that I sent out? Do the terms on the bill and the purchase order match the terms of the contract? And so on. Imagine a future where the money, the stuff, and the terms of the contract are all in the same digital system and they all reconcile with each other. It’s done instantly. In 10, 15 years, the whole process will be universal and invisible. Back-end plumbing, right?

Currently, most data centers are owned by telecom companies like Maroc Telecom and Inwi or by data center operators like Medasys and N+One. Most large banks also have one, while smaller banks lease data storage space.

Regional governments compete by offering different incentives. Casablanca-Settat and Rabat-Salé-Kénitra boast the most data centers. The full internet penetration rates of these urban centers and energy availability are key for these sites. Other regions are catching up, too. Last year, American firm Iozera signed a $500 million deal to build a data center in Tetouan.

“Datacenter location decisions are driven by a complex interplay of factors, including proximity to business hubs, regional infrastructure capabilities, and long-term operational sustainability. The industry naturally gravitates toward areas that optimize these variables,” says Doha Ammour, vice president of International Business Development at N+ONE Datacenters.

The digital wave in Morocco doesn’t stop at data centers. Developments in fintech, AI, and even e-government initiatives, like Digital Morocco 2030, were recently showcased at April’s 2025 Gitex Africa tech expo in Marrakech. The event drew over 1,400 exhibitors and received over 45,000 visitors and delegates from over 130 countries.

The saying goes, “Data is the new oil.” Data must also be refined and properly stored. However, unlike oil, data is infinite and even self-replicating, so the demand for data services will continue to increase.

“Like many emerging markets, Latin America is a hotbed of financial innovation,” said Tripathi to Costa Rican newspaper La República. “In fact, some of the most cutting-edge developments in global banking originate [in Latin America]. These aren’t just regional success stories, but global benchmarks. Latin America is leading by example, and the world is paying attention.”

Tripathi cited two examples: Nubank, which started in Brazil and has spread to Colombia and Mexico. Nubank passed 100 million customers in May 2024 and has a market capitalization of $56.6 billion. Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Brazil’s Pix payment platform has transformed the nation’s instant payments system with more than 155 million users, 15 million companies, and over 6 billion transactions monthly. In 2024, Pix had a 53% year-on-year growth and surpassed credit card transactions.

However, Tripathi warned that more than 50% of the total capital invested in the world banking sector is trading below its value. This suggests that banks are not generating enough returns to cover capital costs, which in turn means they cannot enact societal transformation.

“We are on the verge of a banking revolution that will redefine how banks operate, how they serve society, and how they build trust,” he added.

In March, Brazilian bank Itaú unveiled instant global payments, and the latest unicorn in the region is Mexican digital bank Plata, which raised $160 million in Series A funding led by New York-based Kora that valued the two-year-old company at $1.5 billion.

Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador have fielded projects ranging from financial inclusion to client experience, which won awards during the Fintech Americas Miami conference in March.

Other regional entities that received multiple awards include Grupo AutoFácil, BAC, Banco Atlántida, BBVA, BCP, Citi, Davivienda, and Santander.

The World Trade Organization recently adjusted its trade projections for 2025 accordingly. The global trade body said there will be a substantial decline in merchandise trade and a minor decline in services trade, mainly driven by North America’s new projections of a 12.6% decline in exports and 9.6% in imports in 2025.

The new trade environment provides fertile ground for tech companies to develop new AI offerings that help businesses with their awareness, monitoring, calculation, compliance, risk management, and customs paperwork and payments.

The offerings are diverse. Several AI companies focus on automating the classification of goods and related tariff calculations while improving trade compliance. This complex process has always been one of the most challenging parts of international trade. For example, Avalara, a US software company, developed its Avalara Automated Tariff Code Classification, an AI-driven system designed to simplify and speed up the tariff classification process.

Conversely, governments are using new AI technologies to help them monitor and manage customs and tariffs better. ScanTech AI Systems, a Georgia-based American tech company, has developed its latest technology, CustomsTrace AI. It helps state agencies identify and verify tariff-sensitive goods at national borders and prevent the unauthorized or illegal importation of restricted items.

While trade wars force companies to adjust their supply chains, inventory management, and the locations of the manufacturing facilities to optimize free trade and shipping costs, it has to be supported by sophisticated data management systems. Thus, other companies develop AI-powered offerings for the shipping and customs processes to address labor and shipping concerns. Avathon, a California-based industrial AI company, introduced an AI software that provides risk management solutions for the entire process.

As the trade wars global discussions cool off to help financial markets recover, AI tech companies must maintain a sustainable business model to continue their growth regardless of market conditions.