The financial landscape in 2025 isn’t just evolving — it’s transforming at a pace that demands precision and strategy. BrainStation’s recent “2025 Fintech Trends & Landscape” event highlighted the forces reshaping banking, payments, and financial services. With insights from industry leaders at Wealthsimple, RBC, TD, and Scotiabank, one message stood out: Large financial institutions must carefully balance trust and innovation to remain competitive in a rapidly shifting market.
For established banks, the challenge is navigating a middle path. They can’t afford to be the first movers—the risks are too high—but they also can’t fall behind, as companies like Tesla, Apple and Shopify encroach on traditional banking services with offerings like car insurance and credit cards.
Trust and Innovation: The Balancing Act
Banks are fundamentally in the trust business. Customers rely on them to safeguard their finances, and even a single misstep can erode that trust. This is why there must be a human in the loop when adopting AI solutions. As panellists noted, for new entrants such as Wealthsimple their primary challenge is in gaining trust, while for established banks their goal is to not fall behind on innovation. Rolling out AI features too early, without adequate safeguards, is a risk most large banks won’t take, as it could potentially jeopardize trust and their reputation.
Wealthsimple’s vision of tools, like a “Money Therapist” and “Investment Sidekick”, exemplifies how AI can offer hyper-personalized financial advice while keeping meaningful human interaction at its core. These tools reflect the kind of innovation big banks are watching closely, but adopting cautiously.
The Reality of Innovation: Choosing the Right Use Cases
“We’re not able to innovate everywhere,” Vipul Lalka from TD remarked during the panel discussion. This sentiment underscores a critical point: deciding where to focus innovation efforts is just as important as innovating itself. Banks face constraints in resources, talent, and risk tolerance. Prioritizing high-impact use cases, such as fraud prevention, hyper-personalized customer experiences, or open banking solutions — is essential for modern-day, digital-first banks.
This is where innovation sprints and hackathons play a pivotal role. These programs help financial institutions identify and prioritize the top business areas and use cases for employees to work on. This ensures that new prototypes are aligned with strategic goals and that resources are allocated to the ideas within the organization that have the most potential for success.
Attracting and Retaining Top Talent
Attracting AI research talent to a large bank was initially a significant hurdle, according to Kathryn Hume from RBC. To overcome this, RBC had to create a separate type of culture, one that resonated with AI researchers — while bridging the gap between academic exploration and business application. This culture shift enabled them to build cross-functional teams that pivoted toward applied AI with measurable business outcomes for the bank.
Creating such an environment is not easy, but it is a key area where innovation programs such as hackathons can help. By fostering a culture of experimentation and collaboration, these initiatives not only engage existing employees, but also position organizations as attractive destinations for top-tier talent.
A Look Ahead: One Year From Now
As we imagine revisiting these conversations a year from now, here’s what the panellists hope to see:
- Vipul Lalka (TD): Personal experiences and fraud prevention as a core focus, given the growing sophistication of financial scams and cyber attacks.
- Tim Das (Scotiabank): A reimagined customer experience where phones act as digital concierges, delivering meaningful, hyper-personalized and interconnected interactions.
- Dasha Sivkov (Wealthsimple): A functional v1 of a “Money Therapist” tool, leveraging Wealthsimple’s cost structure to provide more value to customers.
- Kathryn Hume (RBC): Client-facing large language models (LLMs), enabling customers to complete complex tasks, like paying bills, without ever needing to visit a branch.
These aspirations highlight the diverse sets of priorities across the fintech landscape, from hyper-personalized experiences to fraud prevention.
Legacy Systems and the Path Forward
Legacy systems remain one of the biggest hurdles for large banks. Migrating off decades-old infrastructure is a complex and costly endeavour, but it’s essential for staying competitive. Even here, the seemingly mundane can help drive significant technological breakthroughs. Kathryn Hume, from RBC, shared an enlightening and eye-opening example of how early cheque processing automation work at banks, laid the foundation for the significant AI advancements that we now all benefit from today.
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Programs like innovation sprints help banks tackle these challenges incrementally. By identifying the most pressing issues — whether it’s migrating off legacy systems or exploring open banking — they enable institutions to make tangible progress without overextending their resources.
Preparing for the Future
The fintech landscape presents new challenges, as well as immense opportunities. Open banking is poised to revolutionize data transparency and collaboration, while quantum computing looms as both a transformative tool and a security threat. Navigating these future trends and technological changes requires a blend of both bold innovation and responsible stewardship.
At Onova, we’ve worked with large banks, such as BMO and HSBC to drive innovation breakthroughs through intentionally crafted hackathons and innovation sprints.
These innovation programs help teams and organizations:
- Identify and prioritize high-impact use cases.
- Build a culture of innovation that attracts top-tier talent.
- Deliver measurable outcomes that align with strategic business goals.
If your organization is ready to be a leader in the fintech and AI space, let’s connect. Together, we can help you stay ahead of the curve and turn today’s trends into tomorrow’s biggest technological breakthroughs.
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