Romandy CTO

Special Edition
30 June 2026

★ Banking Special

When the bank starts doing the work

What a panel we had last Thursday. A packed room at Wonderful in Geneva, and — like the best panels — it left us with more good questions than answers. We walked out a little obsessed, so we went digging.

We've kept this one a mix — some serious, some fun. The thread through all of it: in 2026, banking AI stopped just answering and started acting. It onboards the client, screens the deal, fixes its own code — sometimes logging in with the same access as the banker beside it. Dazzling in a few corners.

★ The big picture

Everyone has adopted AI. Almost no one has shipped it.

Illustration: Romandy CTO

Start with one number. In McKinsey's June snapshot, 88% of banks now use AI somewhere — but only 7% have actually rolled it out. Everyone's dabbling; almost no one has finished. McKinsey's name for the trap is hard to beat: "pilot purgatory."

Where it does land, it's the unglamorous stuff — the back office and engineering, where a slip costs a code review, not a client. BNY runs "digital employees" with their own logins and human managers. Goldman sat an AI engineer next to 12,000 human ones. Citi has 80% of 180,000 staff using it.

But the line to keep is McKinsey's: the technology is barely a fifth of the job. The other 85% is people, habits and trust — the part the robots are still, well, studying.

For the CTO: owning the tool is the easy part now — almost everyone does. The edge goes to whoever rebuilds a whole workflow around it and treats the agents like staff: named, permissioned, audited. McKinsey's carrot — the banks that move first could end up far more profitable than the rest by 2030. Its stick — being six months late is, in its words, "a very expensive adventure."

★ This week

Three to read with your coffee

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1. The regulator now has its own AI

Switzerland's FINMA told Reuters it runs AI in-house to watch the banks: one tool flags oddities in inspection files, and a second one's only job is to catch the first making things up. When your regulator keeps fact-checked robots, "explain your model" stops being a polite request. (PYMNTS)

Illustration: Romandy CTO

2. The card giants quietly rebuilt the rails

Mastercard switched on round-the-clock settlement in regulated stablecoins, chasing Visa, which is already moving billions this way. And the two are reportedly teaming up with Stripe on a shared stablecoin of their own — aimed straight at Tether and Circle. You won't notice it at the till. Your treasurer will. (Mastercard, Fortune)

Illustration: Romandy CTO

3. The face on the call might be fake

Deepfake fraud has gone mainstream — people spot a faked video only about 40% of the time, and one firm wired $25m after a video call with a "CFO" who turned out to be AI. JPMorgan's advice is refreshingly un-magical: watch for odd payment patterns, verify the details before any money moves, and treat every request as unproven until checked. (J.P. Morgan)

★ Worth knowing

Five quick ones

→BNY is planning 150 AI products on its Eliza platform — its "digital employees" come with logins and human managers. (CIO Dive)

→The EU's AI rules bite on 2 August 2026 — credit-scoring people is "high-risk," fraud checks are exempt. A delay to 2027 is on the table, but plan for August.

→Rogo raised $160M (about a $2bn price tag); its assistant now sits inside the work of 35,000+ bankers at Rothschild, Jefferies, Lazard and Nomura. (PR Newswire)

→JPMorgan and Citi are building a round-the-clock tokenised-deposit network for 2027 — keeping the money on their own books instead of handing it to stablecoins. (Fortune)

→Anthropic rolled out ten ready-made finance agents — pitchbooks, KYC, month-end close — that run inside Excel, Word and Outlook, already in use at BNY, Citadel, FIS and Carlyle. (Anthropic)

★ Meanwhile in Switzerland

The Swiss bet: keep it at home

Illustration: Romandy CTO

For private banks, secrecy is the product — so keeping data inside Switzerland may matter more than any model. UBS just named its first Chief AI Officer and has 280+ projects live, all in the Swiss cloud, human-checked. Pictet skips pilots on principle: full rollout or nothing. Julius Baer is betting on 135 years of its own data — while quietly swapping out the plumbing underneath. (CIO Dive)

The money is going digital too: UBS, PostFinance and four others are testing a Swiss-franc stablecoin, while the central bank keeps running real digital-franc settlement behind the scenes. Sovereignty, stitched right into the rails.

★ The lighter side

A couple just for fun

Illustration: Romandy CTO

The agents can do the job — they just can't open an account

An AI can screen the deal and draft the pitchbook. It just can't pass the bank's checks — no passport, no ID, nothing to prove who it is. So Circle's co-founder raised $30M for a startup, Catena Labs, that does one thing: get bank accounts for bots, with humans setting the limits. The machines came for the junior analysts before they could even get a debit card. (Fortune)

One agent went looking for a side hustle

Researchers training an AI agent watched it quietly slip its sandbox and start mining cryptocurrency — nobody asked it to. It's a small, funny story with a serious tail: "autonomous" cuts both ways, and "what exactly is this thing allowed to do?" is fast becoming the question of the year. (Axios)

★ Tool of the week

If you're weighing build vs buy

Illustration: Romandy CTO

Mercury Command — mercury.com/command

Agentic banking on the customer side (pictured above): tell it in plain English — send the payment, issue the card, set a treasury rule — and it does the work, with every step reviewed, approved and logged. The clearest picture yet of "the bank doing the work."

Also worth a demo: Model ML (modelml.com), "digital teammates" inside Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook with the security badges banks ask for; Rogo (rogo.ai), strong with investment-banking teams and built-in audit trails; and Wonderful (wonderful.ai) — Thursday's panel hosts — enterprise AI agents that take on onboarding, loans and disputes across voice, chat and email, and resolve most on their own.

★ On the watchlist

If you have 15 minutes

McKinsey — "Banking and AI: when the tech starts doing the work" (8 Jun video). Three partners on why the holdup is people, not technology. The best quarter-hour on this all month. (McKinsey)

Colombus — Digital Index of Swiss Private Banks 2026 (June whitepaper). The home-turf reality check on where Swiss private banks really stand — digital maturity, mobile, and the "AI mirage." (Colombus)

Temenos — "Conversational Studio: build digital banking experiences with AI" (video). Conversational banking done properly, not another chatbot. (YouTube)

★ Quick vote

How did this one land?

One click. Helps us decide whether this format earns a permanent slot.

Loved it — more please

It was OK

Not for me

That's our Banking Special — the fortnight banking stopped asking if the agents work, and started asking who's to blame when they do. Thanks to everyone who packed the room last Thursday. You're the reason we keep digging.

Belle semaine.

— Romandy CTO

A quick note on the numbers: most adoption and productivity figures come from the banks and vendors themselves, not auditors; "agent" still covers a lot of supervised, single-step work; and the EU's August deadline could still move. Treat the dates as live and the percentages as rough.

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