AI in fintech: Separating the show from the work
This article is a contribution from our partner, Embat Theo Wasserberg, Head of UK&I at Embat Fintech’s AI moment in 2025 exposed the gap between demos and real impact. Operational AI, not pilots, is reshaping finance workflows and decision-making. At Google’s Gemini Founders Forum this year, they had a term for what happens when AI looks impressive in demos but never changes how work gets done: AI theatre. Finance and fintech teams know this performance well. They sat through it all year. The pilot that would “transform cash visibility.” The dashboard that would “revolutionise forecasting.” The platform that would “finally connect everything.” Exciting presentations. Polished decks. Then back to hunting through spreadsheets for yesterday’s cash position. 2025 wasn’t the year AI-infused fintech modernisation failed. It was the year we learned what separates the show from the work. What Actually Happened in 2025 2025 didn’t deliver the fintech AI revolution everyone predicted. Instead, we saw something more valuable: growing awareness of what modernisation actually requires. AI Pilots Are Easy, AI-First Workflows Are Not Teams stopped pretending AI deployment was simple. Painful experience helped people distinguish between “AI pilots” (exciting to demo, impossible to scale) and “AI-first workflows” (boring to build, essential to operations). Whether it’s payments, banking or treasury, everyone can list a dozen AI use cases they were pitched or watched a demo of. The challenge wasn’t innovation, identifying a problem on paper or imaginative solutions. It was turning the exciting demo into something banking operations, payment processing teams, and treasury departments could trust and use daily. Top-down AI mandates produced impressive presentations that never changed how work got done. We learned that real progress happens when the people closest to the work can design and own their agents. The lesson: without the right infrastructure, AI can’t scale beyond the team that built it. The Board-Level AI Gap A recent Think & Grow report reveals that only 32% of UK startups and scaleups have AI expertise at board level, trailing the 40% of FTSE 350 tech firms that have appointed specialists. This gap risks stifling growth amid strong investor interest in AI. However, there’s a stark divide by company size. Scaleups with over £50m revenue are more than three times as likely to have AI expertise (50%) compared to their smaller counterparts (15%), though 32% of companies overall plan to make appointments in the next year. As fintech evolves toward AI-first workflows, board-level AI knowledge becomes essential to distinguish hype from scalable operations, ensuring startups maximise funding and compete effectively. Breaking the 30% Automation Ceiling For twenty years, finance automation followed the same principle: if X happens, do Y. That approach created value – automating maybe 30% of manual work – but it also created a ceiling [Deloitte Survey, 2024; McKinsey Report, 2024]. Real life rarely follows rules perfectly. A customer pays two invoices in one transaction. Someone mistypes a reference number. A file format changes. Suddenly, the system freezes, and a human must step in. The promise of efficiency evaporates in exception handling. AI, by contrast, doesn’t require every rule to be predefined. It understands intent. You tell it the desired outcome, and it figures out how to achieve it. That’s the difference between 30% automation and 99%. It’s also the difference between a system that merely saves time and one that transforms how finance operates. The real breakthrough in 2025 was understanding this wasn’t just incremental improvement. It was a different category of capability. The Contained Value Breakthrough One of 2025’s most important lessons came from understanding what didn’t work, and why.Early AI mistakes involved treating it as a cosmetic upgrade atop legacy systems. Teams that succeeded took a different approach: contained value. Contained value means specific, auditable use cases where you know what AI will do, who it serves, and how success will be measured. Not “transform X process or industry.” Instead: automate reconciliation first, then forecasting, then cash visibility. This builds confidence, one use case at a time. The teams that flipped from cost centre to strategic partner did so by making AI agents accountable for specific outcomes. Not vague efficiency targets, but measurable work removed: reconciliation time cut by 75%, forecasting accuracy above 90%, audit prep compressed from weeks to days. They stopped talking about AI strategy and started retiring manual processes. They killed familiar workflows when data showed better paths, even when it made people uncomfortable. We Watched Finance’s Role Fundamentally Shift Something deeper was happening beneath the surface of failed pilots and stalled initiatives. Finance itself was evolving. In a revealing shift, HSBC found that 64% of CFOs at large organisations now consider treasurers part of the C-suite, reflecting a mindset change: finance is no longer viewed purely as a cost centre, but as a catalyst for insight and strategic agility [HSBC Corporate Risk Management Survey, 2024]. This wasn’t just finance functions – whether treasury, payments operations, or banking teams – getting better at their traditional tasks; they were becoming something entirely different. Digital adoption is central to solving this challenge: 80% of CFOs expect digital tools to dominate operations by 2025, while 30% of finance tasks are fully automatable [Deloitte Survey, 2024; McKinsey Report, 2024]. By modernising tools and processes, companies can both attract top talent and unlock productivity gains.Over the next five years, 69% of CFOs expect greater emphasis on data analytics, 60% anticipate more scenario planning, and 55% say finance will become a more embedded strategic partner across the business [Cherry Bekaert CFO Survey, 2025]. But you can’t advise strategy while drowning in exception reports. The Real Shift Isn’t Technical What 2025 ultimately revealed is that modernisation isn’t a technology contest, it’s a cultural reckoning. Finance operations are not evolving just because the new tools are powerful. They’re changing because leaders finally confronted how much of their operating model depends on institutional memory, heroic manual work, and processes that only “function” because people quietly filled the gaps. Modernisation begins not when teams deploy agents, but when they stop accepting complexity,…
Franklin
ISO 20022 for corporates: the change you can’t ignore (even if you’d like to)
From Treasury Masterminds ISO 20022 is one of those initiatives that sounds like a banking problem… right up until it quietly lands on the corporate desk. Treasury, finance operations, IT, ERP teams, payments, compliance. Congratulations, you’re all invited. SWIFT’s ISO 20022 migration replaces legacy MT messages with MX (XML-based) messages. Banks are doing most of the heavy lifting, but corporates still need to pay attention. This change affects payment data quality, reconciliation, investigations, compliance, and yes, costs. This is a corporate-focused, neutral view. No hype. No fear-mongering. Just what matters. So what is actually changing? In very practical terms: MX messages can carry more detail: structured addresses, party roles, identifiers, remittance data. That’s a good thing. Until that rich data gets squeezed back into MT during translation and information gets truncated or lost. So no, this is not “just a formatting upgrade”. It changes how reliably information travels through the payment chain. “But we’re a corporate, not a bank”. Why should we care? Because this affects daily treasury reality more than most people expect. Payments and rejections ISO 20022 introduces stricter structure and validation. If your ERP, TMS, or payment factory relies on creative free text, expect more noise. Reconciliation and reporting In theory, ISO 20022 improves reconciliation. In practice, many corporates still flatten everything into legacy fields internally. If your systems don’t store the richer data, the benefit disappears before it reaches accounting. Compliance and investigations Structured party data supports: But if messages are translated back to MT somewhere in the chain, key details can still vanish. The uncomfortable reality: coexistence and translation We are in the “messy middle” for a while. During the transition you’ll see combinations like: SWIFT offers translation services to bridge the gap. Helpful, yes. Perfect, no. Important to understand: This matters for investigations, audit trails, and operational confidence. What this means in daily corporate life ERP and TMS readiness Even if you don’t connect directly to SWIFT: “Let the bank handle it” only works up to a point. Vendor and customer payments High-volume payment runs amplify small issues. ISO 20022 increases consistency, but reduces flexibility. That’s a trade-off corporates need to manage. Investigations and exceptions Expect: Runbooks may need updating. Very important: check your pricing This deserves its own section because it’s easy to miss. During the transition, SWIFT applies additional charges for MT to MX conversion and translation services. Key points corporates should be aware of: Now the corporate twist:Most corporates don’t pay SWIFT directly. Instead, these costs can surface as: What to do now Ask your banks and connectivity providers one clear question: “Are there additional costs during the MT to MX coexistence period, and where do they appear in our pricing?” If the answer is vague, dig deeper. Silence is not the same as “no cost”. A simple corporate ISO 20022 checklist Use this as a sanity check, not a project plan. Data Systems Banks Operations Costs Final thought ISO 20022 is inevitable. For corporates, the real risk is not the standard itself, but drifting through the transition without visibility. The danger zone looks like this: The smart corporate response is calm and practical:understand your data flows, align systems, challenge your banks, and keep control over the pricing story. That’s not transformation theatre. That’s just good treasury. Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Mastermind is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.