Our global report identifies how financial institutions can position themselves for continued strong performance. Winning institutions embed AI as a CEO-owned priority – using it to reset productivity, unlock tech-led growth, sharpen an active portfolio strategy, and position early for disruption from digital assets and non-bank competitors. In Australia, those themes still hold – but they will be shaped by our large pool of super savings, mortgage-centred household finance, strong prudentially frameworks and an RBA-led reset in payment economics and tokenisation in market infrastructure.
What Matters Most in Australia
- Savings, retirement and servicing matter more than ever: With $4.5t in super assets, Australia's future-of-finance story is not only about banks. As more Australians move from accumulation to drawdown, the value pool is shifting toward retirement income, administration, wealth platforms, custody, distribution and private-market access. Capturing this prize requires a differentiated playbook: stronger distribution, product innovation in lifetime income and advice, and AI-enabled servicing to scale personalised offerings beyond the traditional high-net-worth client.
- Household finance remains a housing and protection story: Australia’s $2.5 trillion of mortgage credit keeps housing at the centre of our financial landscape. With the RBA now in a renewed hiking cycle, the risk agenda is broader than volumes: hardship, savings behaviour, broker economics, claims inflation and insurance affordability are interacting more tightly than in recent cycles, feeding into household resilience and credit quality. Leaders will use AI-enabled early warning and personalised hardship triage and journeys to get ahead of stress, not just react to it.
- Productivity and resilience are best built together: Across banks, insurers, super, wealth and payments, the most successful transformation programs will use AI to simplify a small number of end-to-end journeys while lifting cyber, third-party resilience, scam controls, data quality and operational discipline. Productivity and resilience can no longer be run separately.
- Institutional banks must continue to cater to a broad client base: Our non-bank financial institutions (NBFI) landscape is more than private credit and non-bank lenders (2% and 6% of financial system assets respectively) with super making up 29% of financial system assets. Institutional banks must tailor coverage models and AI-enabled services to this diverse client base. The prize is increasingly across transaction banking (payments and cash management), markets (FX, rates and capital markets), custody, collateral and settlement – with tokenised-market infrastructure emerging as a new frontier.
Implications for Australian Financial Institutions
- Define your role in the value chain: distributor, manufacturer, balance-sheet provider, servicer or infrastructure/orchestration layer.
- Simplify and redesign 3–-5 enterprise journeys with generative and agentic AI that improve the 4 Cs: Customer, Colleagues, Cost and Control (e.g. onboarding/KYC, credit, servicing, claims and transaction banking operations).
- Reallocate resources to services that create steady, repeat revenue and build client relationships, such transaction banking, super and private-capital coverage, retirement, claims administration, custody and data infrastructure, rather than relying on commoditised volume growth alone.
- In payments, plan for second-order redesign, not just lower fees. Lower interchange and higher transparency will put pressure on loyalty economics, premium card propositions, annual fee structures, merchant acquisition models and scheme negotiations. Expect tighter rewards, repriced card economics, more merchant switching and a shift to lower-cost rails.
Sources: APRA Dec-2025 ADI Performance, ADI Property Exposures and Superannuation Statistics; RBA FSR Mar-2026; RBA Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging - Conclusions Paper Mar-2026; RBA/DFCRC Project Acacia Jul-2025. Figures rounded.