Technology Awards 2025 – The Banker

The pace of technological developments across industries and geographies has never been as high as it is now, and this year’s Technology Awards submissions are a reflection of the wide variety of challenges that financial institutions can tackle with innovation.

With more than 200 submissions across 17 regional and product categories, this year’s awards set a new record and provide us with an unparalleled view of some of the boldest ideas and radical improvements out there.

Emphasising the pivotal role of technological developments in the financial industry, the Transformation Project category was by far the most popular, followed by AI and Payments. It is also telling that, similarly to last year’s awards, the Transformation Project category winner also secured the Global prize.

This year’s winners have demonstrated exceptional creativity in addressing challenges and inefficiencies and seizing emerging opportunities. Unsurprisingly, many solutions are underpinned by generative AI platforms, which offer significant improvements in chatbot interfaces and processing of large amounts of data.

While many of the projects submitted for the awards had to do with banks’ mobile apps, internal innovation and productivity improvements for employees appear to be as important as customer-facing upgrades in the financial industry. From cyber security innovation to chatbot platforms for customer support agents, this year’s entries showed how much efficiency can be gained through digital innovation.

Another trend shown by this year’s submissions is that financial companies are increasingly taking on long-standing issues affecting the industry, streamlining processes that long resisted automation and digitisation. These are often entrenched in business-to-business and enterprise banking systems where the stakes tend to be higher than in consumer applications. While hard to tackle, these projects often yield the most rewards and move the needle in efficiency and customer satisfaction.

A common thread in the banking industry across the world is the topic of financial inclusion. Creative solutions enabled by digital innovation allow bringing financial services to underserved communities and people who are less comfortable with traditional banking interfaces. In addition to that, creating products for children and fostering healthy financial habits from a young age is growing in importance.

Overall, we saw submissions of exceptionally high quality, and determining the winners whose projects best demonstrated innovation, utility, and transformation was not an easy task.

Judges

Francesco Burelli, partner, Arkwright Consulting

Andrii Degeler, technology correspondent, The Banker

Lesly Goh, World Bank senior technology adviser and former World Bank group chief technology officer

Aliya Shibli, senior reporter, The Banker

Bryan Zheng Zhang, co-founder and executive director, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

Global

Winner: BBVA

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