Hits, misses, and the road ahead for banking leaders in FY 2025–26

As the Indian banking sector enters FY 2025–26, a new set of strategic priorities has emerged for CXOs and digital leaders. The push toward digital transformation has already delivered substantial value in the past few years—particularly in improving operational efficiency, expanding digital lending, and automating compliance. However, as competition intensifies and customer expectations evolve, the focus is shifting from transformation to precision.

This year, the top priorities for banking leaders can be distilled into five themes: hyper-personalization, instant decisioning, omnichannel consistency, seamless onboarding, and smarter risk control. These aren’t just buzzwords—they reflect real, measurable gaps in customer experience, cost management, and growth enablement. And while some banks have scored wins in specific areas, others continue to face bottlenecks that limit their ability to scale.

Hits: Where Banks Have Made Strides

Over the past year, banks have made impressive progress in some critical areas:

• Digital KYC and onboarding: Many have digitized KYC processes and reduced onboarding time from days to minutes.

• Unified mobile and web experiences: Top-tier banks have improved app quality and digital channels, leading to better NPS and engagement.

• Credit scoring advancements: Alternative data and AI-based scoring are becoming more mainstream, especially in unsecured lending and BNPL.

These wins have helped banks reduce operational costs, improve compliance outcomes, and reach new customer segments. But challenges remain.

Misses: Persistent Gaps in Execution

While digital capabilities have expanded, some key gaps are holding back performance:

• Personalization is still surface-level. While product recommendations exist, most banks still offer generic loan offers or savings advice not tailored to real-time customer behaviour.

• Offer-to-disbursement is slow. Pre-approved offers are often delayed by manual rule checks, legacy systems, or unclear underwriting logic.

• Omnichannel is fragmented. Customers expect to start a journey on one channel and continue on another seamlessly—yet many banks can’t provide continuity across web, app, branch, and agent touchpoints.

• High reliance on IT for rule changes. Credit, product, or risk teams often depend on tech teams to change eligibility rules or onboarding logic, creating delays and friction.

• Risk mitigation is reactive. As banks chase growth, risk controls often lag behind offer generation or partner channel expansion, leading to higher delinquencies.

These misses indicate the need for a smarter, more agile architecture—one that aligns business intent with tech execution in real-time.

FY 2025–26: The Shift Toward Precision Banking

This year, banking leaders are focusing on precision—serving the right customer, with the right offer, at the right time, and with the right risk posture. That means enabling:

• Hyper-personalized journeys: Offers and journeys that adapt to individual financial behavior, product needs, and channel preferences.

• Instant decisions, not just faster ones: True real-time underwriting, powered by data and flexible business rules.

• Omnichannel consistency: Continuity across every customer interaction—whether digital, physical, or assisted.

• Frictionless onboarding for both customers and partners: Be it a salaried customer, a DSA, or a merchant, onboarding should be seamless and compliant.

• Tight integration of business and risk teams: So that both can align on product configurations, policy enforcement, and real-time interventions.

The challenge lies in enabling all this without overburdening IT or compromising on compliance.

One Integrated Stack: A Strategic Enabler

To navigate these priorities, many leading institutions are turning to a composable digital banking stack that combines:

• No-Code Business Rule Engines (BREs): Allow business and risk users to define and manage product logic, eligibility rules, pricing, and policies independently—without coding. This dramatically reduces go-to-market time and improves agility.

• Seamless Onboarding Engines: With pre-integrated modules for KYC, document collection, video verification, and digital agreements—so customer journeys don’t break mid-way.

• Credit Decisioning Modules: Offering real-time scoring, data aggregation, and bureau integration to ensure faster and smarter credit decisions.

• Risk and Compliance Layers: Configurable risk models, audit logs, and alerting tools to stay compliant with RBI guidelines and internal policies.

When brought together, these systems allow banks to launch personalized offers instantly, make real-time decisions, and onboard customers or partners in minutes—all while maintaining strong risk controls.

Why This Matters for Business and Risk Leaders

For business heads, this integrated approach means:

• Faster go-to-market for new products, campaigns, and offers

• Higher conversion rates through personalized journeys

• Lower acquisition costs through partner and digital channels

For risk leaders, it brings:

• Consistent rule enforcement across channels

• Better visibility and control over approvals and risk events

• Fewer compliance issues due to real-time validations and audit trails

More importantly, both teams can collaborate more effectively—because they operate from the same source of truth and logic, rather than waiting on backend tech updates or fragmented systems.

Looking Ahead

FY 2025–26 presents an opportunity to move from digital transformation to digital precision. The winners in this race will be those who not only digitize but also empower their business and risk teams to act instantly, intelligently, and independently. A no-code, integrated decisioning and onboarding stack isn’t just a technology upgrade—it’s a strategic lever for growth, compliance, and differentiation.

The question isn’t whether to adopt these tools—but how soon. For banks that want to lead in agility, profitability, and customer satisfaction, the time to act is now.