The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) posted a memo detailing a meeting between its Crypto Task Force and JP Morgan. While the task force primarily handles cryptocurrency issues, it also oversees tokenization matters that increasingly affect traditional finance (TradFi) companies. JP Morgan’s meeting agenda revealed three key discussion points: an overview of its existing digital finance services including repo solutions and debt platforms, analysis of how capital markets activity might migrate to public blockchains, and plans for future regulatory engagement. The discussion likely centered heavily on tokenized collateral, an area where multiple regulators are actively involved. The CFTC is currently running tokenized collateral pilots for derivatives margin posting, and the DTCC is launching its own platform. The CME is also participating in this space. Tokenization offers a solution by allowing institutions to transfer tokenized securities directly to meet margin requirements without selling underlying assets. JP Morgan’s recent announcement of JPMD deposit tokens on the Base public blockchain further addresses cash collateral needs, providing an alternative to stablecoins. The bank already operates a tokenized collateral solution on its permissioned blockchain, Kinexys, alongside an intraday repo solution called Digital Financing and a bond issuance platform called Digital Debt Services. However, using permissioned blockchains creates integration challenges that public blockchains can ease.
Citi plans to level up Its AI game building on Stylus, a browser plug-in for document and article analysis, and integration of Citi Assist into Microsoft Teams
Citigroup’s Jane Fraser is on a mission to modernize the global bank. Three executives have been appointed to ensure AI plays a big role in that. As part of the push, the firm — which has long struggled with its reputation issues, some of which are directly tied to tech — said it’s unveiling new tools, pilot programs, and a broader effort to embed AI across its operations. The internal memo, which went out to Citi’s roughly 200,000 employees, reveals the scope and ambition of the bank’s AI efforts, which will be overseen by new co-sponsors of Citi’s AI strategy, who are part of the Executive Management Team, include Gonzalo Luchetti, head of US personal banking; Tim Ryan, head of technology and business enablement; and Anand Selva, the firm’s chief operating officer. “We are focusing on accelerating our AI strategy—connecting teams and partners, prioritizing resources and expediting use cases across our businesses and functions,” the three leaders. To realize the push, the bank will rely on some of its $12 billion annual tech budget, though it’s unclear how much is specifically dedicated to AI. But it comes as much of Wall Street, from JPMorgan to Goldman Sachs, races to integrate the technology into everything from consumer service to trading to internal operations. “AI is reshaping how we operate, serve our clients and scale our business,” they added. “We firmly believe that to be competitive in this digital evolution, we must be an AI-ready workforce—nimble and ready for what this technology can unlock.” They explained that Citi is scaling its generative AI capabilities across the company, with more than
U.S. Bank’s vision for SMB brings banking and payment services into an interconnected ecosystem focused on simplifying cash flows and management
U.S. Bank recently launched two new products to its SMB offering: a spend management platform as well as an all-in-one checking account called Business Essentials that will help SMBs accept card payments with same-day access to funds. It also comes with a free mobile card reader, no maintenance fees, and the ability to integrate a business’ accounting into budget management software. These products are a result of a years-long strategy at US Bank that combines fintech acquisitions, like that of Bento Technologies which the firm acquired in 2021, with internal innovation to build products that can serve SMBs holistically and at scale. The Bento Technologies acquisition came as a part of the bank’s vision to bring banking and payment services into an interconnected ecosystem focused on simplifying cash flows and management for SMBs, says Shruti Patel, Chief Product Manager for Business Banking at the firm. Fintech acquisitions allow US Bank to plug capabilities into their systems that might have otherwise taken them years to build but there is always a risk of integrations leading to a choppy and fragmented experience for customers. US Bank was able to avoid this by keeping the main thrust of integration efforts aligned with and optimized for customer experience. The bank’s recent spend management tool is a result of teams like business banking, payments, IT, project teams, as well as the employees who joined from Bento owning the build regardless of where they were based in the country. “Team members were located everywhere from San Francisco to Minneapolis to Chicago. It was a real cross-bank collaboration,” she said. Banks need to integrate generative AI into their SMB spend management and cash flow tools to compete with fintech innovations like Lili’s Accountant AI, as small business owners increasingly use AI for content creation, data analysis, and marketing strategies while seeking faster answers and more efficient business execution. The possibilities for banks are massive: Integrating Gen AI in bank-offered spend management and cash flow management tools can help SMB owners get answers faster and execute business plans more efficiently. More broadly, CX is trending towards enabling a higher level of automation, where jobs to be done are executed by Gen AI and monitored by employees. Banks have yet to catch up onto this change and their movement is likely to be the same slow and deliberate gait we have seen in years past but it doesn’t mean that the C-suite is sleeping on this innovation. iIt’s just prioritizing the back office: “We are incorporating AI into our own operations and in innovations that benefit clients. For example, to make our interactions with customers as frictionless as possible, our customer service teams use AI for call transcriptions, knowledgebases that give the representatives quicker access to the information they need, and personalized product recommendations. We’re exploring a number of ways to use AI, including investing in our own data and technology infrastructure so we can deploy AI at speed and scale. We will continue to look at innovations that can help our clients save time and money and improve their operations,” said Patel.
JP Morgan Chase is lauded for success of Payments Development Portal, Integrated Solutions Plugin Cash Flow Intelligence and API Multibank Reporting; bank is declared overall model bank by analyst firm
- Celent, now part of GlobalData, recognises 17 model banks and declares JP Morgan Chase as the overall model bank of the year.. JP Morgan Payments launched several concurrent initiatives that markedly improved its end-to-end payments and treasury services, driving business value for corporate clients and ecosystem partners. Specifically, the bank is recognised for the success of four initiatives, namely:
- Payments Development Portal: a strategic digital platform to connect developers with JPM’s payments infrastructure.
- Integrated Solutions Plugin: an embedded banking solution integrating popular middle-market resource planning systems.
- API Multibank Reporting: a reporting product that recognises multibank reporting by using the API connectivity channel to retrieve information from non-JPM accounts.
- Cash Flow Intelligence: an AI-driven analytics and cash forecasting solution providing visibility into clients’ cash flows.
- The 2025 Model Bank programme attracted 140 nominations from around the world. Every region was well represented with the nominations well balanced across all asset tiers. Of the 18 winning banks, six are headquartered in the US and three in Canada. India and the UK each have two winners with institutions from the Philippines, Chile, Brazil, Vietnam and Romania also recognised. A common theme across all categories is the winning banks success in combining technology, talent, and processes to modernise platforms, enhance customer value, and lead with impact
https://www.retailbankerinternational.com/news/celent-reveals-2025-model-banks/
Analyst Celent declares Bank of America a model bank for an Edge in Actionable Analytics, BMO for Payments Innovation, Citi for Corporate Integration, Citizens Bank for Technical Onboarding Excellence and Wells Fargo: Award for Step Change in Corporate Digital Banking
- Bank of America: Award for the Edge in Actionable Analytics: Celent selected Bank of America’s CashPro Data Intelligence for this year’s Model Bank Award for developing an Edge in Actionable Analytics. The bank has demonstrated a commitment to engage with its corporate client community and develop self-service, rich data and analytics tools that help all corporate clients meet their working capital and operational goals.
- Bank of Montreal: Award for Payments Innovation: BMO is recognised for six recent initiatives spanning the entire client lifecycle, from sales and onboarding to servicing and support. The six initiatives address specific client pain-points around payments and were executed with care and attention, and collectively merit recognition.
- Citi: Award for Corporate Integration. Citi launched a new unified API and integration experience, Citi Developer Portal, delivering innovation across client experience, operational efficiency, and business impact, earning the bank the 2025 Celent Model Bank Award for Corporate Integration. According to Celent, Citi’s Developer Portal initiative highlights the importance of adopting a client-first approach, designing solutions based on how clients experience Citi as a single entity, rather than developing within traditional product silos. It also demonstrates the bank’s commitment to delivering a world class developer experience while helping clients accelerate time-to-value with scalable, more secure, and user-friendly integration options. By combining self-service design, embedded certificate provisioning, pre-built integrations, and a solution-oriented marketplace, the portal sets a high standard for enterprise API platforms in the financial industry and demonstrates a clear understanding of client pain points.
- Citizens Bank: Award for Technical Onboarding Excellence: The bank’s MTF platform was approaching end of life, along with its underlying software and infrastructure. Its age was causing many challenges, not least that the platform was failing to meet the bank’s functional, business, customer, resilience, and security needs. There was also a recognition that the bank would also need to prepare for widespread ISO 20022 adoption. The customer onboarding and file testing processes were a major pain point. They were inefficient and time-consuming, and reliant on excessive back-and-forth communication, creating lengthy, frustrating customer experiences. Citizens Bank implemented a robust, next-generation, cloud-based business integration platform from SEEBURGER that was flexible, scalable, secure, and resilient as well as provided traditional secure file transfer capabilities.
- TD Bank: Award for Customer Centred Innovation in Business Banking. Celent recognises TD’s Small Business Dashboard and Tap to Pay on iPhone as representing exceptional discovery of distinct customer needs and innovation. The bank leveraged consumer-digital technologies to deliver truly impactful solutions for small business clients. Partnerships with proven third party solution providers combined to form a complimentary offering producing strong results. The bank took a customer-centric approach to product design that included extensive research to identify specific pain points experienced by its small business clients. In addition, the bank pursued an early-adoptor position in the area of payments technology, where it knew it would have difficulty playing catch up later.
- Wells Fargo: Award for Step Change in Corporate Digital Banking. Wells Fargo Vantage, the bank’s next-generation digital banking platform, is recognised for delivering a dynamic, persona-driven experience tailored to business clients’ unique needs, including industry, size, operational context, and lifecycle. As a result, Vantage can support companies that range from start-ups to multinationals with complex workflows—all in one platform. The project was highly complex and involved integrating 65 fragmented systems with a modular, scalable framework using advanced technologies like micro-frontends, APIs, AI/machine learning, and GraphQL. Celent recognises the bank’s success in delivering across all the critical dimensions of digital banking transformation: acting on the voice of the customer and selecting and implementing the most effective advanced technologies.
MIT research shows providing agentic AI models with insight into human reasoning can offer models a degree of flexibility to make human-like decisions while being able to justify their choices
New research at MIT suggests that could be the case. A new report from the university’s Sloan School of Management covers some of MIT’s studies involving agentic AI, including an exploration into how these digital entities can be trained to reason and collaborate more like humans. For example, a new paper co-authored by Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo and researchers Sinan Aral and Harang Ju presented both people and AI with the same scenario: You need to purchase flour for a friend’s birthday cake using $10 or less. But at the store, you discover flour sells for $10.01. How do you respond? 92% of the people given this question proceeded to buy the flour. But AI models, spread across thousands of iterations, chose not to buy, concluding the price was too high. “With the status quo, you tell models what to do and they do it,” Ju said. “But we’re increasingly using this technology in ways where it encounters situations in which it can’t just do what you tell it to, or where just doing that isn’t always the right thing. Exceptions come into play.” The researchers found that providing models with information about both how and why humans opted to purchase the flour — essentially giving them insight into human reasoning — corrected this problem, giving the models a degree of flexibility. The AI models then made decisions like people, justifying their choices. The models were able to generalize this flexibility of mind to cases beyond purchasing flour for a cake, like hiring, lending, university admissions, and customer service.
Research finds 89% of enterprise technology leaders plan to use proprietary data to train LLMs this year but only 49% of them believe their current data architecture can handle the demands of AI
Fivetran released new research showing that 49% of enterprise technology leaders believe their current data architecture can handle the demands of AI. At the same time, 89% say they plan to use proprietary data to train LLMs this year. The disconnect highlights how quickly companies are pushing forward with AI, even as they acknowledge their data systems aren’t ready. 68% said they rely on 50 or more data sources to support decision-making, and more than a third cited integration complexity as a major hurdle. Others pointed to scalability limitations (34%) and security and compliance risks (33%) as top concerns. Half of the executives surveyed said their organizations plan to invest $500,000 or more in data integration over the next year. Their focus areas include reducing manual pipeline maintenance, improving real-time access to data, and ensuring data quality and governance. Still, challenges remain. 45% reported a lack of automation or self-service capabilities, 44% said legacy systems and implementation costs were holding them back, and 41% pointed to talent gaps on their data teams. The report also shows how the role of the technology leader is shifting, with 48% expecting to take on more responsibility for data privacy and compliance, and 45 percent anticipating a larger role in company-wide data strategy. Some organizations are already seeing results. Key findings include: 89% of tech leaders plan to use proprietary data to train LMMs this year, but only 49% believe their architecture can support AI workloads; 68% say they rely on 50 or more data sources to support decision-making; 64% of CIOs have delayed innovation efforts due to compliance concerns; 50% plan to invest $500,000 or more in data integration in the next year; Nearly half of respondents expect to take on more responsibility for privacy, compliance, and company-wide data strategy.
Citi Singapore almost triples wealth transactions after digital revamp; also doubled mutual fund transactions and introduced an easy visualiser for clients to quickly see their wealth portfolio movements
Citibank Singapore’s digital wealth management transactions increased 165% in the last two years due to a revamp of its mobile app and website, as well as the introduction of over a hundred features to its wealth products. The bank’s wealth management arm, Citi Wealth, has shifted its digital ecosystem to speak in the wealth language, with four of five clients using the digital app regularly. One of the biggest changes is an auto top-up feature allowing brokerage clients to invest in US dollars, with Citi doing the foreign currency swap for the client in real time. Citi also doubled mutual fund transactions and introduced an easy visualiser for clients to quickly see their wealth portfolio movements. Wealth management is now in the era of hybrid experiences, with clients using digital platforms while still talking to relationship managers. Citi combines digital and human access, allowing clients to swiftly authorise transactions without speaking with an advisor face-to-face. The bank has also created a secure WhatsApp channel for relationship managers to interact with clients.
Alibaba merges delivery platform Ele.me and travel agency Fliggy into e-commerce group
Alibaba Group Holding is merging its food delivery platform Ele.me and online travel agency Fliggy into its core e-commerce business, as the Chinese tech giant seeks to streamline operations and sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence (AI). The restructuring “marks a strategic upgrade from an e-commerce platform to a comprehensive consumer platform”, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming wrote in a letter to employees on Monday. “Moving forward, we will increasingly optimise our business models and organisational structures from the user’s perspective to create richer, higher-quality consumer experiences.” Alibaba, the business conglomerate founded by billionaire Jack Ma, owns the South China Morning Post. Following the changes, Ele.me CEO Fan Yu and Fliggy CEO Zhuang Zhuoran will report directly to Jiang Fan, who leads Alibaba’s E-commerce Business Group. That division oversees domestic platforms Tmall and Taobao, as well as the company’s international e-commerce operations. The move was designed to drive synergies across Alibaba’s consumer-facing businesses – “sharing unified objectives and fighting as one”, Wu said – reinforcing the e-commerce group’s role as the company’s main profit engine. Ele.me was previously grouped with Alibaba’s mapping service Amap under the Local Services Group, while Fliggy had operated independently. “Ele.me’s merger clearly aims to bridge the gap between instant delivery services for retail goods and food, integrating resources to better compete in the broader instant retail market,” said Hu Yugui, an analyst at Dolphin Research, a secondary market research brand under Longbridge. He added that the synergies from Fliggy’s merger are less clear, requiring a “wait-and-see” approach. Hu noted that escalating competition in instant commerce continues to blur the boundaries between online retail and service platforms. “E-commerce, instant retail, travel and hospitality, as well as offline-to-store businesses, will increasingly merge,” he said. The move also aligns with Alibaba’s recent efforts to refocus resources on its main revenue drivers, which include cloud computing. AI has recently been a top priority at the company amid intensifying competition in China. Alibaba’s push for ecosystem synergy is already showing results, as its recent foray into instant commerce – also known as flash shopping, or shangou in Chinese – intensifies competition in the country’s on-demand delivery sector against rivals JD.com and market leader Meituan. Launched on Taobao in late April, the service offers rapid delivery of a wide range of products, from food and electronics to clothing and flowers, all fulfilled by Ele.me. Daily orders reached 10 million within the first week. The company announced on Monday that daily orders have reached 60 million. Meituan’s daily orders reportedly reached 90 million in recent days, while JD.com’s service hit 25 million daily orders earlier this month. The latest moves underscore Alibaba’s efforts to break down internal silos and foster greater collaboration across business units. In an internal letter to staff in May, CEO Eddie Wu said the company would “mobilise at full strength and concentrate our efforts on a few core strategic priorities”, with “key initiatives driven jointly by multiple businesses”. Alibaba shares fell 1.5 per cent on Monday morning in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Web3 group issues blueprint for accelerating- prioritizing stablecoins, funds management, VATPs, legal and compliance, and custody and OTC trading
Web3 Harbour and PwC Hong Kong have released the “Hong Kong Web3 Blueprint” to encourage greater investment in blockchain infrastructure development. The blueprint emphasizes the transparency, security, and user empowerment of decentralisation and aims to leverage Web3 superpowers through five key enablers: talent, market infrastructure, standards, regulation, and funding and economic contribution. It calls for participants to focus on open finance, trade finance, capital markets, asset management, and carbon markets. The blueprint comes amid recent regulatory progress, with Hong Kong passing its stablecoin ordinance, which is set to take effect in August. The report also outlines five action groups to focus on important areas of blockchain development, such as stablecoins, funds management, virtual asset trading platforms (VATPs), legal and compliance, and custody and over-the-counter trading. The blueprint does not address other types of cryptocurrencies, but focuses on the broader blockchain ecosystem that plays into the technology’s six identified “superpowers”: user ownership, immutability with transparency, privacy and digital identity, automation, security, and interoperability. It also promotes more public-private partnerships and government support for developing Web3 talent through programs such as accelerators and internships.