Following a cycle of accelerated adoption of digital solutions, the coming year will mark an inflection for banks, fintechs, and insurers. The focus will shift from the speed of innovation to intelligent efficiency, data traceability, and system integration. N5, a software company for the financial industry, identified three fintech trends that will determine competitiveness in Latin America by 2026. The advance of autonomous banking, the revaluation of legacy systems and the definitive take-off of open finance in Argentina.
Autonomous banking are systems that automate credit, collection, pricing and liquidity decisions with minimal human supervision. It is positioned as the dominant technology trend for 2026. According to a report by Deloitte, organizations that adopt artificial intelligence and automation at scale achieve average cost reductions of close to 31%.
“The real autonomy of systems arises when they can anticipate, self-adjust, and execute proactive decisions based on each customer’s cumulative experience.” This was pointed out by Julián Colombo, CEO of N5. According to the executive, in 2026 we will see price corrections on financial products, automatic restructuring of risk portfolios. and intelligently triggering preventive collections before the customer experiences friction, all without direct human intervention. For technology providers, the challenge will be to ensure traceability, data governance, and auditable business rules.
The dominant narrative in the last decade proposed comprehensive replacements of banking cores. Today, that narrative is reversed because the transactional history and normative consistency of legacy systems are seen as a critical asset for training AI models.
“Legacy systems are a hidden gold mine, where there are millions of transactions. As well as structured data, consistent categories, historical behaviors, and other key information.” The ability to integrate intelligent layers on top of the core, such as APIs, rules engines, BPM, and RPA, allows value to be captured without assuming the costs and risks of a total migration.
Local regulatory progress places Argentina on the path of open finance. Central Bank initiatives and public API deployments create conditions for data to flow securely between authorized players. By 2026, N5 predicts that the combination of open finance and AI models will enable banks to offer contextual pre-approvals and invisible financial experiences. As long as governance and traceability are respected. “The competition is no longer between old and new technology, but between data, context and speed.”
Putting these three fintech trends together generates a clear map for 2026. The bank that best combines self-employed agents, historical data and open access to information will be the one that manages to gain the most ground in the local market.
