Digital transformation anticipates how the financial sector will be able to improve its efficiency and differentiate itself in a constantly evolving regional market.
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.
From N5, a software company for the financial industry, we identify three trends that will determine competitiveness in Latin America:
- El avance del autonomous banking
- The revaluation of legacy systems
- The definitive take-off of Open Finance in Argentina
Autonomous banking: agents acting on their own account
Autonomous banking, systems that automate credit, collection, pricing and liquidity decisions with minimal human supervision, is positioned as the dominant technological trend by 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 accumulated experience.
In 2026 we will see price corrections on financial products, automatic restructuring of risk portfolios and intelligent triggering of preventive collections before the customer experiences friction, all without direct human intervention. For IT providers, the challenge will be to ensure traceability, data governance, and auditable business rules.
Legacy systems as a strategic asset
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 goldmine, where there are millions of transactions, structured data, consistent categories, historical behaviors, and other key information.
The possibility of integrating intelligent layers on top of the core, APIs, rules engines, BPM and RPA, allows value to be captured without assuming the costs and risks of a total migration.
Open Finance in Argentina: a door to inclusion
Local regulatory progress puts Argentina on the Open Finance route: Central Bank initiatives and public API deployments create conditions for data to flow securely between authorized players.
By 2026, N5 forecasts 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 trends together generates a clear map: 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.
*By Julián Colombo, CEO of N5.
