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A year of convergence for banking transformation
As the banking industry looks ahead to 2026, the conversation is no longer about whether transformation will happen, but about how coherently it will be executed.
Digital and physical banking, cash management, ATM infrastructure and cybersecurity are increasingly intertwined, and progress in one area now depends on maturity in all the others.
Reflecting on the past 12 months and the year ahead, two of our experts at Auriga – Brendan Thorpe, Customer Success Manager, and Néstor Santolaya, Cybersecurity Product Expert – offer a perspective on 2026 banking industry trends, moving beyond experimentation and into a phase of operational convergence.
Channel-Agnostic Banking Will Replace “Omnichannel” as the Gold Standard
To understand where banking is heading, it helps to look beyond the industry itself. In many digital services, users can move effortlessly between devices and touchpoints – browsing on one screen, continuing on another, switching from self-service to assisted support, and completing a transaction without any sense of interruption. The service adapts to the user, not the other way around.
Against this wider benchmark, the banking experience still feels notably fragmented.
This gap helps explain one of the clearest shifts identified by Auriga’s Customer Success Manager, Brendan Thorpe: the gradual move away from traditional omnichannel thinking towards genuinely channel-agnostic banking.
While omnichannel has long been positioned as the gold standard, customer expectations have evolved. People no longer think in terms of channels; they simply expect continuity.
Customers increasingly want to start a journey on a mobile app, continue it via live chat or a call centre, and complete it in-branch or at an ATM, without re-authentication, repetition or lost context.
As Brendan observes,
“the technology to support these journeys already exists; the challenge now lies in effective integration and execution.”
Importantly, this challenge is as much organisational as it is technical. A unified customer identity across digital and physical touchpoints, real-time data synchronisation between core banking platforms, ATMs and branches, and closer alignment between digital and physical estate teams are becoming critical.
Without this, banks risk delivering what Brendan describes as “disjointed” experiences – environments where channels exist, but do not truly connect.
In a landscape shaped by seamless, cross-touchpoint services outside of banking, anything less is increasingly misaligned with customer expectations.
Cash Access Will Become a Core Part of the Omnichannel Experience
Auriga’s CSM believes cash will continue to be of importance, as we’ve seen cash usage continue to grow throughout 2025, with cash access likely to be re-designed as a service, embedded into omnichannel banking.
He notes we could see cash ordered on-demand via apps or online banking, with fulfilment through bank branches, retail partners, or shared cash hubs, which in turn reduces reliance on traditional, standalone ATMs.
This shift could place new pressure on cash management operations, but will also enable predictable cash distribution, stronger coordination with retail and third-party partners and lower idle cash while maintaining availability.
In this context, Brendan notes, cash access will no longer be judged by how many ATMs a bank owns, but by how reliably and flexibly customers can access cash when and where they need it.
Regulation Will Accelerate the Move to Shared “Cash Hubs”
Brendan predicts that governments and regulators are likely to increase pressure on banks to preserve cash access to ensure financial inclusion, particularly for rural communities, elderly and vulnerable customers and small business reliant on cash.
This could take the form of formal “cash-access commitments”, mandated minimum coverage requirements and a greater scrutiny of ATM closures.
Rather than maintaining under-used ATMs, Auriga’s CMS expects major banks could be set to consolidate infrastructure, invest in fewer, better-located shared cash hubs and focus on high-footfall, high-need areas, such as busy town centres and transport hubs.
Data-Driven Cash Distribution Will Be Crucial
Advanced data analytics will become critical to cash operations, according to Brendan, enabling banks to predict demand spikes on busy days of the year, proactively stock ATM locations before shortages occur and reduce emergency replenishment costs.
He noted that some say traditional banking infrastructure is often too rigid to support this shift, as they have static replenishment schedules, siloed data across channels and slow response times to behavioural change.
With this, banks that modernise their cash infrastructure, integrating real-time data, AI and predictive cash forecasting and flexible logistics, will be far better positioned to support both cost efficiency and customer experience.
ATMs Will Evolve into Multifunction Financial Kiosks
Brendan forecasts that ATMs will continue their transformation from cash dispensers into self-service financial hubs, moving beyond withdrawals and deposits to support real-time account verification, peer-to-peer transfers or short term cash advances.
While adoption will vary by region, he sees this as an opportunity for global banks to deploy region-specific functionality, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all model.
A rapidly evolving threat landscape
If the physical banking estate is being reshaped, the threat landscape surrounding it is changing just as quickly.
According to Néstor Santolaya, Auriga’s Cybersecurity Product Expert the past year has seen a marked escalation in attacks on ATMs that target legitimate transactions directly, moving well beyond the traditional skimming techniques of the past.
Criminals are increasingly combining physical manipulation of machines, smartphone malware capable of cloning payment data, identity impersonation and highly targeted, AI-enhanced phishing.
The result is a rise in fraud where customers are tricked into completing transactions themselves, often without realising it.
The human factor and the supply chain under attack
“This shift reinforces the human factor as the weakest link,”
Néstor explains, not only among ATM users, but across the entire supply chain.
Fake maintenance requests, false cash-replenishment alerts and other forms of social engineering are now being used to target operators as well as customers.
As AI continues to amplify these tactics, he expects 2026 to be a critical year for strengthening both user awareness and supply-chain verification processes.
Modernising the ATM ecosystem securely
At the same time, the ATM ecosystem itself is entering a phase of accelerated modernisation with Néstor forecasting this to continue in 2026.
Banks are becoming increasingly aware that 2038, and the associated risks for ageing 32-bit embedded systems, is closer than it appears.
In response, the industry has seen a surge in large-scale migrations to Windows 11, which is rapidly becoming the new standard for ATMs of the future. While this transition helps mitigate many traditional attack vectors through improved security features and vendor support, Néstor cautions that it will also create new vulnerabilities.
Throughout 2026, Néstor notes that defenders will need to harden new ATM fleets quickly and embed Zero Trust principles more deeply than ever, eliminating implicit trust and strengthening resilience against emerging and previously unknown threats as criminal techniques continue to evolve.
Regulatory pressure versus attacker agility
Overlaying all of this is an increasingly demanding regulatory environment, highlights Néstor.
Deploying or updating cybersecurity solutions now requires compliance with multiple regulatory frameworks, making it a regulatory challenge for banks to move quickly without risking non-compliance.
He argues that success will depend on those able to modernise compliance processes early, increasing resilience without weakening security. Attackers, by contrast, face no such constraints. With the help of AI powered strategies, they can develop customised ATM malware families tailored to new models and architectures at unprecedented speed.
In 2026 banking trends, the gap between offence and defence will continue to widen, reinforcing the need for security strategies that are not only regulation-aligned, but also highly agile.
