Future Readiness Indicator

By Howard Yu and the Center for Future Readiness

Agents, tokens, and rails: The three forces reshaping financial services

AI agents are no longer just comparing products; they are buying them too. Software has dissolved banks’ monopoly on moving money. The era of one dominant rail for international payments is over. Against this backdrop, the companies that top the Future Readiness Indicator for Finance are those that are trusted by regulators to enter new product categories and that have the business models to do so. Meanwhile, meaningful investment in AI is translating into economic value for market leaders.

Mastercard stays on top (100.0), its success driven by its nimble business model and its trusted reputation, which has allowed it to quickly add two new fee streams. Through Mastercard Agent Pay it now clears OpenAI Instant Checkout transactions, and through its pending acquisition of BVNK, it is positioned to own stablecoin rails end-to-end. Payment network giant Visa (98.1) also continues to lead (third place), responding to the era of AI agent buying by launching the Trusted Agent Protocol.
Southeast Asia’s most digitally advanced bank, DBS, holds firm in second place. Its massive investment in AI has demonstrated tangible economic value, estimated at over $1bn in 2025. Its return on equity stayed above 17%, well above the global banking average.
Universal banking franchises JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Banco Santander all feature in the top 10, by holding or improving on different axes, including AI expenditure, restructuring, and digital execution.
Insurance giants Zurich and Allianz are also amongst the most future-ready finance companies. Zurich’s climate-adjusted underwriting saw it limit its exposure to the Californian wildfires to just $200m, a fraction of what many other insurers reported.
Coinbase, the secure online platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing cryptocurrency, looks set to maintain its future-ready title. The signing of the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025 was a watershed moment for the company, significantly impacting its revenue model and legal standing.

Who are this year’s most future-ready companies?

Mastercard and DBS once again top the Finance Future Readiness Indicator, which ranks 39 of the world’s most future-ready companies, with Visa in third place. An 18-point gap separates them from the next in line, JPMorgan Chase, followed closely by Zurich.

1. The elite tier: the rails

Singapore bank DBS (98.5) sits between the world’s two largest payment networks – Mastercard (100.0) and Visa (98.1). An 18-point score gap separates them from the next company, JPMorgan Chase. They define the cost of capital, the trust layer, and the AI-absorption rate for the rest of the sector. In practice, this means Mastercard and Visa set the fee economics that every merchant and issuing bank globally must accept, while DBS demonstrates the productivity ceiling that AI deployment can deliver inside a regulated bank. When a company in this tier moves on pricing, technology adoption, or risk standards, the rest of the sector recalibrates.

2. The diversified champions and the adapter

The second tier, covering ranks four to nine, includes JPMorgan Chase, Zurich Insurance, HSBC, Santander, Allianz, and Coinbase. The five universal franchises (three banks and two insurers) are spending heavily on AI and growth, while crypto-native company Coinbase has made significant regulatory strides to secure its place in the top ten. Each holds or improves on a different axis: Zurich on climate underwriting, HSBC on restructuring, JPMorgan on AI capital expenditure, Santander on US digital execution, and Coinbase on regulatory legitimacy.

3. The middleweights

Assicurazioni Generali, BNY, NatWest, Progressive, Bank of America, Ping An, and American Express stand firm in the middle by demonstrating solid execution on traditional metrics. What separates them from the leaders is their slower absorption of the three forces because of constrained geographic limitations or corporate heritage. 

Forces reshaping finance in 2026

The labels that have separated banks, insurers, asset managers, and payment networks for a century are now poor descriptions of what each company does. Today, JPMorgan runs a blockchain settlement business while Mastercard owns a stablecoin company.  Three forces will decide which companies matter in financial services by 2030.

1. The AI agent is the new buyer

Until 2025, every credit card account had a human behind it. In 2026, that is no longer true. AI agents are now able not only to search and compare products, but also to pay on behalf of consumers. They are issued cryptographic credentials, authenticated at checkout, and increasingly given limited spending authority by issuing banks.

In April 2025, Mastercard launched Agent Pay, a system of agentic tokens that let an AI agent transact on a consumer’s behalf.^[6] Five months later, OpenAI’s Instant Checkout in ChatGPT launched on Mastercard’s rails. By launching on Mastercard’s network, OpenAI gets instant access to millions of merchants globally without having to negotiate with individual banks or payment processors. Mastercard’s network processed $59bn in crypto-related transactions in 2025, and the firm cited the rapid scaling of digital currency payment use cases, reaching at least $350bn in volume in 2025.^[2]

In October 2025, Visa responded to the rise of AI-initiated payments by unveiling the Trusted Agent Protocol, developed in collaboration with Cloudflare. Early partners include Stripe, Shopify, Adyen, Microsoft, Worldpay, and Coinbase. Trusted Agent Protocol gives merchants a cryptographic way to distinguish legitimate AI shopping agents from fraud bots at the point of transaction. According to Visa, over the past year, AI-driven traffic to retail websites in the United States surged by more than 4,700%, and 85% of shoppers who have used AI to shop say it improved their shopping experience.^[7]Inside banks and insurers, AI deployment is also happening at scale. JPMorgan ran 200 AI applications in production by April 2026, with the LLM Suite available to roughly 200,000 staff.^[1] DBS reported that AI and data work generated S$1.1–1.2bn of economic value in 2025, against S$750m the prior year.^[9] Both figures describe banks as deployers of agents. The bigger shift is the bank as an issuer to agents. By 2030, the balance of fees in financial services will depend on how many agents are buying, and which networks claim the credentialing, authentication, and credit decision-making.

2. Money is becoming software

On 18 July 2025, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law.^[10] This is America’s first federal law governing stablecoins, the dollar-pegged digital tokens that move on public blockchains.

Total stablecoin transaction volume reached $33tn in 2025.^[11] By mid-April 2026, Tether (USDT), the dominant stablecoin, had hit a record $188bn. Circle’s USDC, the regulated competitor that meets EU MiCA standards, grew 73% in 2025 to $78bn.^[11] With more than $3.5B in annualized stablecoin settlement volume by the end of November 2025, Visa launched live USDC settlement in the US in December 2025, marking a breakthrough for stablecoin integration. ^[12]

In May 2025, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup announced they were exploring a jointly operated stablecoin.^[15] Money is becoming software: for 200 years, banks have had a monopoly on moving money. Software dissolves that monopoly. As such, the largest banks, payment networks, and asset managers are now all running production-grade tokenized infrastructure.

3. The rails are splitting

SWIFT, the dominant standard for cross-border payments, is currently facing the most serious challenge in its 50-year history. While it is still the “global plumbing” of finance, its hegemony is being squeezed by geopolitical fragmentation and a technological shift toward real-time digital rails.

In April 2025, China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) exceeded SWIFT in single-day transaction volume for the first time. CIPS is the renminbi-clearing alternative to SWIFT, the dollar-clearing network that has run global payments since the 1970s. CIPS now connects roughly 4,900 banks across 187 countries, with daily volumes near $67bn.^[22][23] The renminbi’s share of SWIFT messaging stays at 3%, against 48% for the dollar.^[23]

Brazil’s Pix, launched in 2020, has 174 million users, about 82% of the adult population. Pix processes roughly $557bn a month. In 2025, it overtook cards as the leading e-commerce method in Brazil.^[24] India’s UPI processed 228 billion transactions in 2025 worth $3.4tn. UPI is now accepted in seven other countries, including Singapore, France, and the UAE.^[25] On 30 October 2025, the European Central Bank moved its digital euro project to its next phase, targeting first issuance in 2029.^[26]

Western firms can no longer plan around one global rail. The competitive question is which rails to support and how to support them? Mastercard and Visa are running multi-chain stablecoin operations precisely because no single rail will stay dominant. The universal banks face the hardest call: their cross-border franchise depends on rail neutrality, and rail neutrality requires investment in every system at once.

How the Future Readiness Indicator works

The IMD Center for Future Readiness, launched in 2021, ranks large publicly listed companies on their preparedness for long-term, secular shifts. For Financial Services 2026, the Indicator scores 39 firms (13 banks, 17 insurers, nine payment and fintech firms) on six equally weighted factors: financial fundamentals, investor expectations of future growth, business diversity, employee diversity and resilience, early results of innovation, and cash and debt position.

The factors are built from 33 to 45 underlying variables drawn from company filings, websites, press releases, Crunchbase, Espacenet, Sustainalytics, and Google Trends. Variables are normalized within each sub-sector, then aggregated and ranked across the combined sector. Future readiness is always a work in progress: dropping places does not mean a company is going backwards, only that it is not improving fast enough to stay ahead. For more details on how we develop the Future Readiness Indicator, please visit our Research Methodology page.