At the TAB Global Business Achievement Awards 2026, Foo Boon Ping, president and managing editor of TAB Global, introduced two new award categories, AI Excellence and Beyond Borders. He framed them within five waves of industry change since the late 1990s: the expansion of consumer banking and cards, the Asian Financial Crisis, the growth of cross-border capital flows through the 2000s and 2010s, the digital transformation driven by smartphones, fintech and application programming interfaces (APIs), and the pandemic-era acceleration of payments.

"Leadership was tested under extraordinary pressure," he said of the Asian Financial Crisis, the period he cited as the clearest test of institutional resilience in the industry's recent history.

AI Excellence rewards institutions embedding AI into underwriting, treasury management, fraud monitoring and customer engagement. "The focus is shifting from curiosity to execution, from isolated pilots to scalable institutional capability," he said, framing the award around who has "the clarity to move beyond experimentation" and "the discipline to build enduring capability."

Beyond Borders recognises institutions helping clients enter new markets, connect with supply chains and structure investment flows. "Banking becomes something larger than transactional intermediation," Foo said. "It becomes an enabler of economic connectivity." That shift, he said, explains why some banking models "are no longer easily defined by traditional product categories alone."

Foo extended the same logic to infrastructure that customers do not see, including payments systems, cloud migration and API-led architecture, calling these "strategic decisions whose significance often becomes fully apparent only years later." He paired that with a reminder that risk management, governance, operational resilience and institutional discipline "remain constant through every cycle of innovation."

Foo closed by returning to a single theme: leadership is ultimately proven through execution rather than the pace of adoption or expansion. The new categories recognise institutions demonstrating that principle through AI deployment and cross-border business performance.