The opening plenary of The Asian Banker Summit 2026 moved quickly beyond the familiar language of digital transformation. Although the summit’s wider theme, Imagining the AI Bank, positioned artificial intelligence (AI) as the central focus, the keynote discussion made clear that banking’s next phase will be shaped as much by geopolitics, economic restructuring and infrastructure competition as by technology itself. Two keynote voices framed that shift from very different vantage points. Malaysia’s Deputy Minister of Finance Liew Chin Tong approached the discussion through the lens of macroeconomic transition, strategic competition and the role of middle economies in a changing global order. Patrick McHenry, former chairman of the US House Financial Services Committee, approached the same future from the perspective of regulatory reform, technological acceleration and competitive urgency inside the world’s largest financial market. The practitioner response came from two distinct banking perspectives. Khairussaleh Ramli, president and group chief executive of Maybank and chairman of the Association of Banks in Malaysia, focused on trust, governance and the institutional responsibilities that come with deploying AI inside regulated financial systems. Kevin Lam, group managing director and chief executive of Hong Leong Bank, brought a more operational perspective centred on execution, trade-offs, organisational readiness and workforce implications. Together, these perspectives challenged several long-standing assumptions about banking. One is that financial institutions can continue to operate primarily as neutral intermediaries, insulated from the strategic pressures shaping trade, industrial policy and state competition. Another is that regulated institutions can adopt new technologies at a pace determined by traditional governance cycles while preserving familiar operating models. For an industry that has spent much of the past decade refining digital channels, automating workflows and responding to fintech competition, the discussion suggested a broader recalibration. The issue is no longer simply how banks modernise, but how they position themselves in a financial system whose architecture itself is being reshaped. Banking’s role expands beyond intermediation Liew’s keynote was less a speech about banking than about the conditions in which banking will increasingly operate. He identified five structural forces shaping the decade ahead: a changing world order, health and demographic pressures, energy transition and insecurity, climate risk and rapid technological transformation. Taken together, these forces create a more volatile environment for financial institutions than the comparatively stable assumptions that underpinned globalisation-led growth over previous decades. His argument was that bankers can no longer treat these developments as background context. Geopolitics, economics and industrial strategy are increasingly intertwined. Trade corridors, supply chains, manufacturing investment and national competitiveness are being shaped by strategic considerations as much as by comparative economics. Liew was explicit in how he framed the shift. “I look to bankers as activists,” he said, arguing that financial leaders need to engage more actively in shaping economic outcomes. He argued that banking leaders now need to understand “industries, understand supply chain, understand geopolitics, understand geo economics”, alongside critical materials, logistics and resilience, rather than operating within narrowly defined financial boundaries. “We have moved away from a just-in-time world to a just-in-case world,” he said, arguing that resilience rather than pure efficiency is becoming a more relevant organising principle for economies and, by extension, the institutions that finance them. That broader framing was closely tied to ASEAN’s positioning. Liew rejected the assumption that a changing global order must be understood simply as a contest between major powers. His view was that middle economies have agency and can shape outcomes, particularly in regions such as Southeast Asia where supply chain diversification, manufacturing realignment and energy transition are creating new opportunities. Liew positioned Malaysia as occupying several strategic intersections: a critical node in semiconductor and manufacturing supply chains, a geopolitical balancing point in a contested region and an economy seeking broader middle-class advancement. In that context, banking becomes more than an enabling service. It becomes part of the infrastructure through which competitiveness and resilience are financed. McHenry’s warning that innovation will not wait If Liew widened the strategic frame, McHenry compressed the operational timeline. His keynote was anchored in a clear premise: regulated institutions face a greater risk from moving too slowly than from moving too quickly. “The real risk is not that regulated institutions use AI responsibly,” he said. “The real risk is that unregulated actors use artificial intelligence irresponsibly and do it faster.” That represents a marked departure from the conventional prudential instincts of banking. For much of modern financial regulation, caution has been treated as an institutional virtue. McHenry’s argument was that the pace of technological development may now be forcing a reassessment of that assumption. McHenry argued that AI was moving at a speed unmatched by previous technological shifts, citing rapid advances in model training, data scale and computational power. Functions that were speculative a decade ago, including anomaly detection, natural language customer engagement, coding support and compliance assistance, are already commercially deployable. As he put it, AI is “a procurement decision today, but table stakes tomorrow”. That urgency extended beyond AI. McHenry argued that digital assets and payment stablecoins would increasingly be integrated into mainstream banking infrastructure rather than remain outside regulated financial systems. The competitive implications are not confined to product innovation, but reach into how financial intermediation itself may be structured. His remarks also reflected a broader regulatory shift in the United States. He described the post-financial crisis regulatory cycle as having become overly rear-facing, constraining competitiveness and technological adoption. The current environment, shaped by political change in Washington, is moving in the opposite direction, with a stronger emphasis on competition, regulatory flexibility and innovation. For banks outside the United States, the message was significant not because American policy automatically defines global norms, but because changes in the world’s largest financial system influence technology investment priorities, payments competition, digital asset development and wider regulatory expectations. Practitioners bring the debate back to operating reality If the keynote speakers framed the strategic and technological arguments, the banking practitioners brought the discussion back to execution. Khairussaleh’s comments reflected the perspective of a major incumbent institution operating within a regulated financial system already deep into digital transformation. He pointed to the rapid growth of digital payments in Malaysia, where e-payment transaction volumes rose to 18.4 billion in 2025, alongside increasing AI adoption across financial institutions and the broader policy infrastructure supporting digitalisation, including the country’s financial sector blueprint and regional payment connectivity initiatives. But his emphasis was on responsible institutional adoption rather than acceleration for its own sake. “Trust is a strategic asset, not simply a hollow record,” he said, arguing that responsible AI governance must sit alongside innovation. For banks, deploying AI is not simply about automation or productivity. It raises questions around algorithmic bias, inaccurate outputs, cyber resilience, governance oversight and regulatory accountability. He also underscored that workforce adaptation remains central. AI may augment productivity and reshape operations, but he argued that customer-facing banking will continue to require human engagement even as technology becomes more deeply embedded in operating models. Lam approached the same future through a narrower but equally practical operating lens. For a mid-sized bank, the challenge is not ideological positioning but execution. “Bankers, we always have to balance risk and return, be too big and be too small,” he said, describing the practical trade-offs institutions face. His observation that AI strategy increasingly becomes people strategy was among the more candid practitioner comments of the session. “An AI strategy, if we have to articulate it properly for the bank, is a people strategy,” he said, pointing to the organisational reality that productivity gains from automation inevitably raise workforce questions around redesign, redeployment and retraining. Taken together, the practitioner perspectives reinforced a central reality: strategic ambition and technological urgency matter, but future banking models will ultimately be determined by institutions that can translate them into disciplined operating frameworks.\ Adaptation becomes the defining test The opening plenary did not produce a consensus model for the future bank. Instead, it framed the competing pressures likely to shape the next phase of banking. Liew argued that banks may need to think more strategically about the economic systems they finance. McHenry’s warning was that technological and infrastructure competition may move faster than institutional comfort allows. Khairussaleh emphasised that regulated institutions cannot sacrifice trust and governance in pursuit of speed. Lam showed that execution remains constrained by practical operating realities, particularly around people, scale and institutional capacity. These are not competing choices so much as simultaneous pressures. What makes the current transition unusually demanding is that none of these pressures can be addressed in isolation. AI strategy cannot be separated from workforce strategy. Payments innovation cannot be divorced from regulatory competition. Geopolitical fragmentation increasingly affects capital allocation, supply chain finance and institutional risk assumptions. Whether banks become shapers of the next financial order or simply adapt to one defined by others may depend less on technology adoption alone than on how effectively they reconcile speed, strategic purpose and institutional trust.
