Building a Fintech Digital Transformation Roadmap

Eighty percent of financial services firms say they're now actively using AI in production, up from just 31 percent a year earlier. That's the headline from Broadridge's sixth annual global technology study.

It's also why a fintech digital transformation roadmap has stopped being a slide in the board deck and started being the document that decides who keeps up.

Why the pace picked up this year

The shift goes beyond simple adoption. Broadridge's sixth annual study looked at financial services technology and operations leaders worldwide.

It found that generative AI overtook cloud computing as the technology leaders rank most impactful to their business, rising from 11 percent in 2025 to 28 percent in 2026 while cloud slipped from 31 percent to 21 percent.

That reordering says something about where budgets are heading next. Returns are catching up too, just more slowly, with 27 percent of firms now reporting measurable financial benefit from AI against 14 percent the year before.

Infrastructure is being rethought to match. Forty-three percent say they need an entirely new stack to run enterprise AI properly, and 84 percent call merging front, middle and back office systems into one platform critical to getting there.

That kind of unified platform work is usually where a roadmap stops being a wish list and becomes a build plan.

The gap between spending and results

Not every firm is seeing that return. The reasons have less to do with the AI itself than what it's sitting on.

Deloitte's 2026 banking and capital markets outlook reports that an analysis by Evident covering 50 banks found only four had realized measurable ROI from AI use cases in 2025.

Most banks, the outlook notes, run reactive, siloed pilots that produce scattered wins instead of a real shift. Data is a big part of why.

That same outlook found that more than 90 percent of data users inside banks say the information they need is often unavailable or takes too long to retrieve. Most of the country's largest banks have already announced formal data modernization programs in response.

AI and automation work built on top of unreliable data just inherits that unreliability, faster.

What belongs on a fintech digital transformation roadmap

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Pexels

Its recommendation for banks is a hub-and-spoke governance model. One team owns AI strategy and standards, while business units run their own initiatives inside that structure.

A hybrid build-versus-buy approach to technology pairs with it, stopping every department from picking its own tools that never talk to each other.

None of this is unique to banks. The same GenAI shift showing up in Broadridge's numbers is visible in how people search and buy more broadly, something we covered in more depth here.

A roadmap that only accounts for internal operations and ignores how AI is changing customer discovery is planning for last year's problem.

Customer experience still lags the back office

Deloitte's Digital Banking Maturity study, the largest of its kind, covers institutions across the US, China, India and Brazil.

It found that mobile banking has become central to account opening, cross-selling and card management. Leading banks now pair it with personalized recommendations and proactive security alerts.

One gap stands out, though. Accessibility features like screen reader compatibility and voice commands remain rare industry-wide, even among the banks the study calls Digital Champions.

For a sector spending heavily on customer-facing design, that's a cheap improvement most roadmaps still skip.

Fix the data, govern the AI, then modernize the platform and the experience sitting on top of it. Firms doing it in reverse are the ones showing up in those ROI numbers with plenty of spend and little to show for it.

Cover photo by AlphaTradeZone on Pexels