Build AI your financial services systems can trust

Banking and insurance CIOs are putting serious budget behind data and analytics. The aim is to scale AI inside workflows where every decision is explainable — even at machine speed. That’s a challenge when the data feeding those decisions is spread across legacy cores and a growing mix of cloud and third-party sources.

The Gartner report, Top Data & Analytics Trends in Banking and Insurance for 2026, discusses the five trends that decide whether financial institutions can scale AI safely and at speed:

• Decision-ready data products that serve people and machines from the same governed source
• Knowledge graphs that ground AI in verifiable business meaning and traceable lineage
• Agentic AI for governance that monitors and enforces data policy as it runs
• Embedded intelligence that builds analytics and AI directly into core systems like payments and claims
• Behavioral analytics that turns real-time signals into millisecond decisions on fraud and customer experience

In our opinion, there’s a consistent thread across all 5: Data is shifting from a reporting asset to an operational dependency, and its reliability now drives customer trust and operational risk. For CIOs, that raises the stakes on integration and engineering, and it reshapes how they work with their data and analytics leaders.

Get the full report for the strategic planning assumptions and recommended actions behind each trend.