How digital banking trends in 2026 are bringing humanity back to finance
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Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we're joined by Amy Wigdahl, Principal Solution Marketing Manager at UserTesting. We dig into the future of banking and FinTech as we head into 2026. We'll talk about how AI is making digital banking more personal, why precision matters more than ever, and what banks need to do to build real trust with customers. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution. Welcome to the Insights Unlocked Podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at UserTesting.
And our guest today is Amy Wigdahl, a Principal Solution Marketing Manager at UserTesting. Welcome, Amy.
What are the emerging trends in digital banking for 2026?
Hi. Hi, everyone.
Amy, can you share with listeners just what you do at UserTesting? What does a Principal Solution Marketing Manager do?
Yes. Well, thank you for having me. But yeah, tell you a little bit about what I do here at User Testing. So my work focuses on helping, you know, in the context of what we're talking about today, banks understand their customers' perspectives really at scale. And I also work on helping create solutions for banks and other financial services. And I do this by learning from some of our best customers, right? How are they solving some of their biggest business challenges and how customer insights actually can help solve those problems.
Yeah, we were just saying before we started recording that you're going to have dinner with a customer later tonight. And from those conversations and from the research that you're doing, I'm just wondering, as we head into 2026, what are these banks, what are these financial organizations thinking about when it comes to customer experience and customer insights?
Yeah, well, I am really looking forward to talking about some of these major trends. And overall, I guess the theme is right now, it's not just any more about digital banking. It's about knowing your people, not just the accounts. And so the first theme that I want to talk about is, oddly enough, how AI-driven personalization is bringing humanity back to digital banking. And so what I mean by this basically is, you know, over the past few years, we've seen how banking and financial services has undergone a major digital transformation. Right. Everything is just easier, more convenient. But with that, banking has become easier. much more efficient, but at the same time becoming impersonal. And so in 2026, banks are really starting to look at using more generative AI oddly enough to make these digital experiences feel more human again.
And obviously that's going to require a lot of customer input, customer understanding to really provide that empathy and the context that banks will need to do this right. And so Accenture recently came out saying that generative AI is helping banks create emotionally engaging experiences, which is very contrary to what we all think. But what they're trying to do with that is replicate the personalization services of the past. Not to talk about our age at all, Nathan, But we know what it's like to go into a branch, maybe have people we recognize who recognize us. And so what would that look like through a digital experience? So banks are not just using like AI to automate things, but to personalize at a level that finally feels kind of human again.
And personalization, this type of personalization is not gonna work without understanding real people, really everyday needs. So that's where customer insights become the fuel for this, right? So any AI model will need to be able to build trust, not just to complete a transaction. And I have a little example of this, too. So, you know, banks are starting to use AI to anticipate big life moments like saving for a home, starting a family, paying off student loans. You know, the difference is now kind of that context and banks are using kind of these insights then to understand how to show up in a way that feels supportive versus creepy, you know, because we could have like all of these predictive things happen, you know, but when it comes to our finances, we really, you know, need to make sure these feel authentic.
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