A traditional job for this time of year is thinking about what might be coming up in the year ahead. For me this is a combination of likely trends and priorities in the areas I work in which involves fintech from both a business perspective and related legislation. My top five headlines for 2025 (so far) are fraud, AI, stablecoins, smart data and the UK opportunity.
1. Fraud: ‘Scamdemic’
Scams are a huge threat – according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance 1 in 4 individuals were affected worldwide and nearly US$1.023 trillion was lost through online scams last year. In the UK, fraud is now the most reported crime, accounting for 40% of all reported crimes. The days of poorly spelled ‘Nigerian Prince’ emails are over, AI upgrades have produced Fraud-as-a-Service LLMs like WormGPT and FraudGPT to generate scams for you.
In the UK new Payment Service Regulator (PSR) regulations mandating that financial institutions compensate scam victims through the 50/50 reimbursement rule have come into force. It looks like scams are shifting from push payments to cards, but the jury is still out on the long-term impact. It remains an issue at the forefront of policy discussions with significant implications for both consumers and financial institutions and serious questions around big tech/ telco data sharing and the extent to which consumer ‘negligence’ should be addressed.
2. AI agents: Personalisation of finance and AI regulation
AI is optimising everywhere—from attacking complex workflows, to hyper-personalised payment experiences and predictive analytics.
Is this the year of GenAI in Finance? Thinking about Klarna’s chatbot doing the work of 700 agents. It seems likely that every bank employee will have an AI agent, but how will AI agents make payments or authenticate identities?
We know much more now about the UK’s planned approach with the publication of Matt Clifford’s AI Opportunities Action Plan. The plan focuses on building infrastructure and sovereign capability and the government has agreed to all recommendations including the creation of AI Growth Zones with faster planning permission and grid connections, accelerating Nuclear Small Modular Reactors to power AI infrastructure, boosting UK public compute capacity 20x and building strategic data sets for AI model training.
There is much to be excited about in both the scale and nature of the ambition in this plan but the section on enabling safe and trusted AI development and adoption through regulation, safety, and assurance, gave me the most pause for thought, given that my AI Regulation Bill aimed to do exactly that. We are incredibly lucky in the UK to have a common law legal system that is considered fair and widely adopted around the world. What we do with AI law and policy could be exported globally.
Embedding our values,
as set out in my Bill, will, in my view, truly make the most of the AI opportunity.
The new ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Artificial Intelligence Management System standard has also published and is another way the UK can encourage AI assurance, ethical and responsible use. Action Plan recommendation 29 focused on support for the AI assurance ecosystem, and the government have promised a public update on this by Spring 2025 – I will be looking out to see exactly what is included here.
Another ISO update, on data standards, mean that by November 2025 banks must ensure all payments messages, both sending and receiving, are based on ISO 20022. It is interesting to think how this could help with fraud prevention and it will undoubtably help with the personalisation of finance.
3. Stablecoins and blockchain
The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulations (MiCA) have led to greater regulatory clarity in Europe driving stablecoin adoption. Société Générale-Forge (SG-Forge) has made a euro-backed stablecoin accessible to retail investors and Oddo BHF SCA and Deutsche Bank’s DWS are all looking at similar initiatives. Payment companies and neobanks are also looking seriously at stablecoins.
Developments in this space are Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge and Nubank’s recent announcement that they will be offering rewards to all customers (100m) who hold 10 USDC, a dollar backed stablecoin. Will the new US administration accelerate this, already significant, trend?
Beyond ISO 20022, it is noteworthy that Singaporean bank DBS is also using APIs and working with anchor platform partners to embed trade finance solutions into ecosystems and leverage supply chain data. I urge the UK government to take note of this and take action to stimulate adoption in the UK following the passage of the Electronic Trade Documents Act last year.
4. Smart Data: Open Finance and beyond
The creation of the Open Banking Implementation Entity in 2016 put the UK at the forefront of open banking and it is positive to see the public sector continue to lead on adoption, bank to bank payments are now used by HMRC and Coventry City Council. I am also keen to see how progress with implementation proceeds following publication of the National Payments Vision at the end of last year.
The Data Use and Access Bill will be moving into report stage in the House of Lords soon and there are some key regulatory changes here that will make a huge difference, extending open finance to a variety of products and beyond finance to different sectors such as energy. I have written before about how supportive I am of the potential of smart data but questions around data-sharing, IP and copyright have serious implications. We have already done a lot of work on the Bill to challenge the government’s plans to allow the use of text and data mining for the training of AI systems with the burden placed on those to opt out of the system.
This work ties into another key recommendation from the AI Opportunities Action Plan – the creation of a National Data Library. The UK has some incredible data assets, not least through the NHS. UK company DeepMind used NHS datasets to develop AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. Making high-quality, well-governed datasets available promises incredible opportunities for innovation but governance, data privacy and security are critical. We already know that millions have opted out of the NHS data sharing scheme due to a lack of trust.
5. The UK Opportunity
It was a tough year for investment in 2024 with a drop of 37% from 2023 for the UK. But despite that drop it is positive that the UK attracted more capital than the next 5 European countries combined. As the prime minister, rightly, points out in his response to the AI Action Plan this is the nation of Babbage, Turing, and Lovelace and we are already the third largest AI market in the world. We have a great opportunity and if we get it right, with British values and public trust truly at the heart of all these developments that I am feeling positive about the year, and years, ahead.