The Next Competitive Advantage in Financial Services Is Knowledge
By Andrew Quinn, Managing Director & Co-Founder at FIDEO Global
Summer is over. The inbox is full again. Meetings are back. And projects that were going to be dealt with “after the summer” have suddenly become immediate priorities.
But financial services has not returned to the same industry it left in July.
Before the summer, we argued in FinanceX that the second half of 2026 would belong to organisations capable of turning growing complexity into confidence. Two months later, that argument needs to go one step further. Because organisations do not create confidence. People do. And that makes education, training and continuous professional development one of the most important competitive issues facing financial services today.
The half-life of expertise is getting shorter
For much of the history of financial services, professional expertise accumulated relatively predictably. You learned the fundamentals, developed experience, kept up with regulatory change and built an increasingly valuable body of knowledge. That model has not disappeared. But it is being challenged.
Professionals across banking, payments, insurance, Fintech, compliance, risk and wealth management are now encountering technologies, regulations and customer behaviours that barely existed at the beginning of their careers, and, in some cases, barely existed a year ago.
Generative AI, real-time payments, digital identity, tokenised assets, operational resilience, fraud, data governance and cyber risk are reshaping the environment in which financial decisions are made.
The issue is not that everybody working in financial services needs to become a technologist. They do not. It is that everybody increasingly needs to understand the implications of technology for their own professional responsibilities.
Artificial intelligence provides perhaps the clearest example. The conversation has moved remarkably quickly from “What can this technology do?” to “How should we use it responsibly?”
The first question is primarily technological. The second involves governance, ethics, risk, compliance, customer outcomes, data and professional judgement.
Europe’s regulatory direction reinforces that shift. The EU AI Act places explicit emphasis on establishing an appropriate level of AI literacy among people involved in the operation and use of AI systems.
But AI literacy cannot mean sending everybody on the same introductory course and considering the job done.
The knowledge required by a board director differs from that required by a compliance professional. Customer-service teams encounter AI differently from software engineers. Risk professionals, product managers, advisers and operational teams each need different levels and types of understanding.
The emerging requirement is therefore not simply AI training. It is role-relevant AI competence.
And the principle extends beyond AI. Regulation is increasingly creating new knowledge requirements for people: operational resilience, instant payments, digital identity, financial crime, cyber risk and digital assets increasingly cross traditional professional boundaries.
That has profound implications for education and training.
Graduation was never supposed to be the finish line
Perhaps the biggest cultural shift required is a simple one: we need to stop thinking of education as something that happens primarily at the beginning of a career. In a market changing this quickly, professional education has to become lifelong.
The greater someone’s responsibility, the more important it becomes that their knowledge evolves alongside the environment in which they make decisions. Twenty years of experience remains enormously valuable. But twenty years of experience combined with current knowledge is more valuable still. The strongest professionals of the next decade will not necessarily be those who know the most today. They will be those who remain capable of learning tomorrow.
That also means moving from an exclusively employer-led model of development towards greater personal ownership. Organisations will continue to provide training and qualifications. But professionals increasingly need to identify emerging skills, access high-quality learning and take responsibility for their own development, particularly as careers become less linear.
A payments specialist may move into Fintech. A compliance professional may need AI-governance expertise. A technologist may need a much deeper understanding of regulation. Someone in traditional banking may move into digital assets, RegTech, financial crime or operational resilience.
The modern financial-services career is becoming an evolving portfolio of capabilities.
Education needs to reflect that reality.
This thinking is at the core of what we do at FIDEO Global. The question we increasingly need to ask is not simply what qualification somebody requires, but: what does a financial-services professional need to understand now, and what are they likely to need next?
The answer increasingly lies at the intersection of finance, technology, regulation and human judgement.
There is a bigger literacy challenge too
It is also always important to remind ourselves financial services do not operate in isolation from society. Europe continues to face a significant financial-literacy challenge, creating an important responsibility for our industry.
We need increasingly sophisticated professionals capable of operating complex financial systems. But those professionals ultimately serve customers who need financial products to become more understandable, not less. Better professional education should therefore produce more than technically competent employees. It should produce people who can explain complexity. People who can communicate risk. People who understand customer vulnerability. People capable of using technology without surrendering judgement to it.
And people who remember that trust remains the fundamental currency of financial services.
This is why the next transformation is, ultimately, a very human one. We frequently describe transformation through technology: AI transformation, digital transformation, payments transformation, data transformation.
But technology alone transforms very little. People implement it. People govern it. People explain it. People identify when it is wrong. People decide when not to use it. And people remain accountable for the outcomes.
That is why skills should move much closer to the centre of financial-services strategy.
Boards should ask whether their organisations possess the capabilities required for the environment they are entering, not merely whether mandatory training has been completed.
Managers should ask which skills their teams will require in two years, not simply which vacancies they need to fill today.
And professionals should increasingly ask themselves: What am I learning now that will make me more valuable tomorrow? The pressures we described in July - tightening regulation, accelerating technology and harder-won trust - have not gone away.
The second half of 2026 will still be about execution. But execution requires capability. Capability requires knowledge. And knowledge can no longer be something acquired once, early in a career, and gradually spent over the following decades.
It has to be renewed. Expanded. Challenged. And occasionally relearned entirely.
The institutions that recognise this will be stronger for it. So will the professionals who work within them. The future of financial services will undoubtedly be shaped by AI, regulation, digital money, data and infrastructure. But the people who keep learning will be the people who shape what that future actually becomes.
