Peer intelligence from 220 lending and compliance leaders reveals where competitive advantage is being built — and where it is being ceded.
2026 marks a structural inflection point for US banking. Capital efficiency, data integrity, and digital infrastructure have displaced balance sheet size as the primary determinants of competitive position. Wolters Kluwer's Banking Landscape Transformation Index is a recurring, data-driven lens on how industry leaders are actually responding — where they are doubling down, where they are retrenching, and where new operating models are taking hold.
Drawing on responses from 220 senior banking professionals — the H1 2026 Index captures concrete peer perspectives on the pressures that matter most: Basel III capital charges, non-bank competition, digitized collateral and payments, AI scalability, continuous supervision, and structural talent constraint
Key findings
Among the key findings are:
- Over half of institutions are actively re-engineering how they deploy capital, with 15 percent exiting high-yielding segments entirely — a direct market share transfer signal to private credit and fintech competitors.
- Basel III capital charges are the dominant competitive handicap, cited by 39.6 percent as their single greatest structural disadvantage versus non-bank lenders — nearly double the next ranked factor.
- 86.5 percent of institutions are urgently or actively reorienting their revenue mix, as fee-based income transitions from a growth initiative to a core survival strategy under NIM compression.
- Nearly 79 percent are pursuing or planning partnerships with private credit funds, signaling the emergence of a collaborative capital ecosystem over the traditional adversarial model.
- Nearly 30 percent of institutions are running black-box AI in regulated workflows, creating near-term examination exposure as the supervisory environment accelerates toward continuous T+1 data access.
