Senior Director, Strategy and Content
American Banker Live Media
Mary Ellen Egan is a journalist with more than 25 years of experience in business and investigative journalism. She has been a staff writer and editor at Forbes, The American Lawyer, First Amendment Watch and American Banker. She has freelanced for Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Thomson Reuters. She is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.
Account-to-account (A2A) payments are moving from a low-cost alternative to cards into a core strategic capability for banks, reshaping how money moves, how value is captured, and how customer relationships are owned.
This panel brings together senior bank leaders to examine how A2A payments will evolve in 2026 and beyond, and what that evolution means for revenue models, infrastructure investment, risk, and competitive positioning. The discussion will explore the shift from batch to real-time rails, the impact of open banking and API-driven payments, and how banks can move from simply providing access to delivering differentiated, monetizable A2A experiences.
Panelists will debate where banks should lead, where they should partner, and where they risk being disintermediated, particularly as fintechs, merchants, and embedded finance players increasingly sit between banks and end customers. Discussion points to include A2A as a strategic asset (not a utility); real-time payments and customer expectations; monetization and business models; open banking, APIs, and control of the customer experience; risk, fraud, and trust; the future of cross-border A2A and interoperability.
The Phone Is the Platform: How Mobile Is Redefining Payments
What began as a convenient alternative to physical cards has become something far more ambitious. Mobile devices–and digital wallets–have quietly become the most powerful point of sale in history. Phones are transforming acceptance, enabling new merchant experiences, and reshaping expectations for security, flexibility, and speed across the payments landscape.
Fraudsters are advancing faster than traditional defenses can adapt—leveraging AI, exploiting real-time rails, and capitalizing on consumer expectations for instant, frictionless payments. Meanwhile, real-time payments (RTP) present the lowest recoverability of any fraud channel, intensifying the stakes for providers, banks, and merchants. Consumers now expect not only seamless user experiences but also full protection and reimbursement—even in cases of authorized fraud. The pressure is mounting: Juniper Research estimates that online payments fraud will cost companies more than $362 billion between 2023 and 2028.
This panel explores how organizations can modernize their fraud management frameworks and take a proactive approach by orchestrating identity verification, risk scoring, and behavioral insights across every stage of the customer journey. Leaders will examine how to integrate reputational data to identify and reduce first-party fraud; how to design AI-based fraud models tailored to specific products, channels, and typologies; and how to expand KYC and due-diligence disciplines across the broader payments ecosystem. Panelists will discuss how to balance fraud losses, customer experience, and revenue/risk appetite to create a cohesive, resilient, multi-layered defense strategy for the real-time era.