Oana Ifrim
25 Sep 2026 / 10 Min Read
The Banking View is an interview series published by The Paypers, a European trade publication covering payments, fintech and financial services. Each edition features a senior executive from a bank discussing a specific challenge their institution is working through, from rebuilding cross-border payments for real-time rails to governing AI in financial crime compliance.
This page brings every edition together, grouped by topic, with a short summary of what each contributor covers. It is updated each time a new edition is published.
Series author: Oana Ifrim, Lead Writer, The Paypers
Last updated: [25 September 2026]
Andrew Breslin, Vice President, Institutional Clearing EMEA, and Anthony Zheng, Director, Head of Institutional Clearing, TD Securities | [25 September 2026]
The great cross-border payments reset: why banks must move now
Andrew Breslin and Anthony Zheng of TD Securities argue that the biggest risk banks face in cross-border payments is losing ownership of the client relationship to fintechs and payment specialists, and set out what banks should do now to keep it.
Banks sit at the centre of most conversations about payments modernisation, yet they are not always the ones setting the agenda in industry media. The Banking View gives them that space. Each piece is either a direct interview or an expert article from someone working inside a bank's payments, fraud, compliance or digital assets function.
Contributors so far come from eleven banks: BNY, Citi, Commerzbank, Danske Bank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Payments, mBank, NatWest Group, Openbank Deutschland (Santander), TD Securities, and UniCredit.

Four editions deal with fraud and financial crime, and data sharing comes up in all of them. Dave Laramy of Danske Bank and Vilém Dědek of mBank both point to the UK's CIFAS database as a working model for sharing fraud intelligence between banks. Susann Gäbler of Openbank Deutschland and Vilém Dědek both see cooperation with telecom providers and online platforms as one of the hardest parts of the new framework to put into practice. Osman Saçarçelik of Commerzbank adds the governance side, arguing that supervisors now expect banks to explain how an AI-supported decision was reached as well as what it concluded.
Dave Laramy, Head of Group Fraud, ABC & Tax Evasion, Danske Bank* | 4 March 2026
Fraud defence with built-in contingencies
Dave Laramy, then at Danske Bank, discusses how Fraud-as-a-Service and AI-generated deepfakes have lowered the barrier for criminals, and shares the controls he relies on: releasing new features to employees first so they can try to break them, and building every control with adjustable parameters and an emergency kill switch. He also covers real-time payment interception and why each layer of a fraud strategy needs a contingency ready to deploy.
*Editor's note: at the time of the interview's publication, Dave Laramy was Head of Group Fraud, ABC & Tax Evasion at Danske Bank. He has since left the bank and joined Klarna as Global Head of Fraud.
Vilém Dědek, Senior Credit Fraud Analyst, mBank (Czech Republic and Slovakia) | 4 May 2026
Why credit fraud often remains below the spotlight
Vilém Dědek of mBank argues that credit fraud is underestimated because much of it is stopped before any money is paid out, and because cases are often written off as bad debt instead of being reported as fraud. Drawing on earlier work in telco fraud and consulting, he discusses the PSR's liability shift and the practical obstacles to sharing data with telecom providers, citing the UK's Scam Signal as an example Europe could learn from.
Osman Saçarçelik, Global Head of Global Standards, Advisory & Governance for AML/CTF, Commerzbank | 8 September 2026
AI, risk and trust: leadership and compliance in the future of banking
Osman Saçarçelik of Commerzbank explains why the most realistic uses of GenAI in AML/CTF compliance sit in preparatory work, where subject matter experts stay accountable for the outcome. He describes how the EU AML Regulation pushes banks towards data-centric compliance, and how a large bank can build a maker culture safely, for example by running AI models in shadow mode alongside existing processes before they touch live cases.
Susann Gäbler, Head of Risk Steering Fraud, Openbank Deutschland (Santander) | 9 September 2026
Securing the whole payment journey: fraud prevention in the PSD3/PSR era
Susann Gäbler of Openbank Deutschland explains how Strong Customer Authentication under PSD2 secured the approval step, while social engineering now requires banks to protect the full payment lifecycle. Her priorities for the next 24 months are real-time monitoring of outgoing and incoming payments and the foundations for cross-industry fraud intelligence sharing. She also works through the tension between the PSR's behavioural monitoring requirements and GDPR.
Five editions of The Banking View address Europe's new payments framework. Andrea Monteleone of J.P. Morgan Payments describes PSD3 and the PSR as a modernisation of existing rules and sees Verification of Payee as an obligation banks can build commercial fraud services on. Susann Gäbler of Openbank Deutschland argues the PSR extends fraud prevention to the whole payment journey, and names real-time monitoring of incoming payments as the hardest capability to build. Vilém Dědek of mBank identifies expanded fraud liability as the biggest change from PSD2, while noting that detailed requirements are still being finalised. Dave Laramy of Danske Bank expects fraud data-sharing frameworks to grow with support from the PSR, and Ajay Krishna of UniCredit examines how PSR rules on account access interact with the digital euro.
Andrea Monteleone, Executive Director, EMEA Payments Industry Advocacy, J.P. Morgan Payments | 2 April 2026
PSD3 and PSR: evolution, not disruption
Andrea Monteleone of J.P. Morgan Payments explains why the bank sees Europe's new payments framework as a modernisation of existing rules. He covers the harmonisation gains of a directly applicable regulation and the limits of payments law when scams begin in other channels. He also argues that wider access for non-banks is more likely to deepen bank partnerships than to replace them.
Ajay Krishna, Product Manager, Digital - Open Banking Operations, UniCredit | 6 August 2026
Open Banking and the digital euro: how far does the shared standards layer actually reach?
Ajay Krishna of UniCredit, who runs the bank's Open Banking platform across nine European markets, examines how much interoperability the ECB's reuse of existing standards actually delivers for the digital euro. He separates what banks can extend from their current API and authentication stack from what must be built from scratch, such as settlement and holding-limit logic. He also works through the unresolved question of third-party access and the central fraud risk score in version 0.91 of the digital euro rulebook.
Three editions deal with cross-border and real-time payments, and each treats speed as a question of infrastructure and data. Bana Akkad Azhari of BNY argues that resilience across multiple rails has to be proven before banks optimise for cost, while Ajin Krishnan of Citi shows how Australia's New Payments Platform now extends instant settlement to inbound cross-border payments. Andrew Breslin and Anthony Zheng of TD Securities add the commercial stakes, warning that banks which delay modernisation could keep processing the final leg of a payment while losing the client relationship around it.
Bana Akkad Azhari, Head of EMEA, Global Payments & Trade, BNY | 9 March 2026
How banks are rebuilding cross-border payments for the real-time, multi-rail era
Bana Akkad Azhari of BNY explains how the bank is upgrading its cross-border and treasury systems so each payment can run in real time over the most suitable rail. She argues that interoperability between legacy methods and newer options such as tokenized deposits and stablecoins is the precondition for scale. She also describes how BNY's AI platform, Eliza, is used to repair payment exceptions.
Ajin Krishnan, Head of Payments, Australia and New Zealand, Citi | 10 June 2026
Money never sleeps: Australia's bet on always-on finance
Ajin Krishnan of Citi uses Australia's New Payments Platform as a case study for payment leaders elsewhere. He explains how PayTo gives customers direct control over who can debit their accounts, and how instant settlement improves working capital for businesses. He also shows how Australia's AML/CTF reforms are pushing payment flows off the legacy BECS system onto modern rails.
Andrew Breslin, Vice President, Institutional Clearing EMEA, and Anthony Zheng, Director, Head of Institutional Clearing, TD Securities | [25 September 2026]
The great cross-border payments reset: why banks must move now
Andrew Breslin and Anthony Zheng of TD Securities argue that the biggest risk banks face in cross-border payments is losing ownership of the client relationship to fintechs and payment specialists. They set out how banks can respond through partnerships and better use of ISO 20022 data, citing TD's role as a gateway intermediary into Canada in the Swift payments scheme. They also focus on the last mile, the stretch between a payment reaching the beneficiary bank and landing in the end account, where most of the delay now sits.
Both editions on this topic come from HSBC, and they approach the same shift from two sides. Hema Iyengar looks at how structured ISO 20022 data will survive the full correspondent banking chain in 2026, cutting repairs and manual investigations. Mark Evans looks at what that richer data means for corporate treasurers, who can use it to track performance and automate reconciliation.
Hema Iyengar, Director of Payment Programs, Global Payments Solutions, HSBC | 24 April 2026
ISO 20022: why 2026 may be the real inflection point
Hema Iyengar of HSBC traces how ISO 20022 moved from a coexistence phase to native, end-to-end processing, with 2026 as the year structured and hybrid address data starts surviving the whole correspondent chain. She sets out the practical payoff for corporates, such as automated reconciliation and intraday liquidity visibility, and for banks, such as fewer repairs and higher straight-through processing. She also flags change management as the lever institutions tend to overlook.
Mark Evans, Global Head of Payment Products, Global Payment Solutions, HSBC | 28 July 2026
Why treasury's next competitive advantage will be in payments data
Mark Evans of HSBC draws on the bank's Global Payment Trends Report 2026 to argue that treasury's next advantage lies in the data each payment carries. He covers ISO 20022, tokenization, agentic commerce and cross-border real-time payments. He then gives treasurers concrete steps, from embedding payments in core systems to tracking KPIs such as straight-through processing rates.
Christine O'Reilly-Stewart of BNY and Lee McNabb of NatWest Group both look at where banks fit as new models emerge around them. Both see regulatory experience and customer trust as the assets that keep banks central, whether they are providing infrastructure to fintechs or issuing tokenized deposits.
Christine O'Reilly-Stewart, Director, Product Management, Banking-as-a-Service, BNY | 11 February 2026
Why banks still matter: navigating innovation and trust in a changing financial landscape
Christine O'Reilly-Stewart of BNY examines what role incumbent banks play as fintechs and newly chartered US banks multiply, with Banking-as-a-Service as her answer. She sets out how BaaS partners should divide responsibilities, with the bank carrying compliance and payments infrastructure while the fintech builds the customer experience. She argues that alignment on values and risk appetite has to happen well before any contract is signed.
Lee McNabb, Head of Digital Assets, NatWest Group | 23 July 2026
The rise of digital assets in payments and financial services
In this video interview, Lee McNabb of NatWest Group explains how tokenized deposits differ from stablecoins and CBDCs, and why he expects the three to coexist. He sees tokenized deposits as the most natural fit for commercial banks and argues that adoption will depend on clear regulation and common standards, along with close collaboration between commercial and central banks.
The Banking View is an interview series published by The Paypers in which senior bank executives discuss specific challenges in payments, fraud prevention and regulation. This page lists every edition published so far.
Contributors so far come from BNY, Citi, Commerzbank, Danske Bank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Payments, mBank, NatWest Group, Openbank Deutschland (Santander), TD Securities, and UniCredit.
The interviews with J.P. Morgan Payments, Openbank Deutschland, mBank and UniCredit address PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation directly. The Danske Bank interview discusses fraud data sharing under the PSR.
Most contributors work at European banks, but the series also includes Citi on real-time payments in Australia and New Zealand, BNY on the US banking charter environment, and TD Securities, part of Canada's TD Bank Group, on cross-border clearing.
Reach out to Oana Ifrim.
The Paypers is an independent source of news and analysis on payments, fintech, Open Banking, stablecoins and cross-border payments, based in Europe and read by professionals across the global payments industry.
This page is updated with a new entry each time a Banking View edition is published.

Oana Ifrim is Lead Editor and Writer at The Paypers. After more than a decade at The Paypers, Oana has built a pretty good sense of what’s happening across banking and fintech, with a strong network of industry insiders across payments, digital innovation, regulation, fraud, and financial crime. She mixes content strategy, trend spotting, a (slightly obsessive) love of research, expert conversations, and a big dose of curiosity to turn complex industry shifts into engaging stories and thought leadership that bring a little life to the industry’s biggest conversations.
More recently, she has been deeply dedicated to The Banking View, an exclusive series bringing direct perspectives from banking leaders on how they’re navigating payments modernisation, fraud and financial crime, regulation, and innovation.
When Oana is out of office, you’ll probably find her singing, reading, cooking with her family, getting happily lost in detective and mystery shows, or exploring every forest she can find with her husband and daughter.
If you’d like to exchange ideas, explore content opportunities, or there’s an industry topic you’d love to dig into, reach out to her at: oana@thepaypers.com or on LinkedIn.
The Paypers is a global hub for market insights, real-time news, expert interviews, and in-depth analyses and resources across payments, fintech, and the digital economy. We deliver reports, webinars, and commentary on key topics, including regulation, real-time payments, cross-border payments and ecommerce, digital identity, payment innovation and infrastructure, Open Banking, Embedded Finance, crypto, fraud and financial crime prevention, and more – all developed in collaboration with industry experts and leaders.
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