Cogent Business & Management

Digital Finance: Reshaping Banking & Finance

In recent years, CBDCs, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and fintech have been reshaping the banking and finance sector. Money and financial services have moved toward digital, programmable, and interoperable architectures. In this new scenario, central bank digital currency projects, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins coexist. For their part, fintech companies are accelerating user experience, operational efficiency, and integration with merchants, platforms, and markets.

The result is a profound reconfiguration of the banking core and the payment system, with direct implications for intermediation, liquidity, risk management, regulatory compliance, and competition.

This collection aims to explore how these pieces can fit together, relate to each other, and complement each other. What problems do they solve and what new challenges do they introduce: from the tokenization of value and digital identity to business models, fraud and theft in digital markets, market volatility, fintech distress, and financial stability in an environment of continuous innovation.

The digitization of money is currently leading to a readjustment in the economic functions that underpin banking and finance. It affects issuance, distribution, custody, and settlement, and also poses a challenge for supervision. CBDCs, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins introduce forms of “value” with different guarantees, and risk profiles. In turn, their interaction with traditional banking infrastructure and fintech can alter access to financial services and competition between intermediaries. These developments are, in turn, redefining risk management and the regulatory framework, including questions related to fraud and theft, market volatility and price crashes, run risk, and the distress or failure of non-bank fintech firms. Operational resilience, cybersecurity, data integrity, fraud prevention, crime prevention, consumer protection, and contagion risks beyond the traditional banking perimeter may all be affected by this digitization of money.

The decisions made now will shape the future architecture of wholesale and retail payments, monetary sovereignty, monetary policy transmission, and financial stability. Understanding the trade-offs is therefore an academic and practical priority.

• CBDC design: retail and wholesale models, remuneration, limits, privacy, and operational architecture.
• Money transmission and banking intermediation: impact on deposits, credit, liquidity, financial stability, and stress transmission during periods of market disruption.
• Stablecoins: reserve quality, stabilization mechanisms, transparency, de-pegging episodes, and run risk.
• Cryptoassets in finance: Cryptoassets in finance: custody, tokenization, secondary markets, settlement infrastructures, collateral, and exposure to fraud, theft, and extreme market volatility.
• Payments and cross-border: interoperability, standards, messaging, final settlement, and remittance efficiency.
• Regulation and supervision: Regulation and supervision: prudential frameworks, consumer protection, market integrity, resolution and recovery issues, and risk-based approaches for banks and non-bank fintech firms.
• Compliance and digital identity: Compliance and digital identity: AML CFT, KYC, travel rule, fraud detection and on-chain analytics.
• Cybersecurity and operational resilience: threats, continuity, third-party risk, and secure architecture.
• Strategy and business models: banking and fintech, partnerships, competitiveness, and adoption.
• Digital financial inclusion: how CBDCs, stablecoins, cryptocurrencies, and fintech expand access to payments and savings with lower costs and better usability. Digital divide, privacy, risks of exclusion, and consumer protection.
• AI in banking and finance: how artificial intelligence is transforming credit scoring, fraud detection, customer service, and risk management, increasing efficiency and personalization at scale.
• Risk and financial stability: fraud and theft in digital markets, market volatility and price crashes, run dynamics, and the distress or failure of non-bank fintech firms.

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PhD. Sergio Náñez Alonso is an associate professor at the Catholic University of Ávila and holds a PhD in Law and Economics, with ANECA accreditation as Full University Professor (February 26, 2026).  He specializes in digital economics, focusing on CBDCs, decentralized finance, financial inclusion, and taxation; and has published 100+ scientific works across leading indexed outlets.  His research has received broad international visibility (1,700+ Google Scholar citations; h index 20) and is supported by sustained international collaboration and competitive project participation.

Luís Pacheco has a PhD in Economics from the Technical University of Lisbon, a MSc in Monetary and Financial Economics and a Degree in Economics. University lecturer since 1994, teaching at undergraduate and master degrees in the financial and economical area. Full Professor at Universidade Portucalense - Infante D. Henrique (Porto - Portugal) and Director of the Research Unit REMIT - Research on Economics, Management and Information Technologies, evaluated as "Very Good" by FCT. Develops research activities in the financial and tourism areas.

Peterson K. Ozili is a senior policy economist at the Central Bank of Nigeria. He specialises in economic policy and financial sector issues. He has developed thought leadership in financial inclusion, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), financial stability, economic policy and international development research. He is widely published in international journals in the finance, economics, and development discipline