In today’s hyper-regulated, data-driven financial landscape, customer trust is no longer a soft metric, it’s a strategic asset.
As banks navigate the dual imperatives of digital transformation and regulatory compliance, technologies that empower customers to control their data are emerging as critical enablers of both innovation and resilience.
The 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience offers a timely lens into how financial institutions can harness consent management and data privacy technologies not just to meet compliance mandates, but to differentiate on customer experience (CX).
For CIOs and CISOs, this is a call to action: the future of banking will be built on transparent, secure, and customer-centric data ecosystems.
Key takeaways:
- Customer trust as a strategic asset: Trust is no longer optional, it’s central to competitive advantage and regulatory compliance.
- Shift toward proactive support: Banks are moving from cost-efficiency to delivering personalized, proactive customer support at scale, powered by data and consent-aware technologies.
- Privacy and consent as differentiators: Technologies that embed privacy and consent into customer experiences are becoming essential for innovation and resilience.
- Urgency for CIOs and CISOs: The technologies highlighted are mature or maturing, ready for deployment to build secure, transparent, and customer-centric data ecosystems.
Jump to…
- From cost-to-serve to proactive support
- 4 technologies to watch as we move into 2026
- Consent and Preference Management: From checkbox to strategic platform
- Digital Twin of a Customer (DToC): Privacy-first personalization
- Journey-time orchestration: Real-time risk and consent management
- Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): The engine behind consent-aware engagement
- Why this matters now
From cost-to-serve to proactive support
This year’s Hype Cycle underscores a pivotal shift in digital banking strategy: from reducing cost-to-serve to enabling proactive, personalized support at scale.
Technologies that anticipate customer needs, contextualize interactions, and empower users to manage their data are central to this evolution.
Three overarching themes define the 2025 landscape:
- Powering a consistent experience through technology
- Enabling proactive support at scale
- Maximizing the benefits of human support
Within this framework, several technologies stand out for their relevance to consent, privacy, and data governance.
4 technologies to watch as we move into 2026
Consent and Preference Management: From checkbox to strategic platform
Maturity: Mature Mainstream
Benefit rating: High
Consent and Preference Management (CPM) platforms are no longer optional. With global privacy regulations tightening, from GDPR and CCPA to India’s DPDP Act and the EU’s upcoming Financial Data Access (FiDA) framework, banks must provide customers with granular control over their data.
CPM platforms consolidate user choices across systems, enabling banks to:
- Comply with evolving privacy laws
- Support open banking and open finance data-sharing requirements to complex detail
- Build trust through transparent consent dashboards
As open banking adoption accelerates, CPM becomes a foundational layer for secure data exchange with fintech partners. CIOs should prioritize modular, scalable CPM solutions that integrate with legacy systems and support real-time consent orchestration.
Digital Twin of a Customer (DToC): Privacy-first personalization
Maturity: Emerging
Benefit rating: High
DToCs offer a dynamic, virtual representation of a customer’s preferences, behaviors, and financial context. While still nascent, this technology holds transformative potential for hyper-personalized services… Provided privacy is built in from the start.
Key privacy implications include:
- Customer-owned DToCs enabling negotiation with banks
- Enhanced transparency into what data is collected and how it’s used
- Consent management as a prerequisite for DToC deployment
For CISOs, DToCs introduce new governance challenges. Banks must establish clear identity, access, and consent frameworks to ensure ethical and compliant use of digital replicas.
Journey-time orchestration: Real-time risk and consent management
Maturity: Adolescent
Benefit rating: High
Journey-Time Orchestration (JTO) platforms manage identity verification, authentication, fraud detection, and consent in real time across digital touchpoints. This orchestration is critical for balancing security with seamless CX, especially during onboarding and high-risk transactions.
JTO enables:
- Centralized policy enforcement for data access and sharing
- Dynamic consent prompts based on user behavior and risk signals
- Integration with GenAI guardrails for responsible automation
As banks modernize their digital journeys, JTO platforms offer a scalable way to embed privacy and security into every customer interaction.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): The engine behind consent-aware engagement
Maturity: Early Mainstream
Benefit rating: High
CDPs unify customer data across channels, enabling real-time personalization and analytics. But with great data comes great responsibility. Modern CDPs must support:
- Consent-aware data activation
- Privacy-by-design architecture
- Integration with CPM and DToC systems
For CIOs, CDPs have moved beyond traditional marketing use to become part of the enterprise data infrastructure. Ensuring these platforms respect consent boundaries is essential for both compliance and customer trust.
Why this matters now
The convergence of open banking, AI, and evolving privacy norms is reshaping the competitive landscape. Banks that treat consent and data privacy as strategic capabilities will be best positioned to:
- Deepen customer relationships
- Accelerate digital innovation
- Mitigate regulatory and reputational risk
The 2025 Hype Cycle reveals that the technologies enabling this shift are not far-off future possibilities. They are here, maturing, and ready for deployment.
Access the Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience
This article only scratches the surface. The full Gartner Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience provides detailed analysis of over 30 technologies, from AI agents and GenAI-enabled virtual assistants to blockchain asset tokenization and emotion AI.
Download the full report to explore how your organization can lead in the next era of customer-centric, privacy-first banking.
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