CBD's Bernd van Linder: Banking's Next Decade Is About Decisions, Not Transactions

Commercial Bank of Dubai chief executive Dr. Bernd van Linder says the next phase of banking will be judged less by how well banks process transactions and more by whether customers end up in a better financial position. Digital banking, in his account, has stopped being the destination. It is now the foundation for what comes next.

Van Linder argues that the next decade will be defined by helping customers make better financial decisions, not just executing them. That sounds like a small change in language. It is a large change in operating model. A bank that only executes is measured on speed and accuracy at the counter or in the app. A bank that helps customers decide has to understand their goals, join up products and stay useful after the transaction closes.

Van Linder describes a shift from product-centric banking to life-centric banking. The goals are concrete: buying a home, growing a business, securing a family's future. The bank's job is to help customers reach those goals, not merely to sell them a mortgage, a loan or a savings account along the way.

That shift is visible in how CBD talks about its digital services. Digital banking is no longer a separate destination that customers are encouraged to visit. It is the layer on which other services are built. That view changes what counts as a good journey. A mortgage application is not just a form to be digitised. It is a decision process that may begin with a savings plan, run through affordability checks and continue after drawdown.

At CBD, the usage numbers show how far that base has been built. 95% of the bank's customers actively transact digitally. 92% of servicing interactions take place through digital channels. In 2025, the bank delivered more than 60 new digital capabilities and launched 50 self-service journeys. It reported infrastructure availability of 99.999%.

Those figures matter for a reason that is easy to miss. A bank with near-total digital participation cannot run digital as a channel bolted onto branch banking. Every new self-service journey changes the work behind it: how queries are routed, how exceptions are handled, how risk is monitored and how products are designed. The 99.999% availability figure sets a high bar for that operating model. Customers who use digital channels for almost everything notice when the channel is down.

That is why van Linder calls digital banking the foundation rather than the destination. The foundation has to carry more weight as more of the customer relationship moves onto it.

CBD's AI work began with broad adoption of Copilot across the organisation. It has since moved to Merlin, alongside a dedicated programme of AI agents supporting specialist banking workflows. Around 1,300 employees have completed AI training.

The sequence is telling. Many banks start with isolated pilots, then struggle to move them into production. CBD's account starts with broad tool adoption, then moves to named platforms and agents tied to specialist workflows. Van Linder says AI is treated as an institutional capability rather than a set of isolated productivity tools.

That has consequences for training, data access, model risk and accountability. An institutional capability needs owners, standards and a way to stop bad use cases before they spread. It also needs a workforce that can question what a model produces. The training figure matters for that reason: tools do not audit themselves.

Van Linder says AI success should be measured by value created, not the number of tools deployed. The distinction is practical. A bank can count licences and pilots with ease. It is harder to show that a workflow is faster, that a risk decision is better documented or that a customer gets an answer without being passed between teams. Those are the measures that connect AI spending to banking outcomes.

On Agentic AI, van Linder identifies the biggest opportunity for banking as augmenting human expertise rather than replacing it. That position sets the design brief. An agent that drafts a credit memo, gathers policy references or routes a complex servicing case can give a specialist more time for judgement. An agent that is left to make the judgement alone creates a different risk profile.

Governance, in his view, has to be built into innovation from the outset, with human oversight and clear accountability at every stage. That is not a brake on experimentation. It is the condition for scaling it. Banks operate in a regulated sector where a failed process can become a customer harm or a supervisory issue. Controls added after deployment are harder to defend.

Van Linder also says AI is moving too quickly for organisations to wait for perfect certainty. The balance is familiar in other technology shifts: move early enough to learn, but not so loosely that the bank cannot explain what its systems did. For CBD, the test will be whether the Merlin programme and the AI agents produce measurable value while the governance model holds.

CBD has been active in the UAE's regulated innovation programmes. It was the first UAE bank licensed as an Open Finance Third Party Provider. It is participating in the Digital Dirham pilot with Bank of China on the Central Bank's JISR platform. It is a member of the Commercial Bank Money Token Association.

Those roles put the bank inside several parts of the financial infrastructure being built, not just at the customer-facing end. Open finance changes who can access account data and initiate payments, with consent and licensing as the gate. Tokenised money and digital currency pilots test settlement and issuance models. A bank that joins the early phases learns how those models behave before they reach mass use.

For business customers, UP by CBD integrates with UAE Pass and the Dubai Unified Licence to simplify business setup and scaling. The combination targets a familiar friction point: the paperwork and identity checks that sit between an idea and an operating company. CBD is also Strategic Banking Partner of Dubai FinTech Summit 2026.

The UAE is building financial infrastructure through Open Finance, Aani, Jaywan and the Digital Dirham. Van Linder describes the country as one of the world's most progressive financial innovation hubs, citing collaboration between regulators, government and industry.

His argument is that banks have a role to convert national financial infrastructure into real outcomes for customers and businesses. That conversion is the harder part. Infrastructure is national; adoption is local to each customer and each company. A payment rail or an open finance rule only matters if a small company can open an account, a homeowner can complete a mortgage journey or a treasurer can move money with confidence.

The agenda also explains why CBD frames digital banking, AI and open finance as connected. Open finance needs reliable digital journeys. AI agents need clean data and clear controls. Tokenised money needs settlement systems that customers can trust. Each depends on the others, and each adds pressure on the operating model behind the app.

Van Linder's view of the next decade is therefore less about a single product launch than about the bank's ability to turn infrastructure into decisions. A customer who gets a mortgage decision, a business that gets licensed and paid, or a treasurer who moves money without friction will not care which rail or model made it work. They will care that the bank did.