Transformative Innovation 2026-2027

In July 2026, mathematician Hong Wang became only the third woman to receive the Fields Medal – mathematics’ highest honour. She was recognised, in part, for resolving a problem that had resisted mathematicians for decades.

This is also the premise behind BNP Paribas’ Innovation Lab and our wider approach to co-creation with clients. Instead of starting with a product and looking for somewhere to apply it, we start with the client’s own constraints and pain points.

At its simplest, the problem asks how small a space can be while still leaving room for a needle to point in every direction. While highly technical, it’s a neat way of posing a very corporate question: how do you fit innovation into an already crowded system, without shutting off options you may need later?

After all, most organisations do not innovate on an empty page. Instead, they’re trying to move within systems already crowded with regulation, legacy technology, risk controls, competing priorities and ongoing obligations to clients. The space is finite, yet demands arrive from every direction.

Seen in that light, innovation is not necessarily the introduction of something wholly new – but the process of changing the geometry of existing systems and processes.

It might involve arranging what is already there more intelligently. Perhaps redesigning a payment process so value can move more directly, connecting fragmented information so treasury can see and act earlier, or making a financing structure, digital asset or guarantee usable across markets rather than leaving it confined to a promising pilot.

Corporates, advisers, product specialists, technology teams and implementation experts then examine those challenges together, rather than one team handing a brief to the next. They also stay involved through build and roll-out rather than stepping back once the idea is agreed.

The case studies in this year’s Innovation Guide show what that looks like beyond the workshop. This might mean creating new connections across markets, rethinking guarantees and working capital, adapting infrastructure to support growth, or combining established banking capabilities with emerging technology like tokenisation and agentic AI.

Just as Professor Wang’s breakthrough grew from earlier discoveries and years of work across a wider mathematical community, the innovations explored in this publication have developed through a similar accumulation of knowledge – with one organisation bringing the challenge, another contributing specialist expertise, and both discovering possibilities that might have remained invisible from a single vantage point.

Innovation, after all, is not always about finding more space. Sometimes it begins by discovering – together – how many directions were already possible.