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For some time, the progression of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and the increasing influence of blockchain technologies have advanced as distinct, yet equally impactful, forces within the financial sector. However, these groundbreaking technologies are on the brink of a powerful convergence, setting the stage for financial marketers to operate at this critical intersection.
According to Michael Toner, an innovation advisor at Profor and a featured speaker at The Financial Brand Forum 2026, financial marketers will find themselves simultaneously empowered and challenged by this technological evolution.
- Empowerment: AI tools are set to revolutionize financial marketing, from sophisticated content generation and personalization to precise measurement of campaign effectiveness and actual impact.
- Challenges: Marketers will grapple with the rise of AI-generated fakery, including deceptive communications impersonating their institutions. Concurrently, they must develop compelling strategies to educate customers on the significant advantages of migrating to blockchain-based payment systems, credit solutions, and investment products.
While AI’s influence on financial marketing is already profound and growing, Toner believes blockchain technology is nearing its breakthrough moment. Its widespread adoption, he suggests, is largely contingent on the completion of congressional deliberations concerning proposed legislation, specifically the “CLARITY Act.” This legislation (Digital Asset Market Clarity Legislation for Asset Regulation, Innovation, and Trading Yields Act) is a successor to the previous year’s GENIUS Act, designed to guide and establish national innovation for U.S. stablecoins.
Key Insight: Blockchain technologies offer a crucial solution to address and mitigate the escalating trust issues consumers face with AI.
Building Trust in an AI-Driven World: Blockchain as the Authenticity Layer
Michael Toner, drawing from his past experience as a social media and digital marketing manager at Navy Federal Credit Union, emphasizes the profound trust the public places in financial institutions. This trust, he notes, will be more vital and simultaneously more vulnerable than ever as generative AI enables the creation of increasingly sophisticated fake photos, texts, videos, and even personas.
“Who am I going to trust? How am I going to verify authenticity and provenance? How do I even know that this text message is really from my bank?” Toner questions. He asserts that when AI can create anything, discerning its origin becomes paramount. Toner predicts that blockchain will serve as that essential ‘truth layer.’
Blockchain as Financial Institution’s “Insurance”
Financial institutions face a substantial risk when customers fall victim to deceptive tactics, such as fraudulent digital marketing messages. Toner proposes that blockchains could provide an invaluable method for tracking which communications genuinely originated from the institution and which are fabricated.
Under this system, every legitimate communication from a bank or credit union could be securely stored and cataloged on-chain. This immutable record would act as verifiable proof, for instance, to authenticate a promised interest rate or other incentives, effectively serving as a high-tech evolution of traditional tracking methods for marketing messages.
Enhanced Lending and Payments with Blockchain
Beyond its potential as an anti-fraud mechanism, Toner expresses considerable excitement for blockchain’s capacity to introduce innovative variations of conventional financial services.
Blockchain-Powered Lending
Toner envisions a new era of consumer lending facilitated by blockchain technology:
- Digital assets, such as Bitcoin holdings, could function as collateral for loans or credit lines, all managed on blockchain rails.
- Repayment processes could be autonomously managed through smart contracts – self-executing blockchain commands triggered by predefined conditions.
- Tasks like managing payment due dates, facilitating recovery through collateral liquidation, and other administrative functions could be automated via blockchain.
“This could open up an entire new world of business with folks who have not participated in the traditional banking system,” Toner states. Should the CLARITY Act pass, a significant change would be the regulation of cryptocurrencies as commodities by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), rather than as securities under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Traditional banking has long focused on “know your customer” (KYC) compliance to combat money laundering. However, in an age of AI fakery, Toner suggests that customers engaging with digital tokens or accepting digitally granted credit will increasingly need to “know your issuer.”
Revolutionizing the Payments Landscape
Toner also foresees an expanding role for blockchain as a primary payment rail, driven by its inherent reliability.
He illustrates this with an analogy from the gaming world: his children use “Robux,” the virtual currency within the Roblox platform. “That currency has value in that digital world,” he observes, “but it’s locked within the game, in that little world.” Toner advocates for greater interoperability between such digital economies and the broader real world. “When I buy them $20 in Robux, why shouldn’t they be able to go to a Nike store and buy a pair of real shoes?” he asks.
The anticipated reliability of blockchain payments is expected to drive down the operational costs of traditional payment systems, such as credit card networks. This efficiency could ultimately translate into lower credit card rates for consumers.
Why Marketers Must Pay Attention: “Financial brand marketers need to start to understand these possibilities,” Toner emphasizes. “Because if they’re going to be out there marketing, say, a blockchain-based credit card, they need to understand how it works and what the value propositions are for the end user.”
Source: thefinancialbrand.com