AI, Crypto and ESG: What the World Finance Conference Papers Reveal for 2026
Generative AI is moving faster through banking and lending than any technology wave before it. A Celent survey of 106 U.S. banks, credit unions and consumer finance companies found that 83% of lenders plan to increase their GenAI IT budgets in 2026, 67% will have implemented a GenAI strategy by year-end, and 70% are adopting or planning GenAI for analytics and reporting. Celent's own conclusion: adoption is spreading "faster than previous lending technology innovations," including online and mobile banking. At the same time, cryptocurrency markets remain a defining source of volatility for portfolio managers and risk teams navigating 2026's markets. Both trends land squarely inside current academic finance research — and inside the pages of a new peer-reviewed volume.
Innovations in Finance: Proceedings of the World Finance Conference, Malta 2025 (Springer, 2026), edited by Professor João Paulo Vieito — who has chaired the World Finance Conferences since 2009 — brings together 17 peer-reviewed chapters from a truly international pool of researchers. Rather than a single-author narrative, it offers a curated cross-section of where finance research stands right now: AI and technology readiness in banking, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin volatility modelling, ESG ETF performance, and corporate governance's link to carbon accounting.
The applications are concrete. A bank innovation or risk team benchmarking its own GenAI roadmap can draw on the volume's chapter assessing AI and technology readiness in Indian banking — a market moving through the same adoption curve U.S. institutions are now navigating. A portfolio or risk manager can apply its copula-GARCH modelling of cryptocurrency volatility and Bitcoin connectedness analysis directly to current crypto risk frameworks. An ESG analyst, meanwhile, can use its study on performance and volatility asymmetries between sustainable and conventional ETFs to inform allocation decisions under real market conditions rather than back-tested assumptions alone.
For business school, economics and finance libraries, conference proceedings like this one fill a specific gap: they capture emerging research — on GenAI in finance, crypto markets, ESG investing — months or years before it consolidates into single-author monographs, making this an efficient way to keep a research collection current across several fast-moving subfields at once.
CLNZ Books sources current academic and professional titles from Springer, Wiley, Routledge, Elsevier and other leading publishers, helping institutional libraries and finance professionals worldwide stay current without tracking dozens of individual journals and conference series.
Q&A
Q: How fast is generative AI actually spreading through banking in 2026?
A: According to Celent's 2025 survey of U.S. lenders, 83% plan to boost GenAI budgets in 2026 and 67% will have a GenAI strategy implemented by year-end — adoption that Celent describes as faster than prior lending technology shifts like online and mobile banking.
Q: What is the World Finance Conference and who edited this volume?
A: It is an international academic finance conference; this proceedings volume from its Malta 2025 edition was edited by Professor João Paulo Vieito, who has chaired the World Finance Conferences and World Finance & Banking Symposium since 2009.
Q: Does the book address cryptocurrency market volatility?
A: Yes — it includes a copula-GARCH analysis of cryptocurrency volatility and a separate connectedness study replicating Bitcoin's performance through equity portfolios.
Q: Is this book useful for someone tracking ESG investment performance?
A: Yes — one chapter directly compares performance and volatility asymmetries between sustainable ESG ETFs and conventional ETFs under current market conditions.
Q: Who is the intended audience for this volume?
A: Finance and economics researchers, doctoral students, business school and institutional libraries, and banking, investment and ESG professionals seeking current peer-reviewed research across global finance topics.