Every Vendor Claims Data Is Their Moat: Why Banks Pay For The Silos Between Them

InnovationEvery Vendor Claims Data Is Their Moat: Why Banks Pay For The Silos Between ThemByXiaowei Jiang,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 12, 2026, 09:00am EDTXiaowei Jiang is CEO & Chief Architect at Tacnode, focused on real-time data systems for AI-driven decision making. gettyA receipt shows a charge of $271, but it doesn’t specify whether it’s in U.S. or Canadian dollars. One system parsed the receipt, but it doesn’t capture currency. Another system does, yet the two don’t connect.This scenario came up during a breakfast roundtable at FinTech Meetup. Around the table were solution vendors, investors and bank strategists, and the initial reaction was straightforward: just integrate the systems. But the conversation shifted when I asked a different question—where does your AI actually get its signals, and what makes your data defensible?Each vendor pointed to proprietary data as their advantage: transaction velocity patterns, device fingerprints and document verification histories. Yet when I asked whether any of them used each other’s data, the room went quiet. The bank leaders exchanged a look, and the gap in the system became obvious—not a failure of integration, but a deeper fragmentation in how customer intelligence is constructed.​The Gap Between The MoatsMost banks run a handful of vendors across the decision pipeline: one for fraud scoring, another for KYC, a third for compliance screening and a fourth for credit decisioning. Each vendor claims that data is their competitive advantage. Each operates on their own slice of the customer. None of them sees each other’s slice.It’s not because vendors refuse to cooperate. The bank receives each vendor’s output—the fraud score, the identity match and the KYC result. But outputs are summaries. The fraud vendor’s score doesn’t tell you which devi...