Market dynamics, financial leaders’ priorities, and consumer expectations are evolving simultaneously, creating both challenges and opportunities for financial institutions. This session explores the connections between the forces influencing today's decisions and the trends likely to shape tomorrow's banking landscape. Expect fresh perspectives, emerging signals, and thought-provoking insights about where retail banking is heading.

Universal banks win with diverse customer bases, owning the moments that change lives and balance sheets. We explore how to turn this advantage into a scalable, data driven capability with CRM, Mobile and AI agents—creating a new, bank wide growth engine.

Karoly helps incumbent banks compete with neobanks like Revolut by breaking down barriers to change. He simplifies IT architecture and operating models, and accelerates digital and AI transformation. His expertise lies in integrating channels - digital, human, and artificial intelligence - to create seamless omnichannel customer experiences. He builds movements for change within complex organisations, turning ambition into action.

Agentic Commerce, Real Accountability: Banks and Regulators on the New Rules of Automated Transactions
Amelia Stewart (NatWest), Úna Dillon (PCI SSC), Daniel Dawson (Datos Insights)
As AI agents begin initiating payments, opening accounts, and negotiating terms on customers' behalf, banks and regulators face a shared question: who's accountable when the buyer isn't human? This panel brings bank executives and regulatory representatives together to examine liability frameworks, consent standards, and the compliance infrastructure agentic commerce demands.


Breaking the Barrier: Bringing Crypto to Everyday Banking Customers
Giorgi Gurgenidze (Bank of Georgia)
For most Georgians, crypto was out of reach - unfamiliar platforms, confusing onboarding, real risk of loss. Bank of Georgia removed that barrier by building crypto trading into the app 1.9M+ customers already trust. In this session you'll learn how we simplified a complex asset class for a mainstream audience: the regulatory groundwork, the partner model, and the product decisions that made buying crypto feel as ordinary as a transfer.

Reclaiming the Daily Relationship—From ATM Transactions to Loyalty Moments
Angeliki Ksona (National Bank of Greece)
As banking becomes increasingly digital, ATMs remain one of the most frequent physical touchpoints between banks and customers. Drawing on National Bank of Greece’s experience, this session explores how network reach, broader self-service capabilities, fee reform and personalisation can transform routine transactions into meaningful relationship moments. It also highlights the role of trust, human support and responsible data use in creating relevant, accessible and customer-centred ATM experiences across markets today.

Innovation Driven by Customer Needs - Shaping a Future-Ready Ecosystem
Jana Švábenská (Komercija banka); Helena Müller (Diebold Nixdorf)

Beyond Cash Automation: The Better Business Banking Experience
Javed Anjum (Glory), Johnny Mattocks (Lloyds Banking Group)

How to Protect Cash in a Changing World
Graham Mott (LINK), Donna Calero (LINK)
Consumers’ relationship to cash continues to evolve, and while their overall use of cash for payments is falling (but will never be zero) cash’s role for saving and as part of households’ emergency resilience remains and indeed will grow. To fulfil these different roles, access to cash needs to be protected, and the UK has been leading the way with shared facilities.

Maintaining Physical Access Through Shared Banking Infrastructure
Richard Talbot (NatWest Group)
In the face of increasing pressure from digital and online banking, this session looks at how banks are pooling resources and co-operating to ensure those who do wish to access cash or bank face-to-face, are still able to do so.

Fraud Prevention: A Shared Responsibility – Romanian Perspective
Radu Stancu (National Bank of Romania)
Effective fraud prevention requires more than reactive measures. Drawing on the Romanian payments ecosystem, this case study explores how continuous market monitoring, stakeholder engagement, and feedback collection can inform timely and proportionate action. It highlights the role of cooperation between authorities and industry participants in shaping prevention strategies and supporting resilience, while contributing to the evolving European regulatory framework.


Beyond Borders: Making Sense of Global Operational Resilience Rules
John de Freitas (ACA Aponix)
This fireside chat with John de Freitas of ACA Aponix explores operational resilience and compliance as a genuinely global challenge, spanning UK, EU, US and international regulatory regimes. It covers what proportionate compliance looks like for institutions of every size, from UK building societies and community banks to large multinational banks, how supplier and third party risk should be managed, and how banks can balance compliance spend against customer facing investment, alongside emerging issues such as AI risk.


UK vs EU: Does More Prescription Mean More Resilience?
Alexis Car (Raiffeisen Bank International AG), Lu Zurawski (ex-PSR (UK)), Sarah Garrington (Royal London Group)
This panel examines the different paths the UK and EU have taken to strengthen how banks withstand and recover from shocks. The UK's approach is more outcomes focused, giving firms flexibility in deciding how they meet expectations, while the EU's DORA framework is more prescriptive, setting out precisely what firms must do. The panel debates whether greater regulatory prescription actually makes financial institutions more resilient, or whether it simply pushes organisations towards demonstrating compliance on paper rather than building genuine operational readiness, and what that trade off means for cost, speed and customer outcomes.

Most branch conversations still treat the branch as separate from the "real" channel strategy, a legacy cost center to be managed down, or an existing approach to be defended. The real question isn't whether the branch survives, it's whether it's designed as one component of a single channel strategy or bolted on beside it.

This roundtable pushes past the "branches still matter" consensus into where banks are challenged to integrate the branch into the broader channel design, particularly the hand-off point where a customer starts digitally and finishes in person, or vice versa. That gap usually starts inside the org chart: whether branch and digital report to the same strategy team, with shared budget and shared KPIs, or answer to two separate ones entirely.

Picture a mid-size, well established bank. Its existing base is demographically older, branch-loyal, and profitable today. Its growth ambition depends on looking credible to a younger, digitally native audience that has never set foot in a branch. Every investment decision pulls in a different direction depending on which customer the bank is optimizing for.

Rather than a straight panel, this roundtable works through a shared fictional case: participants are given the bank's constraints and have to debate out where it should spend its next transformation budget, forcing the trade-off the industry usually avoids naming directly.

Agentic AI is moving from pilot to production faster than most banks' governance structures were built to handle, but the push is not coming from one direction. In some institutions it's the board asking for a story to tell shareholders. In others it's a handful of technologists building agents ahead of any customer demand, or a customer base that has never asked for autonomous decisioning and doesn't know it's getting it.

This roundtable separates the hype from the mandate: who inside the bank is really driving agentic adoption, what "customer demand" for it actually looks like when it exists, and where agentic banking is solving a real customer problem versus a competitive-optics problem.

The solutions to your most pressing challenges may already be out there. The Innovation Showcase is where you find them.

Hear from pre-vetted, high-growth fintech firms, each selected because their solutions directly address the challenges on this year's agenda. Datos analysts lead Q&As that highlight how each solution connects to your strategy, giving you the context to judge whether a solution is worth exploring further. From there, engage with hands-on demos and have in-depth conversations at your own pace.