Banking & FinTech
Speakers navigating the collision between traditional finance, digital innovation and the future of money
Inflation, interest rates and financial regulation now move faster than most leadership teams can interpret them. Boards need someone who can take a central bank decision, a supply shock or a fresh enforcement action and explain what it actually means for capital, pricing and risk, without jargon and without dumbing it down. The gap is rarely information. It is translation at the level a chief executive can act on.
Leaders of banks, central banks and other regulated institutions know their organisations are being rewired by AI, platforms and new regulation. What they struggle with is translating that awareness into sequenced decisions about capability, talent and operating model. The gap is not vision. It is a practitioner view of which AI moves build durable advantage and which ones become stranded pilots.
Boards now have to make capital-allocation calls inside an economy where monetary policy, fiscal stress and political fracture move together. Most leadership teams can read the headlines but cannot trace how a central-bank decision in Frankfurt, a fiscal rule in Brussels and a war on Europe’s eastern border end up reshaping their cost of capital. The gap is not data. It is judgement from someone who has sat on the other side of those decisions.
Most investment decisions in large organisations still rely on conviction, narrative, and individual judgement. The cost of that habit shows up in inconsistent returns, hidden risk concentrations, and strategies that cannot be repeated when the person leaves the room. The hard question is what it actually takes to run capital, or any high-stakes commercial decision, on systematic rules rather than gut.
Emilie Bellet is the founder and CEO of Vestpod, helping organisations and audiences improve financial confidence and financial education, particularly for women.
The compliance function in most global banks is now larger than many of the businesses it oversees, and yet the vast majority of illicit financial flows still move through the system undetected. The gap is not a shortage of policy, it is a shortage of first-hand understanding of how professional money launderers actually think, which bank procedures they exploit, and which internal controls they find trivial to bypass. Closing that gap requires someone who has worked on the other side.
Boards are being asked to make large, irreversible bets on AI while the rules governing it are still being written. The people drafting those rules, and the people deploying the technology, rarely sit in the same room. Without a translator between Westminster, Silicon Roundabout and the executive committee, firms either over-invest in the wrong guardrails or under-invest and wait for enforcement to find them.
Senior conferences live or die on the host. A panel of bank CEOs, central bankers and geopolitical analysts will not self-organise into a coherent hour; someone has to hold the room, follow the money in real time, and ask the question the audience came to hear. Most rosters of available moderators thin out fast when the brief involves live financial markets, sanctions, or a head of state in the green room.
Financial services firms are expected to adopt new technology faster than their regulators, risk teams or cultures are built to absorb. Innovation programmes stall not on the technology itself but on the gap between what executives announce in public and what their organisations are actually able to execute. Closing that gap requires someone who has lived inside both the trading floor and the startup, and can speak credibly to each.
Economic forecasts fail not because the data was wrong, but because the cultural assumptions shaping the analysis were invisible. Reading markets through numbers alone consistently misreads the human dynamics that move prices, shape policy, and generate systemic risk. The harder question is not what the data shows – it is what the cultural frameworks inside your organisation prevent you from seeing.