2026 Agenda

Thursday 30th April, Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh

 

​​SESSION 1

The Financial Services sector is going through a period of unprecedented change, driven by rapid technological advancement, and wholescale market disruption. The opening session will look at some of the ways that organisations are responding, by rethinking their approach to innovation; monetising data more effectively, and leveraging AI to bypass legacy tech debt.

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​09:15    Welcome and Introduction from the Conference Chair

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Mark Stephen, Journalist & Broadcaster, BBC Scotland

09:25    Why Innovation Must Change in Big Banking

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• Big organisations don’t lack ideas, they lack environments where early ideas can survive long enough to be tested

• Learning speed is the new competitive advantage

• Parallel disciplined experiments complement our strong day-to-day digital delivery and enable us to explore larger, more uncertain opportunities with confidence

• Leadership capability is at the heart of breakthrough innovation i.e. following evidence rather than momentum or assumptions

• The next decade belongs to organisations that make bold innovation repeatable

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Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group

09:45    How to Monetise Payments Data Products - and Does AI Help?

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• Experience of being first to enable data products in the bank

• Impact of Technical architecture

• What issues we encounter - data governance, frameworks, incidents, consumers, data mapping

• How did AI help

• How are we monetising data - showing the benefit for ISO 20022 regulation, RoI and prioritising data products based on business cases

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Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest 

10:05    ​Leapfrogging Legacy: Bypassing the Legacy Debt Trap with AI-First Engineering

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• Most traditional financial services are stuck "eating the elephant" - trapped in multi-billion pound modernisation projects that often fail before they finish.

• Explore how to break the cycle and bypass legacy debt by using AI to "thin slice" your transformation for immediate impact.

• Learn how to move away from bloated, multi-year roadmaps, shift your focus to 90-day ROI cycles that deliver immediate value and modernise at the core, freeing up capital to reinvest in the customer experience.

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Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture 

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​10:25    Combined Q&A​​

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10:55   Networking, Exhibition & Refreshments
 

SESSION 2

Session two will hone-in on a variety of key topics in longer individual slots. Presentations will be run across parallel streams, providing delegates the opportunity to attend two of the breakout options.

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11:30    First Breakout Option

12:05   Transition

12:15    Second Breakout Option

Breakout Options Include:

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Governing AI at Scale: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Use of AI at Royal London

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• ​Developing our AI strategy and roadmap for the adoption of artificial intelligence solutions

• Our approach to accounting for AI related risk within our existing Risk Management framework

• Our AI Handbook and its purpose

• Our new AI Centre of Enablement

• The operating model for AI governance at Royal London

 

Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London

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Software Supply Chain: The Growing Threat Landscape

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• Why the supply chain is now a primary attack vector: how open-source dependencies, build pipelines, and developer tooling are becoming a critical route into financial institutions

• 8 campaigns in 6 months: a tour through the threat landscape - self-propagating worms, nation-state actors, and attacks that defeated each new defence deployed against them

• The actors behind the threat: who is driving this, why they are not stopping, and why your engineers are the target demographic

• Strategic priorities for 2026: what security and engineering leaders in financial services should be doing now to get ahead of the risk​

 

Rebecca Ennion, Cyber Threat Intelligence Manager, NatWest

 

Aberdeen’s Approach to Sustainability Across our IT Operations

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• Overview of Aberdeen's operational technology landscape and associated sustainability initiatives

• Our cloud optimisation programme and its contribution to decarbonisation

• Our view on AI impacts and the emerging challenges for organisational decarbonisation efforts

 

Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen

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Not Another AI Talk: Designing AI (That Actually Works) for the Human Side of Finance

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• Human-in-the-Loop Reality Check: Why full autonomy is rarely the right goal

• The "Boring" Side of AI: Ownership, governance and surviving audit

• AI Epic Fails: How to avoid common pitfalls with solid design

• Building AI Workflows, Not Demos: A framework for laser-focused, scalable AI adoption in FS

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Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech

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​Why AI is forcing a rethink of financial services cyber security?

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• The need for “secure by default” to become an operational reality

• Tackling the security and governance challenge of human & agentic AI workforce

• Why digital identity security must change to protect financial services organisations

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Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter

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​12:45   Lunch, Networking & Exhibition

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​​SESSION 3 

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The afternoon session will focus on adapting for the future, and navigating the challenge and opportunity of emerging technology. We will consider both the commercial opportunities and governance implications of AI, and discuss how rapid advancement and the explosion of new tools requires a more agile, responsive, and resilient technology infrastructure.​

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13:35  Third Breakout Option

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Breakout Options Include:

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​Governing AI: Rethinking Risk & Control

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• How AI-driven systems challenge traditional risk and control assumptions

• Strengthening governance and oversight around AI-enabled decision-making 

• Moving from periodic assurance to continuous oversight and monitoring

• Embedding risk and controls early in the product and engineering lifecycle

• Emerging regulatory expectations around AI governance and operational resilience

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Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank

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From Pilot to Powerhouse: Scaling AI Across Global Sales and Marketing Teams

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• The Implementation Roadmap - How we successfully deployed AI tools across global asset management teams, navigating diverse markets and organizational complexities

• Winning Hearts and Minds - Proven strategies for driving adoption across different roles, geographies, and levels of technical readiness, plus our most impactful wins

• Hard-Won Insights - Honest reflections on what worked, what didn't, and the critical lessons that will inform your own AI transformation journey

• The Path Ahead - Forward-looking perspectives on emerging opportunities and the next wave of AI-driven innovation poised to reshape financial services for sales and marketing

 

Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton​

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Tokenisation, Digital Assets and the Future of Capital Markets

 

• What are Digital Assets, Tokens and a brief overview of their history

• Why Digital Assets are a ’step function improvement’ in Capital markets

• Old business models are being reimagined, but the products remain the same

• The regulatory picture is getting clearer

• Outstanding challenges remain; transparency, risk, interoperability and governance

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James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence

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​14:00   Transition to Plenary

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14:05    Building a More Responsive & Future-Ready Technology Infrastructure

 

• What is infrastructure? - Lets understand what we’re talking about.

• Why is infrastructure so complex - why the complexity is not necessarily a bad thing.

• Understanding technical debt - Good debt vs bad debt

• Options to address Tech debt and improve business alignment - How do business priorities feed into Infrastructure? 

• How to prioritise when everything is critical

• You don’t have a technical debt problem, you have a culture problem 

 

Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General 

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14:25    Building for the Storm: System Resilience in the Age of AI Agents

 

• AI agents are reshaping how software is built and delivered - and the infrastructure underneath must evolve fast

• When autonomous agents create code, trigger deployments and call APIs at machine speed, our assumptions around capacity, access controls, observability, and security start to break 

• Performance evaluation demands sustained attention to monitoring data - compounded by the challenge of tracing telemetry at scale

• This talk covers the concrete engineering challenges of supporting an agentic ecosystem, and what you need to change before the agents arrive in force

 

Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase

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14:45    Combined Q&A

 

Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank

Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton

James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence

Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General 

Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase

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15:15    Closing Remarks

15:20   Close of Session

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NETWORKING DRINKS RECEPTION

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15:20    Networking Drinks Reception

​16:30    Conference Ends

*The conference agenda is provisional and subject to change

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