Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou

Some banks block AI agents outright. Others let them read but not write. And a few US banks are now adding contract language that puts the liability on any customer who hands an agent their login credentials. Jimena Santillán, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Sharp Labs, has seen this movie before. She worked in risk at CaixaBank when digital payments were new. At first, online transactions...

Paolo Sironi and I co-authored a chapter in Brett King’s “Branch Tomorrow”, arguing that physical bank branches would become 360-degree advisory hubs, not transaction counters. Brett’s own closing line in that book was blunter: branches have no role in an agentic world. Two new 2026 US surveys, Jim Marous’s Digital Banking Report and the Curinos/Adrenaline report on de novo branch expansion, and t...

Dharmesh Mistry’s primary bank has two of his financial products. He deals with 23 organizations in total. Do the math, and you’ll see why he says banking holds maybe 2 to 3 percent of the data that actually describes a customer’s life. 💡 In this conversation, we discuss: 🔺 The four forces Dharmesh calls Quanvergence: quantum computing, agentic AI, tokenization, and digital twins, and why their...

In 2021, Paolo Sironi slipped the word "conscious" into the subtitle of a banking book, three years before ChatGPT turned consciousness into the debate of the decade. Quantum Sapiens, his new literary novel, is where he goes deep into concepts that matter more than ever - like knowledge, wisdom, truth, consciousness.  And the machine's biggest hallucination, he argues, isn't ge...

We recorded this conversation with Sarbjeet Johal, top Silicon-Valley based Technology Analyst, the day before Nvidia reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the primary hub for open-weight AI models, for $12.9 billion.  That timing matters, because the entire conversation is about open-weight and open source models.  Open-weight models are free to download, but Brex's Summer 2026 Benchmark hi...

Agentic Banking is not another AI upgrade for banks. It's a new operating system and most incumbents are still running the old one. In this conversation, Driss Temsamani - Managing Director, Americas Head of Digital at Citi and author of The Agentic Bank which we discussed in the Fintech Book Club in June,  explains what actually has to change for banks to become agentic, and why the gap is w...

What is being built at the intersection of programmable money and the agentic economy? Nik Milanović — founder of This Week in Fintech (now part of Plaid), GP at The Fintech Fund, and founder of Stablecon — joined me to discuss Stablecoins and AI agents as the new emerging economic participants We cover: 🔺 What Nik saw and heard at Stablecon EMEA in Amsterdam - the tensions between Europe and the...

AI agents are starting to make financial decisions without a human approving every step, as such a design cant scale. In this conversation I sit down with Amna Usman Chaudhry, financial economist and frontier technology strategist, to dig into why AI governance built for a single agent breaks down frequently once multiple agents start interacting with each other. KYC governed the customer and KYB...

Agentic AI is everywhere in finance right now — agentic commerce, agentic payments, stablecoin protocols, Anthropic's ten new analyst agents. But agentic lending is the one that touches creditworthiness, and that is why the EU AI Act classifies it as high-risk under Annex III, alongside law enforcement and border control. In this episode of Conversations & Insights, I sit down with Tamara...

What does an AI-native bank actually look like? Jouk Pleiter, founder and CEO of Backbase, argues that adding AI to a fragmented banking stack doesn't fix the problem, it amplifies it. In this episode I sit down with Jouk to unpack Backbase's newly launched AI-native Banking OS, the shift from account-centric to customer-centric architecture, and why the operating model, not the AI model...

This 🔺 What does it actually look like when TradFi and DeFi converge, and why are most banking executives still missing it? I sit down with Scarlett Sieber and Dhanum Nursigadoo of Money20/20, two of the six co-authors of The New Intersection of Money: Where TradFi and DeFi Converge, launching at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, June 2-4, alongside the new Intersection stage. We cover the Holy Tri...

Is the "AI-native bank" a distant reality — or is it already here? In this episode of Fintech Conversations & Insights, I sit down with Georgios Kolovos, NVIDIA conversations & Insights,'s EMEA Payments and Fintech Leader, to unpack what's actually happening at the infrastructure layer of financial services. We go deep on Revolut's PRAGMA — the foundation model tra...

An autonomous AI agent walked into McKinsey's AI platform - no password, no authentication, no break-in. Within two hours it had access to 46.5 million chat messages, 728,000 files, and 57,000 user accounts. This wasn't a hack in the traditional sense. The agent used permissions it was given. My tweet about this went viral - 500,000 views https://x.com/efipm/status/2031736307... . The co...

A discussion of the latest Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) report 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆: 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀, 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. The study captures the complexity of the evolving tokenised money ecosystem, shows how emerging private tokenised money instruments are competing for different applications, analysing the evolving infrastructure and the regulatory trends shaping their devel...

Can Crypto Be Indexed? In this episode I discuss with Jessica Ellerm co-founder of TheMelia https://themelia.co/ , whether crypto can be indexed and why crypto indexing differs from traditional markets.  We explore the enormous token universe and the need for strong screening to avoid scams and illiquid assets, including Melia’s primary filters on minimum market cap and daily volume plus user-defi...

bunq's CEO at Davos: AI, the US Bet, and a Contrarian Take on Stablecoins | Davos during the WEF 2026 Description: Filmed at the House of Collaboration, in Davos during the World Economic Forum 2026. I sat down with Ali Niknam, founder and CEO of bunq, Europe's most profitable neobank, for a fireside chat that went places I didn't expect. We covered their subscription model that mos...

From Trump’s Proposed 10% Credit Card APR Cap to AI Agents in Lending.  In this episode, I discuss with FinTech product lead and bestselling Indian author Shuchi Batra about Trump’s proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates and its implications for credit markets. The conversation covers how FinTechs have expanded access through alternative data—especially cashflow analysis—and why incumbents...

In Formula One, the drivers are the best in the world, all elite. The difference? The car. The same is true for AI. Tim Brophy, Principal Solution Architect at Elastic, argues the model wars are a distraction. The real differentiator is your data platform — and most financial institutions aren't ready. In this conversation, we discuss:  • Why AI is forcing the unified data issue in financial...

We built compliance systems to fight financial crime. Instead, we created honeypots. In this conversation, Beth Haddock — General Counsel at AdvisorEngine, board director at GMO-Z Trust (a NY-regulated stablecoin issuer), and policy lead at The Stablecoin Standard — breaks down what's broken with legacy compliance and the emerging framework to fix it. The Stablecoin Standard just released a w...

A discussion with leaders at the BIAN Summit, where the focus is on Banking banking, integration, innovation, transformation, and AI.  Steven Van Wyk, Chairman of the Board at BIAN, and Shanker Ramamurthy, Global Managing Partner of Financial services at IBM, discuss BIAN's shift from a standards to a service organization, the risks of technological stagnation, and the implementation of BIAN...

AI is upending thebanking pyramid—and open standards are foundational to this transformation. I discuss this transformation with Shanker Ramamurthy https://www.linkedin.com/in/shankerramamurthy/ , IBM's Global Managing Partner for Banking & Financial Markets,ahead of the BIAN Summit in Chicago. We explore IBM's collaboration with BIAN, focusing on open standards and the role of gener...

A provocative way of understanding the impact of AI at the system's level, on businesses, and jobs. Listen to this episode which challenges all AI cliches. We discuss the bold ideas from Sangeet's latest book, Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Rewrites the Knowledge Economy.   We explore how AI is fundamentally transforming job roles, organizational structures, and industry control points. Lea...

What is the importance of the latest announcement by 10 major global banks to issue a stablecoin pegged to G7 currencies? What is AI's role in the adoption of digital assets and the future of asset management in a tokenized world? PARIS/LONDON Oct 10 (Reuters) - Ten major banks including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and UBS are jointly exploring issuing a stablecoin, the late...

Are you aware of what’s happening beyond the flashy headlines of alternative investments like cryptocurrencies or tokenized private shares? There’s a solid investment evolution unfolding right under our nose.  Peer-to-peer lending in Europe has been quietly transforming from a risky “Wild West” asset class to one of the most stable, transparent, and accessible opportunities in alternative investin...

🏦 The financial services industry is evolving from Open Banking to AI Agents – but we're missing the critical framework to make it work safely. Former Citi executive Federico Suarez https://www.linkedin.com/in/federico-suarez-rendon-b2269816/ introduces the Universal Data Access Framework (UDAF) – the missing link between Open Banking regulations and the emerging agentic economy. 🎯 What You...