Agenda

08.30 - 09.05: Registration and refreshments

09.15 - 09.20: Chairman's Welcome

09.20 - 09.50: Keynote speaker - Responsible AI – Scaling with Confidence

Since generative AI emerged nearly 4 years ago, governance has often been viewed as a brake on innovation. At HSBC, we found the opposite to be true. Done well, responsible AI is the accelerator. Robust governance clarifies priorities, reduces duplication, and enables us to move faster with confidence. As AI systems scale across financial services, accountability can’t be delegated to vendors or models, it must stay with the institution. This keynote explores how HSBC is building the governance, infrastructure, skills, and decision-making framework to operate at scale with confidence.

09.50 - 10.20: Presentation – Sponsored by Transmit Security 

10.20 - 11.00: Panel – AI regulation and compliance: Preparing for the EU AI Act, UK guidance, and the next wave of responsible AI in financial services (Sponsored by Aveni)

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more embedded in financial services, new regulatory frameworks are reshaping what responsible AI looks like in practice. This session will provide a timely exploration of the EU AI Act’s phased implementation, the UK’s evolving regulatory guidance, and what these mean for compliance leaders, technologists, and risk managers. Panellists will discuss how firms are preparing for the 2026 and 2027 compliance deadlines, navigating requirements for high-risk AI systems, and addressing transparency, governance, and ethical concerns. The conversation will also examine the intersection of AI regulation with data privacy, model risk, and operational resilience.

11.00 - 11.30: Coffee break

11.30 - 12.00: Presentation – Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: How To Test Software in the Age of AI Development (Sponsored by Antithesis)

Most advice on AI adoption is common sense. Governance frameworks, new tools, the "right" way of doing things. No matter if you listen to all of the advice or none of it, you're still left with a real problem: AI has over-enabled your business, while quietly hiding the cost in risk, compliance, and security. In short, AI increases your velocity while incinerating confidence. But there's no reason you can't have both. A technology organisation already has the cake: it can move blazingly fast with AI. Antithesis is about eating it too – the technology you need to verify AI output, and how to implement it.

12.00 - 12.40: Panel – Architecting AI-native financial services: Modernising legacy systems for production-ready intelligence (Sponsored by EPAM)

The primary barrier to enterprise-wide AI adoption in financial services is rarely the model itself; it is the underlying infrastructure. Most financial institutions operate on a complex web of legacy core banking systems, siloed databases, and rigid mainframe architectures that were never designed to handle the data velocity and orchestration requirements of modern artificial intelligence.

12.40 - 13.10: Fireside Chat: Rewiring the workforce: Building the AI-ready financial institution (Sponsored by Academy AI)
Rob Barnett, Co-Founder & Chairman, Academy AI

 AI is moving beyond experimentation and automation to reshape how financial services organisations structure teams, define roles and measure performance. As AI agents take on more tasks, firms face a growing need to develop new capabilities, establish standards for responsible use and ensure employees can work effectively alongside intelligent systems. In this fireside chat, Rob Barnett, Co-Founder and Chairman at Academy AI, will explore what practical workforce transformation looks like in financial services. The discussion will examine how firms can tackle emerging AI capability debt, bring training directly to the workplace, manage shadow AI and balance productivity optimisation with employee trust. It will also consider how leadership, skills and organisational design must evolve as AI becomes an increasingly integral part of everyday work.

13.10 - 14.10: Lunch Break

14.10 - 14.50: Panel – AI and the future of payments: Navigating real-time risk, operational scale, and tokenised commerce (Sponsored by Form3)

The global shift toward instant, account-to-account (A2A) payments and 24/7 processing has fundamentally changed how value moves. In an ecosystem where clearing and settlement occur in milliseconds, financial institutions face a new operational reality. AI is no longer a peripheral tool for pattern matching; it is becoming a core component embedded directly within payment rails to manage real-time risk, predict liquidity demands, and automate complex exception workflows before transaction windows close. This session explores how financial leaders are deploying AI to manage the commercial and systemic challenges of high-speed payments. Panellists will discuss the balance between transaction speed and security, the operational governance needed as payment volumes scale, and the strategic implications of machine-to-machine (agentic) commerce. The discussion will also examine how established institutions and FinTech challengers can use intelligent automation to eliminate legacy operational friction while maintaining compliance and consumer trust.

14.50 - 15.10: Presentation – New Frontiers of AI in Finance
Eghbal Rahimikia, Assistant Professor in Financial Technology, Alliance Manchester Business School

The session will explore how AI models can support investment management, including trading and portfolio construction, and examine the transition from general-purpose models to in-house AI systems in finance, with a focus on large language models (LLMs) and time series foundation models (TSFMs) as key applications.

15.10 - 15.30: Presentation – Multiverse & Close Bros

15.30 - 16.00: Keynote – Fighting Fraud: How agentic AI is reinventing banking operations

Fraud is now the UK’s biggest crime and AI is creating opportunities to transform how organisations respond. Tom Martin, who has worked as the Economic Crime Prevention Platform Lead at Lloyds Banking Group, shares how agentic AI is helping reimagine fraud operations from the ground up, combining human expertise with AI agents to deliver faster, smarter and customer-focused outcomes. Drawing on real-world experience, he explores how teams can move from traditional processes to dynamic human-AI collaboration, and what it takes to scale innovation responsibly across a large organisation.

16.00 - 16.20: Chairman's closing remarks, quiz and end of conference

16.20 - 17.00: Networking drinks reception