Rebuilding for the intelligent economy
What financial institutions must rebuild to compete in an intelligent economy.
Financial Technology 2030
The Asian Banker Future of Finance Summit 2027 26–27 May | Hanoi, Vietnam
About the track
Building the Intelligent Financial Institution
Financial technology has entered a new phase. Artificial intelligence in banking, real-time data, cloud infrastructure, digital identity, programmable money and embedded finance are converging to reshape how financial institutions operate, compete and build trust. Across Asia, banks must decide which legacy core systems to modernise, which data and technology assets to protect, and which automated decisions require new governance. Core banking modernisation, cybersecurity, regulatory expectations and platform competition are now connected choices affecting customer service, risk management, capital allocation and resilience.
The Financial Technology Innovation Conference at The Asian Banker Future of Finance Summit 2026 in Hanoi examines the technology architecture of the intelligent financial institution. The programme will address scalable AI infrastructure, modern core banking systems, real-time data foundations, digital trust, cybersecurity, automated decision governance, programmable finance and platform banking. Building on The Asian Banker Summit 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, it moves from possibility to execution, helping banking technology leaders decide where to invest, how to sequence transformation and how to build trusted, adaptive and competitive institutions.
Programme focus
Key issues to be covered
The most consequential questions facing financial institutions and technology leaders in an intelligent economy.
AI decision governance
How automated decisions should be governed, monitored and explained.
Core, cloud & data architecture
Why core, cloud and data architecture now determine strategic flexibility.
Cyber, fraud & identity
How cyber, fraud and identity risks are changing in real time.
Always-on payments infrastructure
What payments infrastructure needs to support always-on financial services.
Open finance & embedded platforms
How open finance and embedded platforms are reshaping customer ownership.
Programmable money & tokenisation
Where programmable money and tokenisation create real institutional value.
Regulatory accountability
How regulators are redefining accountability for critical technology systems.
Measuring technology value
What technology leaders must measure beyond cost, speed and efficiency.
Audience
Who will attend?
The conference is designed for senior decision-makers shaping the technology future of financial services, including:
Technology & digital leadership
CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, chief digital and innovation officers from financial institutions.
Architecture, cloud & data
Heads of enterprise architecture, cloud, data, cybersecurity, fraud, digital identity and core systems.
Risk & resilience
Risk, compliance and operational resilience leaders responsible for technology governance and model risk.
Digital channels & platforms
Business heads leading digital channels, payments infrastructure, customer experience, open finance and embedded finance.
Fintech & technology providers
Senior executives from fintechs, digital banks, technology providers and professional services firms.
Regulators & policymakers
Regulators, supervisors, policymakers and industry bodies shaping technology governance in financial services.
At a glance
The Agenda
Two days of dialogues, insight briefings and policy debate. Working agenda — topics and speakers subject to change.
08:30 – 09:00
Registration & Morning Networking
09:00 – 11:00
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Opening and International Keynote: Leadership Dialogue
Co-chaired by: Emmanuel Daniel, Chairman, TAB Global and Gordian Gaeta, International Resource Director, TAB Global.
11:00 – 11:30
Tea / Coffee Break
11:30 – 12:15
What has to be rebuilt and what can wait?
Banks now have more transformation priorities than they can realistically execute at the same time. Core systems, data estates, cloud architecture, cyber resilience and AI infrastructure all compete for investment, while years of interim solutions have created complexity of their own. The real decision is not whether to modernise but what genuinely blocks progress and what can continue operating safely for another cycle.
- Which technology dependencies genuinely prevent the institution from moving faster
- Why legacy is better defined by what prevents safe change than simply by the age of a system
- When coexistence is a sensible strategy and when it merely preserves complexity
- How banks can turn modernisation into a continuous capability rather than another finite transformation programme
12:15 – 12:45
When AI stops answering and starts acting
Autonomous agents are beginning to orchestrate workflows, initiate actions and support decision-making across financial services. Their promise lies in speed, productivity and scale but their risks sit in accountability, control and trust. This session examines how much authority banks should allow machines to exercise, which activities remain reversible and where a person must remain responsible for the final outcome.
- How banks are tiering autonomy according to risk, consequence and reversibility
- Which processes are already suitable for machine execution and where institutions have drawn the line
- Whether deployed systems are genuinely intelligent or sophisticated automation with a new engine
- What changes in operations and supervision once machines complete work rather than simply prepare it
12:45 – 13:00
Industry Insight:
What enterprise intelligence demands from the infrastructure underneath it
The challenge of scaling intelligent systems is increasingly shifting from model capability to the infrastructure on which those systems operate. This practitioner briefing examines the architecture required to run increasingly autonomous workloads securely, reliably and economically inside regulated financial institutions.
13:00 – 14:00
Networking Luncheon
14:00 – 14:30
Governance in an AI Bank: When the supervisor asks how the model decided
As automated systems influence credit, fraud, pricing, compliance and customer decisions, institutions increasingly need to demonstrate how those decisions were reached, what data shaped them, who approved the system and how an outcome can be challenged. Governance becomes credible only when the institution can produce evidence rather than point to a policy document.
The discussion will focus on:
- What regulators, auditors and internal control functions increasingly expect institutions to demonstrate
- What explainability needs to mean when a decision is challenged by a customer, auditor or court
- Where responsibility sits across technology, business, model risk, compliance and data
- How deployed systems should continue to be tested and monitored after they enter production
14:30 – 15:00
What should remain at the core of the intelligent bank?
In institutions furthest along in modernisation, the core is becoming narrower: a deterministic system of record surrounded by separate layers for intelligence, orchestration and execution. The debate is increasingly about what the core should still be responsible for, what should move outside it and how institutions can make that transition without destabilising the business.
- What genuinely needs to remain inside the core as banking becomes modular, real time and increasingly intelligent
- Whether progressive decoupling is enough or whether some institutions still face an unavoidable replacement
- Why access to fresh, contextual data is becoming one of the practical tests of core modernisation
- What customers should actually feel when the architecture improves — faster decisions, fewer abandoned journeys and access to services previously difficult to deliver
15:00 – 15:15
Industry Insight
Can banks modernise without another multi-year transformation programme?
Bank technology modernisation has traditionally meant large programmes, long implementation cycles and significant operational risk. New architectural approaches promise more incremental paths. This practitioner briefing examines whether critical systems can now be modernised progressively while the institution continues to operate and innovate.
15:15 – 16:00
The data problem underneath every AI strategy
Every new generation of intelligent applications increases the value of trusted data and exposes the weaknesses underneath it. Financial institutions are being asked to move faster while still dealing with fragmented estates, inconsistent definitions, sovereignty restrictions and uncertain data lineage. This session examines whether institutions can scale intelligence without first solving problems they have struggled with for decades.
- Whether successive generations of data architecture have solved the previous problem or simply added another layer
- Why context and institutional knowledge increasingly matter alongside transactional and analytical data
- How data freshness can determine whether the same model is merely interesting or genuinely operational
- Whether lineage, integrity, consent and access can be evidenced without slowing development
16:00 – 16:30
Tea/Coffee Break
16:30 – 17:00
When anyone can be faked: Can banks still know who to trust?
Synthetic identities, cloned voices, convincing deepfakes and industrialised social engineering are weakening many of the signals financial institutions historically relied upon to establish trust. As the cost of manufacturing a believable identity falls, banks need to rethink how identity, behaviour and transaction context combine to determine whether a customer interaction is genuine.
- How deepfakes and synthetic identities are challenging onboarding, KYC and relationship management
- Why conventional verification controls are struggling against manufactured customer profiles
- How behavioural, device, network and transaction intelligence can create stronger layers of trust
- How banks can strengthen protection without making legitimate customers repeatedly prove who they are
17:00 – 17:30
Who are you authenticating now — the customer, device or agent?
Digital identity was built primarily to establish whether a human customer is who they claim to be. Financial institutions are now entering an environment in which devices, applications and autonomous agents may initiate or mediate activity on a customer's behalf. The identity problem is therefore expanding from verifying people to establishing authority across an increasingly complex chain of digital actors.
- How identity changes when customers delegate actions to software and autonomous agents
- What machine, device and human identities need to reveal about authority and consent
- Whether current authentication, credential and access-management models can support delegated financial activity
- How interoperable digital identity could develop across borders without weakening privacy or institutional control
17:30
End of Day-1
08:30 – 09:00
Registration and Morning Networking
09:00 – 09:30
When everyone can build, who should control what gets deployed?
AI is changing who can create technology inside a bank. Engineering teams are using agents across coding, testing and quality assurance, while business users can increasingly build applications without waiting for traditional development cycles. This creates enormous potential for speed and innovation but also raises a familiar institutional problem at a much larger scale: how to encourage distributed creation without allowing unmanaged technology, data and risk to spread across the organisation.
- What technology teams should centralise and what business units should increasingly be allowed to build themselves
- How AI-assisted development is changing the roles of engineers, architects and technology teams
- What paved roads, guardrails and pre-approved patterns make distributed development safe enough to scale
- How banks avoid recreating the end-user computing problem in an era when almost anyone can build an application
09:30 – 10:00
What happens when your customer's AI chooses the bank?
Financial institutions have spent years improving their digital channels so customers can compare, select and manage financial products themselves. The next shift may remove the customer from parts of that process altogether. Personal agents could increasingly search, compare, negotiate and act on behalf of individuals and businesses, changing what customer ownership and loyalty actually mean.
- What happens when software rather than the customer compares financial products, prices and providers
- Whether banks will need to design products and information for machines as well as people
- How banks establish consent and authority when software acts on a customer's behalf
- What becomes of brand, loyalty and customer relationships when the interface is no longer controlled by the financial institution
10:00 – 10:15
Industry Insight
Detecting fraud at machine speed without adding customer friction
As transactions and digital interactions become instantaneous, institutions have less time to distinguish genuine behaviour from fraud. This practitioner briefing examines how real-time intelligence can strengthen fraud decisions while avoiding additional steps for legitimate customers.
10:15 – 11:00
What breaks inside the bank when money moves 24/7?
Instant payments change much more than the speed of the payment itself. When money moves continuously, systems designed around processing windows, delayed reconciliation and operational downtime face new pressures across resilience, liquidity, fraud and data. This session examines what technology leaders need to redesign when always-on finance becomes normal.
- How real-time payments change requirements for core systems, resilience, fraud controls and liquidity visibility
- Why richer payment data creates both operational opportunity and governance complexity
- How payment infrastructure connects with digital identity, open finance and embedded platforms
- What financial institutions must modernise before payments become programmable, always-on and cross-border by default
11:00 – 11:30
Tea/Coffee Break
11:30 – 12:00
Your APIs were built for developers, not machines
Bank interfaces were designed around predictable integrations: developers read the documentation, connect once and behave within known parameters. Autonomous software changes that pattern. Agents can discover, query and act at machine speed, placing new demands on authentication, authorisation, product data and interface governance. Banks with mature API estates may find that the architecture built for open banking becomes the trusted layer through which machine access can also be controlled.
- Why API architecture requires long-term governance rather than simply deploying an API gateway
- How governed interfaces can become the trusted layer beneath agent and machine access
- How to authenticate and revoke a machine acting under a customer's mandate
- What happens when APIs must support both external distribution and tightly governed institutional access
12:00 – 12:30
When AI leaves the lab: What does production really demand?
A promising prototype can succeed on a clean path with limited users and controlled conditions. Production banking is different. Systems must perform repeatedly across exceptions, failures and unexpected behaviour while remaining secure, traceable and recoverable. This session looks at the requirements that often appear only after an AI experiment has already been declared successful.
- What production readiness means for machine identity, entitlements, logging, fallback and revocable access
- How deployed models should continue to be tested against reference outcomes and changing conditions
- Why promising pilots fail to cross into production and what institutions should address earlier
- Who decides that an intelligent system is reliable enough to operate with reduced human supervision
12:30 – 12:45
Industry Insight
The attack surface nobody approved
AI applications introduce new identities, model endpoints, data paths and third-party dependencies faster than many security teams can inventory them. At the same time, attackers are using the same tools to accelerate reconnaissance, social engineering and exploitation.
12:45 – 14:00
Networking Lunch
14:00 – 14:30
Tokenised deposits meet the general ledger
Tokenised deposits and programmable payment instruments are moving from experimentation towards real institutional deployment. The strategic argument is increasingly understood; the harder work begins when tokenised value must connect back into core accounting, liquidity, screening, reconciliation and customer records.
- What needs to change in core, ledger and reconciliation systems to carry tokenised balances
- How conditional transactions interact with existing screening and control processes
- Which capabilities banks should build internally and which should come from shared infrastructure
- What live deployments are revealing about operational complexity, cost and customer demand
14:30 – 15:00
When should financial institutions prepare for quantum-era risk?
Quantum computing poses a long-term threat to current encryption standards, but preparation cannot wait until the threat is fully mature. Financial institutions hold sensitive data with long life cycles and operate infrastructure that cannot be upgraded overnight. This session examines when and how institutions should begin planning for post-quantum security and crypto-agility.
- Why quantum risk matters today for long-lived sensitive data and critical infrastructure
- What post-quantum cryptography migration requires across systems, vendors and governance
- How to build crypto-agility without wholesale system replacement
- What boards and risk committees should ask technology leaders about quantum readiness
15:00 – 15:30
AI at scale: Where does the money really go?
The first wave of experimentation was relatively easy to fund. Production is exposing a different economics. The model itself may be only one part of the cost once infrastructure, data, orchestration, security, observability and specialist talent are included. At the same time, AI is challenging technology suppliers whose traditional pricing assumed that more delivery required more human effort.
- Where the cost really sits once intelligent systems operate at production scale
- How banks decide which use cases deserve continued investment and which should be retired
- What happens to vendor and systems-integrator pricing when machines perform more of the delivery work
- What technology leaders need to show the CFO before asking for the next round of investment
15:30 – 16:00
Tea/Coffee Break
16:00 – 16:45
Closing Keynote:
The financial institution of 2030: What will still make it matter?
By 2030, many of today's boundaries may have shifted: machines may make more decisions, money may move continuously, customers may increasingly interact through intelligent agents, and capital may flow through new platforms and infrastructures. Yet institutions will still need a reason to exist beyond simply providing access to technology. This closing plenary asks what will ultimately distinguish those that remain trusted, relevant and valuable.
- What capabilities remain genuinely differentiating when technology becomes widely accessible
- Whether trust, judgement and accountability become more valuable as decisions become faster and more automated
- How relationships between banks, platforms, markets and public institutions may evolve
- What leaders should be building now for an institution that may operate very differently by 2030
* Please note that this is a working agenda and topics and speakers are subject to change.
Get involved
Join Financial Technology 2030 in Hanoi
Be part of the conversation shaping the next architecture of money, liquidity and real-time finance. For programme details, speaking or partnership opportunities, contact our team.