Beginning with a reflective look at the ways that Covid dramatically impacted the payments industry, prompting digital acceleration and a decline in trust levels, Bierry contextualised the day’s focus across trust, sovereignty, client behaviour and embedded finance.

Much of the day unfolded with each topic ultimately being linked to that client behaviour note, with Bierry emphasising that "when someone is using your app, they are not comparing your app with the app from the competition [...] but they are comparing their experience with your app with Netflix or Amazon." This pressure, he explained, created a rush to innovate with customers being more expectant than the industry was ready for.

This need for change was echoed once Laurent Nizri, CEO and founder, Paris Fintech Forum, joined the stage, and a video montage was played of high-level leaders, including the CEO of Revolut, discussing many of the topics brought up in today’s ecosystem.

The end point being that the road to change historically has been both inevitable, long-winded and littered with repetitive conversations. They both expressed a belief that today’s climate is far faster than it once was, and that organisations must be both considered and quick.

Nizri teased that at the time of the videos, many saw Sopra Finance as a dated legacy player within the industry and one that would not be ready for discussions on AI. Admitting this as truth, Bierry welcomed a new era, and positioned SBS at the forefront of a new era, saying "from the technology standpoint, no one can say anymore that SBS has a legacy position."

Protecting and maintaining security

Discussing how fraud and cybersecurity are seen as two of the biggest areas of impact for AI within financial services, Neetu Wadia, CMO and global head of alliances and partnerships, SBS and Meredith Stowell, VP, ecosystem, IBM outlined the challenges and opportunities for AI and security.

Quoting the IBM Cost of Data Breach Report 2024 and the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2024, they described an industry plagued by increasing cyberthreats and attacks. Taking 258 days to identify and contain breaches and a 71% increase in year-to-year attacks with valid credentials, they explained how, with quantum computing soon to enter the fray, it is vital to enact change quickly.

This discussion on the AI fight against cybersecurity ended with a conversation surrounding the environmental risks of AI, something that continues to be an evolving issue. Here, Stowell said that "AI is creating that new demand on infrastructure - 10x increase in energy consumption, 100 times more compute is used for the large-scale AI models. And I would say data centres are having a bit of a moment right now because they truly are looking for how they can increase their power to be able to sustain and support the AI workloads. They’re even looking at small nuclear power in order to power that, and there’s also the water and cooling that’s needed."

Mentioning IBM’s new z17 platform as being built with sustainability in mind, Stowell proudly showed a statistic that it uses 83% less power than older models. This example paired well with a later description of the progress being made to meet the challenge of sustainable AI.

Personalisation and an invisible banking future

Bringing the first day to a close with two interlinked sessions, Andrew Steadman, CPO, SBS, began by comparing the banking relationship to a marriage; one built on trust, honesty and communication. Steadman said that banks have historically relied on how difficult it has been to change to another bank, but now the process has evolved to meet the demands of a younger generation, meaning banks now must work harder to foster loyalty. This loyalty, he said, must be cultivated through a deep personalisation that sees each customer as an individual and not a part of a segment.

Following this up with what was a futuristic conversation with Hani Hagras, head of AI Research and Professor, University of Essex, the pair introduced a future of banking that would be invisible and automatic. Announcing that Hagras was also their new chief science officer and global head of artificial intelligence, and again diverting from their former legacy image, they explained how the future of AI may sound like science fiction, but the younger generation will demand it as a new normal.

Listing several ways in which AI will affect our future, Hagras described examples such as AI in health, from personalised medication to attack cancerous cells without side effects, to predictive AI that could have aided the Covid pandemic response.

Again, they consider the environmental cost of a future with so much technology embedded into daily life, to which Hagras explained that "it is sad to see that AI data centres, some of them, with the growing use of AI can consume energy as equivalent to entire industries, but it doesn’t have to be like this.

"Research that we started doing, and other universities are starting to do, is working on some simple synthetic biology. At the end of the day, the GPUs or the CPUs are trying to mimic the neurons in our own brain. So what we’re trying to do is grow biological organisms in our lab [...] and grow different neurons which are very powerful and we’re able to begin cultivating the power sector [...] I think we have some promise to build the greenest technology ever built in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way."

Before announcing their platform releases between Q1 and Q4 next year, the pair played an AI Generated video envisioning the future generations will inhabit, saying that it was "a glimpse and not of technology, but of life itself. The day that we imagine in the world our children will grow up and the future customers you’ll soon be serving."