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, is the real battleground for the next decade of banking.

Backbase is 22 years old, serves 120+ financial institutions across 50 countries, and was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026, with its Nexus semantic layer singled out as a competitive advantage.

I am a Strategic advisor to Backbase. This conversation is an independent, candid discussion of the technology and its implications.

We get into:

🔺 Why "fragmentation kills intelligence" and what a unified frontline really means
🔺 Agents joining the bank workforce, and the org-chart problem
🔺The shift from account-centric to customer-centric truth: ontology, customer state graph, and the decision/evidence trail
🔺 The four layers: Connectivity, Nexus (the truth layer), the agentic layer, and Sentinel (the authority/police function)
🔺 Why Backbase is not a system of record or a data lake, and how that differs from a Palantir-style approach
🔺 LLM choice, semantic routing, and FinOps cost arbitrage across premium, open-source, and small in-house models
🔺 What beta deployments revealed, and why Sentinel turned out to be the most strategic piece
🔺 How a bank should start small, and Jouk's controversial claim: a bank can run by 500 people serving 5 million customers

💎 Guest Bio: 

Jouk Pleiter https://www.linkedin.com/in/joukpleiter/ is founder & CEO of Backbase https://www.backbase.com/, the AI-powered banking platform he helped build from a small startup in 2003 into a profitable, global fintech leader. Under his founder-led stewardship Backbase scaled organically to the hundreds of millions in annual revenue, grew to a two-thousand person team, and built a client roster of 150+ banks and financial institutions serving tens of millions of end users worldwide. 

Known for a pragmatic, long-term oriented leadership style, he stresses close customer partnership and relentless product innovation. Jouk partners closely with bank c-suite members to turn strategy into measurable customer and business outcomes.

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 Trinity for a Tokenized World, the wrapped tokens question, the "missing money" problem and its echoes of 2008, stablecoins versus tokenized deposits, and what MENA, Asia, LATAM, and Africa actually teach us about convergence.video is about Scarlett Sieber and Dhanum Nursigadoo

About the BOOK to be launched at Money2020 Amsterdam https://buff.ly/EHjQpzu  

This straight-talking book from the global team at Money20/20 is your essential guide to the convergence of traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi). It shows how digital assets, programmable money, and new regulatory frameworks are reshaping global financial infrastructure.

Inside, you will explore how regulation is unlocking scale across regions, how stablecoins and CBDCs power real time cross border settlement, how tokenization brings real world assets on chain, how digital identity and zero knowledge protect users, and how AI and real time rails transform the operating model of modern finance. The result is an integrated financial system built for speed, transparency, and resilience.

Whether you are a banking executive making real decisions about blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenization, a fintech founder building on both traditional and emerging rails, a regulator shaping the guardrails of the digital economy, or an investor scanning for the next structural shift, The New Intersection of Money

 gives you the insights, strategic guidance, and operating frameworks to lead with confidence.

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 trained on roughly 40 billion banking events from 25 million users — and what it signals for the rest of the industry. 

We talk about why Transaction Foundation Models break the silos that have defined financial services for decades, why off-the-shelf models won't cut it for Tier 1 banks, and why Mastercard, Stripe, Adyen, Plaid, and Nubank are all building down the same path.

We also discuss:
✅ The impressive presence of financial services at NVIDIA GTC 2026 
✅ The "AI Factory" framework
✅ Why specialized models and Transaction Foundation Models are complementary
✅ How event-sequence data (not just transactions) is the real moat behind PRAGMA
✅ Whether a "Financial World Model" — a digital twin of an entire payments ecosystem — is fantasy or roadmap

Guest Bio:
Georgios Kolovos is a payments executive, who has worked across the payments value chain, with issuers, digital currency wallets, and merchants. Currently Georgios leads the payments and fintech practice of NVIDIA in EMEA, working with payments companies to accelerate their Machine Learning and AI innovations. Primary focusing on Transaction Foundation Models and Agentic Commerce.

#NVIDIA #Revolut #PRAGMA #AINativeBank #AgenticBanking #TransactionFoundationModels #Fintech #AIFactory #FoundationModels #PaymentsAI #DigitalFinance #ConversationsAndInsights #EfiPylarinou

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 comment that stopped me came from Chris Biele — NFThinker https://x.com/theNFThinker — who builds cryptographic primitives for exactly this problem at Open Matter Network.

So I brought him on. In this conversation we go well beyond the McKinsey incident — into what this means for JPMorgan's 200,000-user LLM Suite, why Mastercard and Visa's tokenization approach solves identity but not mandate, how zero-knowledge circuits act as mathematical circuit breakers for rogue agents, and why "harvest now, decrypt later" may be the most underreported threat in finance today.

This is the conversation the industry needs to be having before the first major incident inside a bank.

What we cover:
→ Why McKinsey/Lilli was an architecture failure, not a hack
→ The JPMorgan thought experiment — blast radius in a real bank
→ What problem  Mastercard & Visa's Agent Pay solves
→ Zero-knowledge proofs as agent circuit breakers
→ AML and KYC without sharing raw data
→ X402: the payment protocol that cuts out Visa and Mastercard entirely
→ Post-quantum cryptography and "harvest now, decrypt later"

💁🏻‍♂️ Guest: Chris Biele (NFThinker) — Core contributor BanklessDAO, co-founder Bankless Card, builder at Open Matter Network-  Chris on X: https://x.com/theNFThinker

📄 Whitepaper referenced: Codewall.AI — How We Hacked McKinsey's AI Platform 👉 https://codewall.ai/blog/how-we-hacked-mckinseys-ai-platform

💎 Chris Biele   / chrisbiele  is the GTM Lead at OpenMatter Network https://openmatter.network/, a privacy layer for the agentic economy, enabling agents to query datasets that remain locked inside an organization's own data silos.

Their Masked Computing environment uses post-quantum safe MPC (mu

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 development across the globe.

Tokenized Money Snapshot
Why Tokenized Money Now
Meet Keith Bear
Building a Common Taxonomy
Regulation Needs a Shared Language
Key Jurisdictions Compared
Top Use Case Cross Border Payments
Trade Finance and On Chain Settlement
Public vs Permissioned Chains
Interoperability Networks and Consortia
Dollar Stablecoins and Sovereignty
Takeaways and What’s Next

📃 Read the full publication ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eXGuMMpu

🔺 Keith Bear 
Fellow at CCAF at Cambridge University . 
Chair of the Digital Asset Research Programme
👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-bear-2b7407/

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-defined constraints. 

We cover data integrity challenges such as wash trading and unreliable exchanges, and how multiple institutional-grade data feeds, averaging, and outlier detection can improve pricing. 

We also examine operational realities like 24/7 trading, real-time rebalancing, changes in circulating supply, forks, and delistings, and why many crypto indexes struggle to beat Bitcoin on a risk-adjusted basis. 

We close on more dynamic approaches that blend rules-based indexing with analyst and AI-agent insights, including long/short index-pair strategies. 

Jessica https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaellerm/ is the CEO and Co-Founder of Themelia, a custom indexing platform for cryptocurrencies. She previously co-founded and sold an Australian superannuation fund, and has worked across high-growth fintech startups in the payments and funds management sector for the past 17 years.

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 most neobanks ignored, the landmark legal battle bunq won against the Dutch Central Bank over AI-driven AML compliance, and what that win meant for all of Europe. We talked about bunq's US expansion strategy, the vision of making European credit history portable, and how Ali thinks about AI.

And then he said something that surprised me. His take on stablecoins and blockchain is genuinely contrarian — and I don't agree with it. I'll let you decide where you stand.

Thank you to the House of Collaboration and J3D.ai for hosting at Davos WEF 2026.

Ali Nikman https://www.linkedin.com/in/ali-niknam-50253913/

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 lag due to legacy systems and integration challenges.

 
Badra describes an AI-driven, gamified cashback card she launched at the Commercial Bank of Dubai that personalized merchant rewards based on spending history and secured a Visa brand collaboration.

 
The discussion then shifts to current AI adoption in lending, including automating loan origination (particularly mortgages and personal loans), speeding timelines from 30–45 days to under two weeks, enabling real-time portfolio monitoring, and using agentic workflows to improve underwriting, engagement, and delinquency management through proactive, flexible repayment support.

Badra also shares how storytelling complements product leadership and lists tools she uses in her work—ChatGPT for brainstorming, Perplexity (including deep research) for research, Lovable for prototyping, and Notion for rapid website creation—highlighting how these tools help bridge communication between business and engineering.

Shuchi Batra https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuchibatra/ is a fintech product leader with 10+ years of experience building and scaling credit, lending, and payments products across global markets. She has owned multi-billion-dollar portfolios, led high-impact growth initiatives, and is deeply passionate about designing financial products that are both profitable and humane. Outside of fintech, she is a bestselling author and poet, blending data with storytelling to create products people truly connect with.

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 services

• A European bank's decade-long journey from fragmented systems to AI-ready infrastructure
• The difference between conversational AI and agentic AI — and where each belongs
• How to implement AI responsibly without waiting for standards

• Why "thinking small" is the path to real value

The takeaway: You can have the best model in the world. Without the right data platform, you can't win the championship.

Tim Brophy https://www.linkedin.com/in/tbrophy/

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 white paper that regulators actually asked for: "Programmable Compliance for Digital Money and Assets." We dig into the core ideas:

→ Why the "consent" model in financial services is a fallacy
→ How data collection meant to reduce risk creates new risk (the honeypot problem)
→ The 4-layer compliance taxonomy: Prevent, Detect, Trace, Protect
→ Why no single RegTech vendor covers all four — and what that means for builders
→ The critical distinction between AML and cybersecurity (and why conflating them is dangerous)
→ How AI changes the compliance paradigm without replacing compliance officers
→ What Beth is advocating for in the GENIUS Act and global policy discussions

If you're in fintech, compliance, RegTech, or digital assets — or just trying to understand where financial infrastructure is heading — this one's for you.

References:

• Programmable Compliance for Digital Money and Assets- https://www.stablecoinstandard.com/wh...
  
  
• Trust Without Intermediaries: A Programmable Risk Management Framework for the Future - 30 Oct 2025 by Jessi Brooks, Ribbit Capital and Katherine Kirkpatrick StarkWare https://buff.ly/FT9zDZ0
  
  

BIO -Beth Haddock   / bethhaddock  is a strategic advisor, General Counsel, and board member with a track record of helping fintech and digital asset companies execute on growth, innovation, and regulatory complexity. She currently leads legal and compliance at AdvisorEngine, a Franklin Templeton-backed platform, and advises top DeFi projects and Web3 ventures including Grayscale, Balancer, and Orca.

Beth serves on the board of GMO-Z Trust Company, a NYDFS-regulated stablecoin issuer, and helps shape global policy through The Stablecoin Standard - https://www.stablecoinstandard.com/. With 25+ years of experience across firms like Guggenheim, Brown Brothers Harriman, and AXA, she brings hands-on legal and strategic support to companies scaling new products, entering new markets, or managing regulatory inflection points.

A frequent speaker, CoinDesk contributor, and