Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou

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 the numbers are hard to ignore (see links below). For the first time, over 50% of US bank executives rank advisory as their top branch priority, ahead of transactions.

Paolo and I go through what’s actually happening on a broader basis. We also get into Paolo’s Contextual and Conscious Banking framework, the MiFID II advisory paradox, why disintermediation from AI has hit family offices and CFOs harder than retail customers, and his new IBM research surveying 500 CFOs and treasurers on tokenization, where 75% of bankers expect efficiency gains but 75% of their clients expect to pay less for it.

Guest Bio: Paolo Sironi, Global Research Leader for Banking and Financial Markets, IBM Institute for Business Value; author of several books including works on MiFID II and Quantum Sapiens; co-author with Brett King and Efi Pylarinou of “Branch Tomorrow.”

Report 1: DBR/DBSI “2026 Future of Branch Banking”
https://blog.dbsi.com/news-events/dbsi-releases-2026-future-of-branch-banking-report-in-partnership-with-digital-banking-report-and-jim-marous

Report 2: Curinos/Adrenaline “How De Novo Expansion is Reshaping Retail Banking”
https://www.curinos.com/insights/curinos-perspective-de-novo-branch-expansion-retail-banking

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 convergence compresses banking’s adaptation window the way the iPhone compressed Nokia and Kodak’s

🔺 Why your bank knows almost nothing about you, and everyday tech, wearables, apps, sensors, are already closing that gap without a bank’s help

🔺 The platform versus pipe decision every bank now has to make, and the real five-year economics behind owning a customer journey versus just selling a mortgage

🔺 Why Lloyds makes his list of winners and Revolut doesn’t

🔺 His theory on why Jamie Dimon stayed publicly skeptical of crypto while JPMorgan spent a decade quietly building tokenization infrastructure

🔺 Why the book is called The Intelligent Ledger, and what happens to the core when the ledger itself moves fully on-chain

📕 → Dharmesh Mistry`s new book, The Intelligent Ledger, is co-written with Louis R. Carlozo, and is on pre-order now from Palgrave Macmillan

Book Pre-Order Link
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Ledger-Computing-Tokenisation-Transforming/dp/3032328411/ref=sr_1_4

Book Website: www.theintelligentledger.com

💎 GUEST BIO: 

Dharmesh Mistry is a banking visionary who has spent 40 years at the forefront of delivering pioneering banking technology. His delivery credentials span branch automation across 2,000+ branches, the world's first online insurance platform (1997), the UK's first multi-device banking solution (1998), Europe's first WAP mobile banking service (1999), and the "single brain" AI architecture concept he developed as Chief Digital Officer at Temenos.

He has held senior roles at Lloyds Bank, Co-operative Bank, and NatWest, and today runs Vision 20/20 Consulting, co-hosts the Demystify podcast with Dave Wallace, and writes the "I'm Just Saying..." column for FinTech Futures. He is an active investor and mentor in fintech and proptech.

The Intelligent Ledger: How Agentic AI, Quantum Computing, Data, and Tokenisation are Transforming Banking, co-authored with Lou Carlozo and published by Palgrave Macmillan, is his urgent call to action for banks.

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 getting something wrong. It's convincing us it knows anything at all.

Paolo has spent 25+ years in financial services, first as a quantitative risk manager, then a fintech founder, and today as Global Research Leader for Banking & Financial Markets at the IBM Institute for Business Value. His 2019 Financial Market Transparency Theory reshaped how the industry talks about the gap between what's easy (Markowitz, runs in Excel) and what's actually true.

We get into why knowledge isn't wisdom, why wisdom isn't consciousness, the "I love you" problem of language and machines, and why anthropomorphizing AI is quietly shaping how regulators think about accountability.

🌐 Paolo Sironi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thepsironi/
Paolo Sironi Books https://www.thepsironi.com/

Paolo Sironi is the author of several books on quantitative methods, technological innovation, and financial markets. In his debut novel, Quantum Sapiens, he explores artificial general intelligence and the hard problem of consciousness. He examines their scientific foundations while confronting the profound ethical questions raised by technology’s growing influence. One of his titles, Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies, has reshaped how seasoned bankers and innovators understand the digital transformation of financial services.

Paolo is the host of The Bankers’ Bookshelf podcast and he currently serves as Global Research Leader for Banking at the IBM Institute for Business Value. A former startup entrepreneur, he previously led quantitative risk management departments in investment banking.

Quantum Sapiens is available globally through this link: https://mybook.to/Quantum-Sapiens

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 highlighted the tech stack and cost that make open-weight models operational. Sarbjeet returned to my show to unpack his LinkedIn comment that started this conversation: "open weights give you possession, not continuity."

We cover:
▪️ The distinction between open weight and open source, and ir is about to matter a lot more
▪️ The backward compatibility problem no vendor has solved

▪️ The business discontinuity risk

▪️ Why Goldman Sachs built its own AI model router 

▪️ Systems of record vs. systems of engagement, and why banks tolerate AI inconsistency in language but not in numbers

Sarbjeet Johal is a technology analyst and go-to-market strategist. This is his return appearance on Fintech Conversations & Insights, following our earlier episode on the DeepSeek moment.

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 wider than most executives think.

We cover:

▪️ Why 2022 was our Netscape moment — and why this shift is fundamentally different from digital transformation
▪️ The two licenses every bank operates on: regulator trust and customer trust
▪️ Why live data streaming pipelines are not enough — what agents actually need
▪️ Auditing outcomes, not paths — how to get comfortable with probabilistic reasoning inside a regulated institution
▪️ Why today's org charts mimic internet-era data storage — and what an "agent-to-human" organization looks like
▪️ Tokenized money, identity, and intelligence converging into a single programmable layer
▪️ AI as universal infrastructure — like roads
▪️ Whether we collaborate or compete on AI — and why that decision defines the next five years

Driss doesn't just make the case for agentic banking. He argues for a rethink of the management layer itself — the committees, the sub-committees, the human chains of decision-making that were built for the internet era and don't fit the era we're now in.

📚 The book: The Agentic Bank: How Intelligent Systems Are Redefining Finance by Driss Temsamani https://www.theagenticbank.ai/

The Fintech Book Club discussion https://www.youtube.com/live/wLyOMV4LZZw?si=rLBisrhV2-jbcFzI

Driss Temsamani is the author of The Agentic Bank and a keynote
speaker on the future of money, and the democratization of finance.
Over thirty years as a digital banking executive, most recently as
Americas Head of Digital at Citi, he has built financial
infrastructure across the US, Canada, and 22 countries across Latin
America, and advised central banks and regulators on the architecture
of the global financial system. His work is animated by a single
argument: that access to finance is a universal right, not a
privilege.

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 US
🔺 Why stablecoins and cards are not competitors - and where the card network actually breaks
🔺 AI agents as autonomous financial actors: x402, Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol
🔺 Why behavior beats economics in payments adoption
🔺 Non-USD stablecoins
🔺 Tokenized deposits vs. stablecoins: where do banks actually land?

Guest Bio:

Nik Milanovic — Founder, TWIF / Stablecon / GP, The Fintech Fund

Nik Milanović is the Founder of This Week in Fintech, a global digest of financial technology news, Stablecon, the leading global stablecoin conference, and The Fintech Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund. He has spent the last decade working in fintech and payments.

He previously led business development and strategy for Google Pay and Google Finance, led strategy at Petal, and led partnerships at Funding Circle.

The Fintech Fund, which he founded in 2022, invests in fintech companies globally at the pre-seed and seed stages, and has closed a second $10 million fund.

He regularly challenges conventional venture capital thinking through his Forbes column and podcast appearances. He is widely regarded as one of the leading voices covering fintech globally, and has helped build the fintech community by sponsoring meetups across four continents — from Mexico City to Lagos, Nigeria.

He is based in New York and is a Stanford University alumnus.

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 businesses. KYA is the emerging standard to govern an individual AI agent. But what happens when several AI agents interact to produce one financial decision, and every single one of them is individually compliant? Amna identifies a gap in several multi-agent workflows which she coins as the swarm accountability gap, and she has built a framework for it - KYS, Know Your Swarm.

We get into why KYC, KYB and KYA all remain necessary but are not sufficient on their own, and what she calls delegation failure: the moment a multi-agent system produces a harmful or discriminatory outcome that cannot be traced back to any single agent. 

The nuances of agentic workflows in finance, are being uncovered. Not all multi-agent workflows created Swarms. However, as we are preparing to delegate agency at scale, we need to understand swarms. This topic touches on biases, financial inclusion, and of course governance and ethics.  

💎 Guest Bio: Amna Usman Chaudhry

is a financial economist and frontier technology strategist defining Autonomous Finance - the structural shift toward AI coordinated financial systems.

She is the author of KYS: Know Your Swarm (SSRN, 2026), a governance framework for multi-agent AI in regulated finance. Her work spans fintech, AI, blockchain, digital assets, financial inclusion and responsible innovation.

Amna is a graduate level lecturer in frontier finance and emerging technologies, and serves on boards and advisory councils across fintech, technology and responsible innovation. She is a UNESCO Women4EthicalAI Expert and has twice been listed on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist.

She has spoken at and contributed to United Nations convenings and multi-stakeholder platforms on algorithmic accountability, digital assets, AI governance, and the future of Autonomous Finance. She also writes Autonomous Finance, a Substack publication on what happens when money starts to think for itself.

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 Laine,
Founder and CEO of Empower, who is building agentic AI infrastructure for
U.S. lenders. Tamara is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist turned
fintech founder, and she comes at the bias and explainability problem from
a perspective most fintech CEOs don't have.

We cover:

▪️ Why agentic lending is the riskiest agentic AI use case in finance
▪️ Two decades of fintech innovation: what alternative credit scoring and
   machine learning actually fixed, and what they didn't
▪️ The gig economy data point that pulled Tamara into this work: 6 out of
   10 gig workers in the US say they have been denied a loan
▪️ SR 11-7 in plain language: the U.S. model risk guidance that examiners
   still use to validate AI in credit decisions
▪️ The EU AI Act, Annex III, and why August 2026 matters
▪️ Why Empower does not use AI for the actual credit decision (and why
   that line is harder to hold than it sounds)
▪️ "AI prepares, humans decide" — soft version of Brian Armstrong's
   one-person team vision, or genuinely different?
▪️ Why 80% of AI agents that reached production were pulled back,
   according to a recent Sinch report
▪️ Five-year outlook: do the LOS providers like Encompass and nCino
   eventually absorb the agentic layer, or do specialist agent companies
   win?

The deeper question underneath all of this: when AI is making decisions
that determine whether a person can buy a home, a car, or grow a business,
where exactly does the human stay in the loop? And who decides where the
line gets drawn?

Guest Bio: 

Tamara Laine https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamaralaine/ is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, fintech founder, and business growth strategist. As the founder and CEO of MPWR, she is transforming how credit and capital are accessed by gig workers, women, and underserved communities through AI and alternative data. A former gig worker herself, Tamara brings lived experience to her mission of building a more inclusive financial system. She has launched and scaled eight-figure tech ventures and is a recognized expert in financial inclusion, ethical tech, and economic innovation. Tamara also co-hosts What the Frac?, a podcast on startup growth.

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.