The Banking Scene Director's Cut

For our first session of The Banking Scene LIVE in 2026 we had Jorij Abraham, Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) deliver a truly eye-opening presentation on The Global State of Scams, flavoured with local insights and statistics from Belgium and the Netherlands.

You can find a summary article of the session on our website here and Rik and Andrew discuss some of the more provocative points arising from the session in this episode.

"Rethinking Relevance" in banking is our theme for our first three conferences of 2026 in Luxembourg on January 27, Amsterdam on March 24 and our flagship conference in Brussels on May 28.

We don't do predictions, but we do discuss our views of the forces shaping 2026 in the lead-up to our first event of the year, inspired by the article that Rik wrote here.

AI has crashed into #banking with all the subtlety of a tidal wave over the last year. But if you look under the hood of most institutions, the reality is far less glamorous: fragmented systems, siloed teams and experimental AI use cases that never quite make it into production.We caught up with Deepak Pandey, Vice President of Technology at Backbase, who cut through the noise and laid out what it actually takes to turn AI into a real growth engine, not just another bolt-on to old architectures.

You can read the blog summary of the session on our website here.

NiCKEL has expanded rapidly across France, not with a digital-only strategy as most neobanks, but with a conscious choice to rely on human contact; not through its own branches but through what they called “buralistes” in France: tobacco and newspaper shops.

Earlier this year, they announced a partnership with bpost in Belgium - we caught up with Emmanuel Legras, CEO of Nickel Belgium, to find out how this fits into their expansion strategy and what he considers to be the key secrets to their success.

You can read the summary of the interview on our website here.

UPDATE: We are excited to announce that Emmanuel has confirmed to speak at our flagship event, The Banking Scene Conference 2026 Brussels on May 28 - join us there to hear more insights!

https://thebankingscene.com/events/tbsconfbxl/speakers/

In cybersecurity, conversations today tend to focus on tools and threats, and rightly so. But Sofia Pogrebynska, IT & Cloud Officer at PayPal brought something more subtle to the surface during our discussion: the biggest shift in cybersecurity today has less to do with technology and far more to do with how organisations behave and operate.Sofia will be delivering a keynote at The Banking Scene Conference 2026 Luxembourg on January 27: “Rethinking Governance in a World of Agentic AI” - secure your seat today to debate the topic with her.In the meanwhile, you can find out how PayPal approaches #cybersecurity awareness and training in order to shift their culture to instinctively deal with threats in this episode.If you prefer to read the summary of the session, you can find it in our blog here.

If you were to ask any banking executive today whether innovation is a priority, the answer would be a resounding "yes". Yet, if you were to look into the internal processes of that same organisation, you would likely find an engine designed to do the exact opposite.

This is the "Innovation Paradox" in banking: institutions that know they must evolve to survive yet operate within structures explicitly engineered to prevent that evolution.

I explored this concept with Wasim Mushtaq, the founder of 1CG and a veteran of the financial services industry, after reading his paper that was published in The Journal of Digital Banking (which he has kindly allowed us to make available for our readers to download for free in our summary blog post found here).

With over two decades of experience, ranging from the coalface of business banking at Abbey National (now Santander) and credit operations at Barclays, to leading global transformation at Standard Chartered and serving as the interim COO of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), Wasim offers a rare, holistic perspective. He has seen the industry from the lender’s desk, the operations floor, and the regulator’s office.

Our conversation went beyond the usual platitudes about "digital transformation" and "agile working". Instead, we dug into the structural, cultural, and leadership mechanisms that stifle innovation, change and transformation and, more importantly, how to dismantle them.

Grab a coffee and get settled in for an epic episode!

In the rapidly evolving landscape of financial services, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, as banks embrace this innovative technology, they face unique challenges in governance, ethics, and risk management. We sat down with Seppe Housen, Senior Responsible AI Engineer, and Dimitri De Rocker, AI Director at Datashift, to hear their suggested best practices and insights on the topic.You can find the key insights summarised in our blog post here, which also includes a link to the free "cheat sheet" from Datashift.

In a very relaxed "behind the scenes" session, Rik and Andrew discussed their highlights from The Banking Scene Art Night 2025 and went a bit deeper into some of the points raised by the speakers, sharing their own views and a couple of nuggets not included in the summary article on our website here.

The full presentation by Guido Ronchetti is available on YouTube here.

When Paul Maskall, Strategic Fraud Prevention and Behavioural Lead at UK Finance, asked the audience what the difference between fraud and marketing is during his talk on “The Psychology of Online Fraud” at the recent Open Banking Expo in London, it sounded a bit provocative.

As Rik found out, the similarities are much more than most marketeers would like to admit!

Rik summarised the key insights from the session in this blog post here, which inspired Chris Skinner to publish his own take on the topic here.

Rik caught up with both of them in this two-part session to dig deeper into the topic.

In our deep dive with Francesco Aghemio, Head of Belgium and Netherlands branches at Revolut, he made it very clear that Revolut doesn’t design products to impress the media or regulators. It builds for customers!

From Belgian Bank accounts (not just IBANs) to partnering with Wero, Revolut has tailored its offering specifically to the needs of the local market.

Find out how they are redefining banking, one day at a time and what's in store for the future.

You can find a summary of the key points on our website here.