Banking Transformation Summit 2026: How banks are turning AI into ROI

Tony Clark: This is the London FinTech podcast, bringing you practical insights and approaches, stories and inspiration from the innovators who are building the new world of financial services. Welcome to the London FinTech podcast. This conversation is one of what has perhaps become a miniseries on the world's major FinTech conferences. After two really popular episodes recorded with Money 2020 and a conversation that we actually recorded in a podcast caravan at Insurtech Insights, I'm really excited today to be switching and talking about the Banking Transformation Summit. In a world that's moving ever faster, conferences are the place to come together and get all the sector updates and introductions in one place. And I don't think they've ever been quite as important as perhaps they are in today's environment. I'm talking to Mark Johnston, head of strategy for the Banking Transformation Summit and this is a place where banks shape what's next. It's one of the most focused sector shows with an emphasis on practical real world solutions, senior speakers and attendees, and a clear focus on leadership in a rapidly changing environment. Welcome Mark. It's great to have you on the show.

Mark Johnston: Thanks so much Tony. Great to be here.

Tony Clark: So, just for the audience, introduce yourself a bit, I think, quite interesting career and it's always great to understand how folks end up in their current roles. So what's been your journey?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, well, thanks so much Tony. Thanks so much for having me. So basically, uh, my name is Mark Johnston. I'm the uh, managing director for Banking Transformation Summit. We're based out of Bristol here. That's where my career started. I went to university down here and like so many in Bristol, got hooked and stayed on. Um, I went into work straight after university for a very, very small conference business. I was sort of the second or third hire in that business and watched that grow. We kind of went all across the world, geo clone the events, that sort of thing and it was very, very successful. Ended up with an acquisition by Informa. Then I went into work for Informa for a couple of years and during that time the marketing director said to me that we, we do this all the time, we buy small businesses like yours all the time for a lot of money. And I just thought, well, uh, if you're going to do that all the time, then I'll be on the other end of it. So then I went left and went away, formulated my own plan for a conference business and sure enough went back down the M4 and sold it to them five years later. And here we are now. So, you know, I'm in that position where, um, I've had a lot of experience. I've worked with Informa and I've worked a number of different events that we've run and here we are now with Banking Transformation Summit, which is now in its sixth year, going from strength to strength. Slightly different to some of these events that we've done previously in the fact that we're working on a slightly different model which is fantastic and actually keeps it very exciting for us. So yeah, that's where I am today.

Tony Clark: I love that. So, always been in the conference business. I've not heard the phrase GEO claiming for a show before, so quite like that and you know, a great entrepreneurial streak from what you've been doing. And in my introduction I talked about a miniseries that I'm doing with the world's fintech shows and it's kind of come about that way by accident more than design, because I've had some great guests on from some of the big conferences and money 2020 of course is Informa. So uh, there's some uh, direct crossovers I think from your career journey and the coverage that we've now got on LFP across some of these uh, big events.

Mark Johnston: Yeah, absolutely. I mean money 2020 is a fantastic show and everyone looks at that in the industry as the beacon of what they've done in former, the latest owners of that event. We've, you know, I've followed it from the very beginning. So they're doing fantastic work over there and I'm um, full of praise for what they do, but very different to what we do, I have to say.

Tony Clark: Yeah. Which is why I've been looking forward to this conversation. And as the recording date, I think we're about three or four weeks before the show. So in a way I'm surprised that you've even got time to talk because you must be total immersion on getting the event ready unless you're better, better at forward planning than I am.

Mark Johnston: No, no, I am absolutely not. And I have a fantastic team around us and yeah, we are absolutely in what would be seen as the eye of the storm. But um, you know, 20 plus years of experience says that we just need to weather these next couple of weeks and everything looks good. I, you know, I have enough experience in the bank to know that I can call upon those reserves off. Well actually, you know, this looks really great and this looks really good as well as when the whole world is falling apart around us. So yeah, we've got enough experience in the bay to do that.

Tony Clark: That's one of those Things that I often talk to guests about is that, um, because we're all on a roller coaster with our businesses that uh, you get to a certain point in career where there's sort of a don't panic confidence and that just comes from years of experience. But given that you're so focused, uh, on the show right now and uh, as we noted, I probably pretty much fully, uh, immersed. When you get the other side of this, what do you like to do? To unwind? I'm always interested in people's off duty and reset hobbies and we've had some interesting ones.

Mark Johnston: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I'm very uninteresting, to be quite honest with you. I'm, I'm um, you know, a self confessed workaholic. I like to work. I, I don't really have a time where I rest, I don't watch tv, I don't do any of those sort of things. My, my spare time is plotting the next move or looking at how we improve the business or that sort of thing, which is really boring. But outside of that then I am um, a gym addict. I'm addicted to going to the gym. I have to go basically every day. I've got two kids as well, 13 and 11. And you know, anyone with kids will know that that basically takes up a huge, huge, huge amount of time. I'm on the sidelines for the rugby, for the hockey, for the. Unfortunately now it's the cricket, which I'm not a big cricket fan of the season, so that's where we find ourselves today. But yeah, and then outside of that, then looking at the next kind of holiday and bit of a break because that's, you know, just spending time with family, that sort of thing. I'm also actually, sorry, Tony as well. I'm also a big golfer, so I'm into golf big time. I'm um, not particularly great. I was better when I was younger. My handicaps going one way, which is unfortunate. So I intend to put that right after this event. And actually one of the shows that we do in the US has a, ah, golf day that I've launched at the start of it. We did that last year, was great success and we're doing it again. So my ambition this year is to go to that event with a lot better handicap than I did last year. So that's what I'll be working on as soon as this event finishes.

Tony Clark: So for the non golfers in the audience, it's one of those games where, where the bigger number is, uh, is not A good thing.

Mark Johnston: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Tony Clark: Yeah. Okay, well look, young, uh, family and Jim and those things we have in common and it's hard to find spare moments in the day. Anyway, we're here to talk about Banking Transformation Summit, so let's get into it. Before we jump right into today's episode, a quick thank you to our sponsor, nextwave. Nextwave is an award winning consultancy that is helping many of the world's leading banks, investment managers and insurers deliver on their growth efficiency, risk and control goals and transform their businesses. With the senior team who have come from MD level positions in major firms like HSBC, Barclays and UBS, NextWave has both the deep industry expertise and the hands on capabilities in AI, data and automation to drive real results, more business outcomes and less PowerPoint. From the consumer consulting experience, as their clients like to say. Nextwave has moved two week manual processes to five minute agentic automations, rescued global banking regulatory control programs and digitized deal platforms, sustainability and regulatory reporting systems. And they do much of this with hands on engineering capabilities on leading technologies which include ServiceNow, Alteryx, Quantexa, uh, and Camunda. So if a modern and specialist alternative to the big brand consulting model sounds appealing, one which covers the full lifecycle of strategy specialists and solutions, but with small practitioner teams, rapid delivery and a uh, better price point, then perhaps you should talk to Nexwave. Visit nxwave.com to find out more and get in touch. That's nxwave.com all right, let's get back to the episode. You noted that you're quite different to some of the other sector conferences and there are lots out there. Data fintech, AI conferences. So what is the Banking Transformation Summit all about and what's your unique mission?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, okay, so there's obviously a lot of conferences in this space and um, sort of most of them are either sort of broad fintech showcases or sort of vendor led AI events where the agenda is essentially sort um, of a sales pitch with um, sort of stage attached but sort of Banking Transformation Summit as I alluded to in my opening was it's built around sort of different question entirely. So what does it actually take inside a bank to deliver sort of change that sticks? Okay, so and our mission is to be the event that senior bankers, leaders, uh, and those sort of people trust to give them the honest and read on transformation. So what's working, what isn't, um, and what their peers are ah, genuinely doing about it. We're, I mean the event is practitioner first, it's not vendor first, um, the main stage is dominated by people running transformation programs inside their banks and in building societies. COOs, CTOs, Chief AI officers, heads of payment, heads of risk. It's not dominated by sponsors with a product to sell. And that's reflected in our audience too. So three in four attendees are, uh, from banks and building societies. Now that's really critical. It's any of those sort of fintech events don't have that level. They may target banks, but they don't have that level of coverage of bank in their audience. So it's not a vendor, it's, it's not a vendor event with a few banks sort of sprinkled in. It's uh, it's a banking event with sort of carefully chosen partners. Um, and then finally the other thing that sort of sets us apart is the breadth of the summit. Okay, so we've got AI conferences. Talk about AI, payments conferences, they talk about payments. Uh, Banking Transformation Summit sits across sort of the full stack of banking transformations, AI infrastructure, payments, customer risk, um, leadership and culture. So because in reality, I think none of those things move sort of independently within a bank. So, you know, you can't have a chief AI officer who can't, they can't deliver without modern infrastructure. Okay. A, uh, payments leader can't move really without risk and compliance moving alongside with them. So we aim with the show, with banking transformation, so to bring those conversations all into sort of the same room.

Tony Clark: So it's really the banking business focus front to back and very much, I think you said, three quarters of the audience being from the institutions with a few partners along the way. Next wave's gonna be there this year, which we're excited about. So I'm, um, delighted that we made the cut and you mentioned their senior audience. So I was looking at some of the stats and I think, uh, you would claim probably 20, 25% of the audience at C Suite, which I think is quite unusual for a conference. Ah, are those numbers about right?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, sure. So, um, the audience is predominantly sort of senior practitioners from incumbent banks, challengers and from building societies. So this year we've cut the attendees a thousand and we've now got a staggering 175 banks and building societies represented in the room. So that's names like Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC, Barclays, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citi, JP Morgan, Deutsche bank, all. Every bank that you could pretty much think of across Europe and as far afield as Africa, the US We've got some Brazilian colleagues coming over, some Asian colleagues coming over so it really is a sort of a mecca for banks and building societies. Um, and I think the other thing, you know, just to look at the kind of what we're doing in positioning with the event was the last couple of years prior, we kind of sort of chased the number and we chased the attendee number, and I think a lot of events do that. Okay. So they all say we want to get another a thousand people or another 500 people. And we, we were guilty of doing that. We moved away from where we kind of founded the idea of the event on. So this year we've kind of taken it back a step and we've gone. Well, do you know what? Actually, Tony, you know full well from the events you go to, there's only so many people you can meet on a day. Right. So you can't meet, physically meet two and a half thousand people or 3,000 people. We had nearly, uh, two and a half thousand people there last year. And we just thought, do you know what, this is silly. Let's make a fantastically good experience for everyone that's coming. But we're going to limit those numbers, so we're just going to allow people to apply to attend and then we can know exactly what type of audience we're getting and we can approve those. So everyone now with a ticket. Congratulations, you got one of very few tickets. Um, um, was there still a few left to go? But, you know, it is that kind of level of scarcity that we're looking to, to make sure that it's a really curated audience that we've got.

Tony Clark: Yeah. So quality, not quantity. And how has the mix changed over the years with the evolution of all things AI, automation, crypto in the market, Are you perhaps seeing more products and tech people than perhaps the audience that you were seeing a few years ago?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, sure. So, um, sort of a few years ago, the typical Banking Transformation Summit delegate would be a transformation director or ahead of change, someone running a program. Often they'd be inside the CTO's office with a remit to deliver sort of a defined piece of change. What we're kind of seeing now is the center of gravity has moved. The fastest growing sort of segments in our audience are, uh, AI and data leaders, chief AI officers, heads of gen, AI, heads of data enablement, those type of people, and then product and, um, proposition leaders who they used to sit maybe one step removed, but now very much involved in those sort of transformation.

Tony Clark: Transformation, truly a transformation audience. And why did that audience come to Banking Transformation? So Summit in particular sort of if you were to sort of try and summarize the reason your audience show up.

Mark Johnston: Okay, cool. So um, I'd say there's kind of sort of three, three main reasons. Um, people consistently tell us they come back. Right. So first of all is the quality of a voice, the quality of practitioner voice. So when you walk into a room at Banking Transformation Summit, the person on the stage is almost always sort of running the function that they're talking about inside a real bank dealing with. So the real constraints. That's different from other events where you get a lot of sort, uh, of analyst commentary or vendor led narratives. Our uh, delegates want to hear from peers and not pundits. So we get that quite a lot. It's sort of real world case studies. The second is the breadth which I touched on before. So most of our audience are senior leaders with cross functional remits. Okay. So they can't afford to spend two days in just AI or just in payments. They need to understand how those areas all connect. And we design um, the agenda specifically so the Chief Transformation Officer can move between the AI frontier, which is one of our themes, intelligent infrastructure and trust in the system themes and come away with a connected view. Right. So rather than four or five siloed conversations, it's all kind of connected throughout the program. And then the third reason is the delegates, um, in the room. And perhaps people don't say, uh, perhaps our delegates themselves don't say that loud enough but it's the real reason, it's the room itself. And I think, you know, for most events actually, you know, all the work that we're doing now, all the work that we do prior to them actually it's all about the people in the room. And I've seen it countless times over the years that actually you know, you might be having a average experience but then have a couple of great conversations and that uh, flips completely. It's the best event ever. And we've all, we all recognize that feeling. So people come to talk to their counterparts at other banks, um, to compare notes on what's actually working to meet. So the right sponsors, the right partners, um, without being sort of pitched at, um, our mantra behind the event is um, big enough to matter, small enough to connect. So that's why we capped it 1,000. We feel that's a number that you can come along to and feel like you can actually meet the people that you want to, you can see them across the room, that sort of thing. Um, a two day event of this kind only sort of works if the people you want to meet are actually there. And that's something that, you know, myself and my team work really, really hard to do.

Tony Clark: Big enough to matter, small enough to connect. I like that. And I like the point about curating the agenda so that you can actually go from one relevant session to another. You sometimes end up at these events and you're, and you're a bit stuck because you're looking at the agenda and say, well, I want to get to that, but I want to be in this one as well. So uh, I think there's, there's something there. So how big is the show? You talked about a thousand attendees, so I got that bit. But uh, how many speakers do you have and what's the setup with stages and those things?

Mark Johnston: Sure. So, um, so we've moved, moved from Excel like I mentioned earlier. So this year it's a tobacco doc on the 19th and 20th of May. Okay. So it's across four stages. So stages are fairly generically named. Headliner Stage, the Vision stage, the Engine Room and the Impact stage. As I mentioned before as well, we've capped it at a thousand attendees and we've got 175 banks so far and building societies representing. I expect that to increase slightly. Um, We've got around 120 speakers across the program.

Tony Clark: Okay.

Mark Johnston: There's around, I uh, think it's around 80 sessions in total. So I know what you're saying before Tony about there's going to be conflict and I'm afraid there is still conflict in your, in your program as well if you come along. But I think we've channeled it in a way where we have these six themes. So the six themes that we run the programs on are uh, the AI frontier, Intelligent Infrastructure, Trust in the system, Money in motion, Power to the people, and human and machine leadership. And they kind of form the pillars of our program. And if you're interested in one of those. So for example, if you are interested in the AI, ah, frontier, you work specifically in AI and in data, then that theme follows through there and you will have very clear journey, um, through the program across the two days.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And I really like that from your six pillars, two of them are overtly human oriented path people. And I uh, think it's a human factor pace that sometimes get lost. Right. So we're focusing on a particular function in the industry ecosystem or it's more of engineering or data focus. And uh, the human element is so important. And I know this is part of the leadership focus that you have for the event and it reflects the senior or to the audience as well. So there's a sort of, uh, a strong, a strong people streak that runs through the whole event.

Mark Johnston: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I mean, actually that, that comes with also having us, uh, having a slightly smaller event that you can connect with audience much easier. And I'm, I'm, I'm. I like being on the show floor. If you come along to Mankind Transformation Summit, you'll see me very visibly. I'll be there and please do come and see. But we take the temperature all the time on the, on the event and it's great to get that feedback from people. And um, you know, I think people are really, you know, want to understand how, I mean, technology is shifting so quickly now. They want to understand how it's going to affect their role, but also how to work with these tools and this new technology for the benefit of their institution. Right. So that's a really key thing as well. And I think leaders that, uh, we come across and we speak to and who will be at the event in May, um, are really keen to understand how do we integrate this, how do we bring this as part of our team. Um, and I've had some. I've been very lucky and fortunate to have some great conversations with a lot of the speakers to understand, you know, the questions and the challenges that they're facing which they'll be bringing to the stage on the 19th and 20th.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And you said 175 banks and building societies, 120 speakers. So you're really looking across the sector when you're pulling this together. So when you're curating the agenda, you're essentially taking the temperature of the industry. So what are the two or three themes that are really popping out for you that delegates are pushing for you to put on stage that everyone wants to hear about? I'm interested is anything that's now in the show that perhaps wasn't even on the radar 18 months ago.

Mark Johnston: Sure. So, um, there's kind of three things I would say probably that have sort of moved since the sort of 2024. Um, the first is agentic AI moving from a buzzword to an operating model. Question. Uh, and I know we'll be doing something on site, um, with, uh, a panel on that as well, Tony. But, um, essentially 18 months ago, Gen AI was conversation and it was mostly about what is this? And where do we use it. Okay. Um, now the conversation has matured into what does it mean when AI is actually making decisions, executing transactions and Acting on behalf of customers. And that's fundamentally sort of a different question. It's no longer a tooling quest conversation, it's, it's an accountability conversation. We've got a session this year called the AI Banker 2027 from tools to Teammates that captures sort of exactly that shift when AI moves from being something you used to see and something you know, being that operates alongside um, you and the team and Santander as well also are actually doing a really great keynote on agentic payments specifically and the idea that AI agents can autonomously initiate and execute transactions on behalf of users. And that simply wasn't a program topic 18 months ago. The second is AI risk. So AI risk and governance becoming a proper sort of headline theme and not just sort of a footnote. So two years ago we'd have a panel on responsible AI tucked away, maybe on day two, a handful of attendees. This year we've got multiple sessions across both days looking at AI risk, the AI act explainability and governance, including things like um, the AI Risk Playbook session and the AI Act Reality Check. The reason it's grown um, is, isn't because of sort of academic interest. It's because the heads of risk and compliance have realized that they're not in on the AI conversation early and they're going to be the people who have to unwind it later. Okay, so and they're or tenders. And then I think the third sort of thing would be the return of the human conversation. So that's kind of what you've alluded to there before. So it's in a much more sophisticated form than it might have been sort of 12 or 18 months ago. So a year ago everyone wanted to talk about automation, cost, takeout, headcount efficiency, that sort of thing. What our delegates are pushing us to put on stage now is the question of where humans must remain in the loop and where digital first is tipped into digital only at the cost of the customer relationship. So we've got a day two keynote from Hampton Bank COO called High Tech High Touch Reclaiming the Human Connection, which I think is going to be a great talk. Um, it's exactly on that kind of conversation. And the most interesting bit is the most digitally native generations are the ones leading that kind of shift back. So younger customers want digital convenience for boring stuff, but um, a human voice for the major decisions in their lives. So that's a counterintuitive finding and it's reshaping how banks are thinking about channel strategy.

Tony Clark: So I got ah, the agentic Bank AI Risk and the Human Connection. And I'll come back to the AI topic in a moment if I can, but just whilst we were talking about putting the event together and the scale of the event, I mean, how do you choose speakers and put the agenda together? You go searching or for people or do you have a long list of people who have already submitted, uh, their thesis to present at the show?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, well, it's a bit of both really. Um, bit of both. We have obviously good ties with the industry, good ties of companies, um, that we want to get to showcase. We spend a lot of time researching the different topics and what certain banks are doing or building societies are doing in the space. I mean, the first phase is sort of theme development. So we spend a lot of time talking to senior banking leaders off the record. What's keeping them up at night, what their challenges are, what they wish, um, was on stage. That isn't where the gaps are between the conversations they're having privately and the conversation happening at other events. Um, and from that we can land on the core themes for the year. Uh, and this year, as I mentioned, we've got those six themes. The AR Frontier, Intelligent Infrastructure, Trust in the System, Money in Motion, Powerful People and Human Machine Leadership. And every session on the agenda has a ladder up sort of to those themes. The second kind of phase of this agenda design is the panel design. So we don't start with who's available, let's push them on a stage. We start with the question we want answered. So for example, can modernization actually deliver momentum or do banks just keep adding to the platform stack? Okay, and so that would be the question and then we would go out and that usually means sort of we need a moderator with deep sort of domain expertise and then two or three bankside practitioners with different vantage points and where, where potentially a relevant sponsor partner we can bring them in to bring to sort of showcase the technology lens on that panel as well. And the third phase is, is balance. So no panel is all incumbents, all challenges, all in one role. A good panel might have a CTO from a Tier 1 bank, a product leader and a challenger, uh, a risk leader and regulator or infrastructure provider. Um, and the other thing that we are very good on actually is m also making sure we have a very diverse agenda. So we're really, really hot on that and making sure, um, we have a very diverse mix of voices across every discussion and every session. Um, and I think actually in terms of gender, um, then we're pushing um, towards the 50% mark on um, on gender balance for the agenda as well, which is kind of unheard of really with these types of events. So very, very proud of that as well.

Tony Clark: Wow. So for anyone in the audience who's in the conference business, we're basically getting a masterclass on putting together a fintech conference here from Mark. So research panels by design, balance, diversity, and there's a real structure to all of this and we're going to see it all come. Well, those of us who are there, we'll see it all come together in three or four weeks time and interesting. Your six pillars, none of them had the title Digital Transformation in them, although pretty much every conference for the last decade has carried that title. And firms are all on a modernization journey, uh, although it's now more overtly around AI as an enabler. But I think most firms, if you were to ask candidly, and perhaps this is a discussion that will be at the transformation Summer next month, would say that they're still midway on that journey, on that modernization journey. There's lots remaining to be done and, and they're often, quote, different obstacles and headwinds, whether that's macroeconomics or other things. But what do you think the BTS audience would say are the obstacles to modernization in the current environment?

Mark Johnston: I think honestly the real blocker isn't really tech debt or regulation. I think it's a gap between digital investment and human adoption. I think that's probably where it sits. So tech debt is real, its regulation is real. Board conviction matters. But what our audience sort of tells us again and again is that the platforms that have been built, budgets that have been spent, the tools that are live, and yet the adoption just isn't flowing. And why is that? So we've got a sponsored keynote from Prosky this year called Digital Investment is Live. Why isn't adoption keeping up? So that captures this kind of idea perfectly. So the thesis is that banks are uh, managing transformation for implementation, but not for adoption. They sort of treat go live as a finish line, will actually go live is kind of the start. Right. So the less obvious, I guess version of the blocker is the middle layer of the bank. So boards have conviction. The front line often welcomes new tools. It's the layer in between, sort of the middle management, ops, leaders, risks, owners, the people whose KPIs were sat against the old ways of working and where transformation quietly sort of stalls. And they're not opposed to, they're just kind of running a different operating rhythm to the. One of the. One of the new platforms. So Sue Hayes from Nottingham Building Society has a fantastic keener at ah, our event as well. Um, it's entitled, I mean can I swear on the podcast it's entitled Permission to Fuck up, which is essentially about, um, modernizing 176-year-old institution. The cultural permission you have to grant people to try to fail and to learn and what actually takes to get to the middle of the organization on site.

Tony Clark: Really interesting and I love that. So just sort of expanding on the practical insights. And you've called out a few of the speakers as we've been chatting over the last few minutes. Um, and the sessions sound, you know, genuinely on point and I think, um, there's going to be a lot of peer practitioner, uh, insights coming from all the conversations just coming back to AI. So noting that we'd sort of moved away from digital transformation and maybe the unlock for many institutions is this boring old thing called change management and the people. But looking forward to the AI agenda and the AI era that we are practically all now in. The sector has matured so fast, right? With the models doubling in power, as I understand it, every four months or so and the adoption cycle being a lot longer with the institutions. But even with the latency, uh, and take up from big banks and institutions, um, for all the reasons we've just been talking about, the agenda has nonetheless moved a lot. So two years ago everyone was saying, what is generative AI? And now it's how do I build my agentic bank? And can you show me some real ROI on these AI rollouts? I may have done 200 proofs of concept, but I've now gone to production with a number of things and I want to see the uh, roi. Do you have a view on where the real value is now being, uh, realized for the banks that are coming to your event? Maybe it's more than just chatbot. Where are they? Starting to see the real bang for the buck now.

Mark Johnston: Yeah, sure. Well, so, um, I'll preempt this with I'm not an expert and I won't be getting up on stage to declare, um, otherwise. Right. So, you know, my role in this is to bring people together. But for what it's worth, my, my read on this is that AI is delivering measurable value in sort of three places and it's still sort of mostly theater, uh, in two others. So where it's real, the first is internal productivity. So coding assistance, document, uh, summarization, knowledge retrieval, contact center support. So those sort of, sort of, um, unglamorous, um, Activities, but it's where, where ROI is most clearly demonstrated. The second I would say is sort of compliance, I would think it's compliance in financial crime. So patent detection alert, triage, kyc, document processing, um, these are areas where AI has been delivering value for longer than people realize. And I think gen AI is now improving the explainability and reducing the false positive rate. It's not headline grabbing but it's, it's saving banks like real money. And then the third is starting to be customer service. So, but only in a narrow, well bounded cases. So for the likes of Virgin Money or on our uh, AI act. AI Act, Gosh, that's not easy to say on our AI ACT panel talking about sort of conversational AI and Barclays or on the CX panel talking about conversational banking, both are doing serious work here. But the lesson sort of from both of those is that the moment you give AI too broad a remit, the trust breaks. The bounded transactional use cases, they work. And the AI as a general purpose customer agent is still mostly sort of aspirational. I think where it's still sort of theater is the first one would be enterprise wide AI strategy decks. So um, a lot of banks have a slide that says sort of AI will transform every function. Um, and I think in practice sort of, very few banks have sort of moved past pilot proliferation into genuine enterprise scaling. And the second I would say is um, agentic AI for high stakes decisions. So there's lots of talk about sort of autonomous agents making lending decisions, executing trades, managing customer relationships. And the reality is that I think most of that is still firmly in the proof of concept phase. Right. And the constraints are governance and explainability and not really the technology itself. And I think we've got Dan Skebank's chief AI officer who's doing a keynote on this. So he's hitting the AI frontier from experiments to scalable advantage. Uh, and the framing is exactly right. Experimentation is cheap. Scaled advantage is very hard.

Tony Clark: Yeah. And I think we have to acknowledge AI for banking is in the context of a highly regulated industry. And I see the advantage uh, really being multi agent workflows on defined Rails. So automation technologies, rules based workflows. But with agentic and gen AI acceleration in those workflows, um, I don't think we're at the fully synthetic worker end of it yet because of the points you were making about governance and safety and ethics and having the right human interventions in the loop. You can't just deploy a digital worker department to go and handle Your vulnerable customers. I don't think anyone's going to stick their neck out on that just yet. That may well be ahead of us with the rapid pace of advancement in the whole field. But for where we are at the moment, I think it's. It's a more practical opportunity.

Mark Johnston: Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to be exploring that together, aren't we? Tony on stage as well. So we've invited you guys down to come and um, to run a panel on the 20th. So any of the orders wants to join us and come along in the afternoon, they can drop us a note. But that panel should be a nice discussion about the agentic bank and agentic AI in banking. So I'm looking forward to that as well.

Tony Clark: Yeah, come and join the discussion. We're just going back and forth on what to call it at the moment, but, uh, very much looking forward to it. And Mark, if you were to characterize how urgent do you think the AI agenda is this year versus last year? Because it, uh. Some of the conferences I went to, there were 30 theater sessions and 25 of them had AI in the title. And this was the last year observation this year. I noted, well, certainly at the Banking Transformation Summit, that's not quite true actually. And I wonder whether there's still as much going on, more going on in the investment sphere than there was last year, but maybe there's a bit more balance. I don't know. What's your thought?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, well, I think, I think, uh, maybe. Maybe we're going past that stage now. I mean, back in the last year as well, with conversations we were having, I had a very, uh, a conversation with a very, very senior guy from a bank. And he said, you know, what do all these companies do? Because everyone has AI and everyone has AI in the title. So. And I think actually we, you know, everyone knows that, you know, everyone will have a level of AI involved in what they do now. So. And it will be developing. So I don't think there's any kind of rush to name that so much. But I think in answer to your question, sort of more urgent, um, but not. But for a different reason than people would think, I think. So in 2025, the urgency was about keeping up. So banks didn't want to be the ones without an AI sort of strategy or an AI center of Excellence and AI Chief AI Officer. Right. So it was competitive positioning, urgency, driven partly, I think, by board pressure, partly by what their peers were announcing, and um, partly by the noise in the press. I think, um, but in 2026 the urgency has shifted to sort of delivery. The boards have been told the story, the budgets have been allocated, teams have been built, and what our delegates now um, have is a 12 to 18 month window to actually demonstrate enterprise scale value. So not pilots, not proofs of context, but um, operational AI that is moving the profit and loss. So the banks can show that by the end of 2026 are going to be in a different difficult conversation with their boards in early 2027. So you can only sustain, we're investing for the long term as a board narrative for so long.

Tony Clark: So priorities increasingly framed as business strategy and business objectives. We always talk about growth, efficiency, risk and control. And if you start with those objectives for the business and the business strategy, AI is the enabler. And yes, you need to know what the new models and workflows are capable of because that drives people the strategy. So I see the two as very highly intertwined. But perhaps we're seeing that now more in terms of the conference agendas. They're being framed more in business language and business outcomes than perhaps the uh, building blocks, which is the technical aspects.

Mark Johnston: Yeah, I think the other thing that's changed perhaps is the regulatory urgency as well. So the EU AI act, biting dora, is biting the window to get AI governance, AI risk frameworks and explainability infrastructure in place is closing sort of fast. And that's a much harder retrofit than getting the AI itself working. So a bank that has 50 AI use cases live, but no governance layer underneath them is going to spend most of 2027 unwinding that and not scaling it. And that's why so much of our agenda this year is about AI at scale, AI in production, AI, uh, undercut governance because that's where the real difficulty is and that's where our audience is genuinely sort of focused, I think.

Tony Clark: Yeah, let's talk about incumbent firms, new entrants and innovation for a minute. And this has been true for many years. There's a tension between cost efficiency and modernizing the established institutions and the need to be customer, experience, focus and to drive innovation in a landscape where there are lots of new entrants. So go back a decade, it was all about the NEO banks. More recently it's also embedded finance platforms, it's big tech, it's AI native fintechs. So how do you think your audience and perhaps the established bank, the incumbent members of the audience, are really thinking about the threats and opportunities over the next few years and maintaining their position in the market?

Mark Johnston: Okay, so three Years ago, the great, the sort of threat conversation was about challenger banks, sort of the monzos, the starlings, the revoluts. That conversation is largely sort of settled and challenges have proven that they can sort of scale the customer base, but most will still struggle with profitability and product, um, breadth. Uh, and the incumbents have sort of learned what to copy and what to ignore and, and that's more of a stable competitive picture than it was sort of five years ago. The threats incumbents are now actually worried about are, uh, different and they're sort of harder to compete with directly. So the first is embedded finance and the loss of customer relationships. So when financial services get embedded inside sort of Sage's accounting platform or Shopify's Commerce Commerce platform or whatever sort of SaaS platform SME is already living in, the bank becomes a utility provider in someone else's experience. So we've got a panel called Embedded Finance and Invisible Services. Who owns the customer now? Um, and that's got hsbc, Lloyds, Castle Trust and Sage on it specifically because this is kind of a question that's keeping product leaders awake at night. I think the second is stablecoins and Tokenized Value. So I think this is moving from sort of theoretical to operational faster than most, certainly most of the incumbents I think expected. And we've got a deep dive on tokenization with State street, that sort of thing. And then the third, and this is one that um, I perhaps think is probably most interesting, is AI native fintech. So these aren't sort of NEO banks with an AI layer. They're firms that have been built from day one. Assuming AI does the work that banks currently use sort of thousands of people to do, and when their cost is to serve is a fraction of the incumbents, then the competitive question isn't can we match their ux? It's uh, can we match their unit economics? And that's a much harder problem. So where the opportunity is, and this is a bit, I kind of, I think we look at is incumbents still have things that are genuinely hard to replicate. Really, really hard to replicate. Trust, regulatory expertise, balance sheet customer relationships across sort of decades of customer relationships. And then the winners over the next three years will be the incumbents who use those advantages to partner aggressively rather than try to build things or build everything for themselves.

Tony Clark: Really like that. So it's ecosystem partnerships, recognizing the core scale and strength and really federating that innovation and doing it with some smart partnerships in the market. And talking about the new entrants you talked about. Uh, AI native fintechs and many new entrants into the space. Where are you seeing the most startup and innovation focus for the show this year? Uh, it might be in fincrime space or cyber or something else. But, uh, I'm curious where you're seeing all the activity.

Mark Johnston: Sure. So, uh, looking at, uh, where the sponsor energy and the speaker submissions are concentrating, it's pretty good lead indicator. Uh, and I'd say it's probably across sort of four areas. So the first is sort of agentic AI infrastructure. So this is where real noise is. So companies like Scan, AI, Cognition, Salesforce, Area flowable, hopefully I've said all those names.

Tony Clark: Right.

Mark Johnston: They're all on stage this year talking about how to operationalize agentic workflows inside the banks. Okay. The pitch has moved from we have a model to we have the infrastructure that makes the model deployable in a regulated environment. And that's a really meaningful shift. Uh, the second is voice and conversational AI, so particularly in customer service and call centers. So 11 labs are on day one talking about 22 million AI banking calls have taught them about trust. So the entire category barely existed at this kind of scale 18 months ago. Um, and the third is AI governance and risk tooling. So as banks scale AI that needs controls infrastructure to match. So we've got uh, Alenia Credera, um, Adesso. Uh, there's a whole sort of emerging category of tools built specifically to give risk and compliance teams visibility into AI systems. And this is going to be one of the fastest growing, um, sort of categories I think over the next uh, 24 months that we see. And then finally the fourth is the core modernization and um, the platform. So companies like Temenos, Pommetry, Element Out, Systems companies maybe we're a bit more familiar with because the AI conversation has finally sort of forced banks to confront their core systems debt. So you can't run a Gentic AI on a 1990s frame mainframe. So the modernization conversation is having sort of second wind, um, driven by AI rather than by sort of cost takeout. Um, and what I'd say sort of is notably quieter than I'd expected is like crypto digital assets in their pure form. So tokenization, yes, but not sort of crypto as product. The conversation there is kind of matured into infrastructure rather than sort of retail, I think. So that's been a bit quieter, but, but maybe that's our event and, and not what others experience. I don't know.

Tony Clark: Wow, you covered a lot there. It feels like You've memorized uh, um, half of the, uh, the panel and the speaker list.

Mark Johnston: Um, we're at a position now where I'm literally living the agenda. It's just uh, you know, very pleased to put this agenda down. So yeah, we're living it.

Tony Clark: So yeah, uh, living proof and uh, a great sort of uh, prequel to the event itself for those who actually end uh, up getting this far in the episode. But we're going to run out of time fairly shortly. So you know, a fun question perhaps. What's the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you've heard from a speaker or delegate in the last year?

Mark Johnston: Well, I think sort of, I've been operating on the assumption, which I think is sort of the industry's default assumption, that resistance to digital transformation comes from older customers and that the younger demographics are pulling banks forward and their data showed the opposite. So the customers most actively asking for sort of face to face conversations on major financial decisions, mortgages, life events, business banking decisions, that sort of thing, they were the under 35s and not the over 65s. I thought that was really interesting. Um, the reason when she explained it to me in one of our speaker calls was it made complete sense. So older customers have been around long enough to have built financial confidence of their own, right? So they use digital because it's faster and they don't need their hand to be held. But younger customers, particularly first time mortgage applicants or people setting up their first business, um, are dealing with decisions they'd never ever faced before. Uh, and they want a human voice at the end that they can trust. So digital is fine for the boring stuff, the high takes, the high stakes stuff. They want a relationship. And so, and I think that's like one of the interesting things in terms of event wise then I think this idea of numbers and I think this idea of chasing the number. So you know, we want more people, we want more people to speak to, more people to meet. And I think that's quite an interesting discussion because actually when we've been where we've been a bit brave and we've flipped the event and gone said we're not going to try and get 10,000 people to the event now, uh, we're going to focus on the right people in the room and that's where we want to be actually it's worked a hell of a lot better for us and it's been received fantastically well.

Tony Clark: Yeah, it's really interesting, particularly that sort of back to front demographics, um, maybe explains why there's a bunch of aging podcasters, myself included, who are ah, um, leading on some of these innovation conversations because it's not all for the youngsters. Okay, so sort of closing comment. Um, for someone who's listening and they've got this far in the conversation, they're wondering whether to attend Banking Transformation Summit. You know, what would you say, what's the one conversation, session or connection that you would expect them to have at BTS that they're just not going to get from anywhere else on the conference circuit?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, so if I had to pick one, you know, if I'd have to look at sort of a session then I'd look at certain session. Some of the, some of the more interesting sessions that we've got are uh, things like the after hours session that we've got at the end of the day. Kimberly waldron of startup PR's very recognizable name and she's chairing that session. We've got uh, Susannah Shisty and uh, Jas Shah joining her on that one. That will be kind of a nice, nice um, way to unwind, to unravel the day's events, that sort of thing. So, so I think that's a great session to join. We'll be serving drinks, that sort of thing at that time as well, so that'd be a nice one. More broadly, I think, um, the real answer to your question is that um, the value for anyone attending Banking Transformation Summit isn't a single session. Okay. It's the density of the bright people in the room for the two days. And this is where sort of uh, our big enough to matter, small enough to connect philosophy really, it kind of shows up. So if you're a Chief AI officer or if you, so you're going to be in a room with the most, um, with most of your peers across UK and European banking if you're ahead of payments, same thing. Um, so if you're into change, uh, and want to know how your bank will be changed and how your role will be changed and how you move forward. If you've got a challenge in your role, um, and you work for a bank or for a building society, we do still have some tickets you can apply to attendance. It's a complimentary ticket for banks and we try and make sure that we can advance the industry that way, making sure the right people are in the room.

Tony Clark: So a uh, density of relevant peer groups. So in case you didn't catch that, and there are complimentary tickets for folks from institutions so definitely worth applying for. You won't be unique in. I'm sure After Hours is lovely, I'm looking forward to it. But uh, you won't be unique in serving a few drinks. I was at one of the insurance conferences a couple of months back and the espresso martinis started at 3 o' clock in the afternoon. But that's insurance for you.

Mark Johnston: Uh, yeah, absolutely. Well, there were plenty of soft drinks as well because I'm. I remember at the top of this I said I was boring. Well, I don't actually drink so, you know, so there'll be plenty of soft drinks as well.

Tony Clark: Okay. And what's next for money? Next I'm sure is, is the, the Parent CO and Banking Transformation Summit events. I mean I guess I could have asked at the top of the conversation, but do you do this just once a year or uh, are there more shows and events coming?

Mark Johnston: Yeah, sure. So, um, well, I think we'll have a couple of days off. We'll allow ourselves that. And yeah, we're working. So we're currently working on the US version of the event. So that's in its third year. Um, a brilliant event based out of Charlotte in North Carolina which is fantastic. Ah, fantastic place to visit. I'll be working on the golf element of that and my golf. And then for in 2020, um, seven. Then we've got a couple more events which we haven't announced yet but uh, a couple more events to add to the portfolio as well alongside taking the learnings from what we do in next month at Banking Transformation Summit in London and growing it again. We've, we've already been speaking to the venue about taking it again the following year. So we'll be back um, the following May. And yeah, so we've got lots planned and the other thing is just working with the community and the stakeholders that we've got. So really building on that and answering some of these huge challenges that uh, that everyone is facing and coming together on.

Tony Clark: So look out for the US show. There may or may not be some golf involved. M Sounds great. If folks want to find out more and sign up for some of those complimentary passes to get the last few spots. Where do they go? Mark?

Mark Johnston: Just uh, go to the website, um, or you can message me on LinkedIn but go to the website www.bankingtransformationsummit.com and

Tony Clark: just a personal reflection as we close out, you've been in this business for quite some time and I'd love to know, is there something that you've learned along the way? You said 20 plus years in the conference business that you wish you'd really known at the start and that you'd like to share perhaps with those at early career stage in the audience.

Mark Johnston: Oh my goodness. What this is, this could be a whole other podcast. I think my underlying thing around these events is, is it's the people that make them right. So, and we all know that really. So when you come to an event like ours or come to an event like this, you know, don't be, and you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm terrible for this at uh, the different events in my life as well. But don't be embedded in your, uh, emails and working on what's going on in your phone. Take a look, take a look up, um, have the confidence to look up and, and, and, and look around you and people will come towards you and speak to you and we, we set the environment, we set the environment up in that way to ensure that happens and it, it that then that's when the most fantastic things happen. You start talking, you start networking, um, and you start speaking to people. And I've watched the, even, even the most timid of people, um, manage to, you know, have a, have a conversation over a role and it transforms the way you, you approach these sort of events and everything like that. And we're there on hand as well to help, help where needed as well. So my advice would be, you know, uh, eventually saying it to our kids, put that device away and um, you know, actually just, you know, enjoy what's going on around you, get some perspective on your role, that sort of thing.

Tony Clark: That's really great advice. Get involved, get engaged. It's sometimes hard to walk into, into a crowded room if you go on your own. And particularly as people will say, oh, you get this conference, I'll go to this conference. And you can spend your time in a corner talking to your colleagues, but it's getting out there talking to new people. And I found this through doing the podcast and the networking that we do at various events. Sometimes you have to give yourself a little push, particularly if you're a little bit more introverted, perhaps some folks are, but, uh, it always pays back, always pays back. And these, and these events are incredibly open because people are there to network and sometimes, you know, the person you pick on hasn't got anyone to talk to at that point in time either. So, uh, they welcome the conversation. So, uh, I love the advice.

Mark Johnston: There's a, yeah, absolutely, completely. That's exactly how it Is yeah.

Tony Clark: Anything on your reading or listening list currently, Mark, if you have any time for any of that.

Mark Johnston: Do you know what? My, my whole life at the moment is just spread around AI for my business as well. You know, where, where, where banks and, and we speak about all these challenges every day with, with the banks and the building societies, that sort of thing. Then you know, actually on event side, how do we, how are we navigating change as well? Because there's a huge amount of changes going on in everyone's roles and everyone is understanding how that works as well. I'm not a great reader, I'm not a great listener. In fact the only time I really do is when I'm on a flight somewhere and the WI fi has gone down and then it's my last option. But you know, I'm really keen to kind of, you know, where I spend my time, uh, with these things is trying to understand the new technology, what it means for my business, how it can deliver, uh, events. So you know, we've talked about conference production in this discussion and that's a scenario that's being changed massively. There's research roles that were done over hours and hours and hours of research and pouring through consultants, paperwork and stuff like that is completely flipped on its head with some of these tools. Um, but I think fundamentally actually bringing that back into what we've just talked about is the one thing that I know is that AI can't replicate those discussions that you have with people and those one to one connections you have with people. And that's why I think actually events are so, so valuable because you can go online with all these tools and everything like that and you can integrate all these working practices in. But actually what comes down to it is real, real meaningful relationships and that's what in person events can give bring you.

Tony Clark: So we started the conversation talking about the people and we brought it back to the people. I love that we've timed out Mark, and uh, there's a super set of insights this conversation. I feel like I could go and launch my own conference business but I've also found out um, all the top things that are happening in the banking sector and I'm looking forward to really unpacking on all of that at the event itself in around a month's time. Really looking forward, I can't wait. So thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for taking time and sharing your insights Mark.

Mark Johnston: Thank you so much Tony. I really appreciate it and really looking forward to seeing you at the event.