In the run-up to FinovateFall, which takes place on September 9 through 11 in New York, we asked several speakers for their perspectives on technologies shaping financial services, the biggest challenges facing banks, and why they keep coming back to Finovate.
Below is a preview of what nine speakers had to say ahead of this year’s event.
Michael Reynolds, Business Technology Executive at KeyBank
Michael Reynolds leads intelligent automation at KeyBank, where he oversees robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, low-code development, and generative AI initiatives. Under his leadership, KeyBank’s digital workforce now performs the equivalent of more than 500 employees’ worth of work.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate is one of the few conferences where you can see real, working technology, not concept slides. The live demo format lets banks quickly assess what is production-ready, identify emerging fintech partners, and compare innovation across multiple categories in just a few days. Finovate highlights hundreds of fintech demos and attracts a large audience of banking decision-makers, making it a highly practical venue for both learning and networking.”
What will banks need to prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks will need to prioritize AI-powered productivity and agentic automation. The winners will be institutions that combine AI with strong governance, security, and operational integration, not those simply deploying chatbots.”
Where is AI making the biggest impact today?
“Inside our organization, the most immediate impact is in operations and employee productivity: automating manual processes, accelerating knowledge retrieval, improving service delivery, and helping teams focus more time on higher value work while maintaining appropriate controls and oversight.”
Sam Kilmer, Managing Director at Cornerstone Advisors
Sam Kilmer leads Cornerstone Advisors’ work with fintechs, financial institutions, and private equity firms. A longtime banking executive and host of the Fintech Hustle podcast, he spends much of his time helping organizations navigate innovation and partnerships.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate is fast-paced, so likes hit fast and dislikes are over quickly. It exposes me to a lot of earlier stage companies.”
What should the industry focus on next?
“Banks will need to improve showing outcomes and storytelling authentically to stand out from increasingly AI-generated content and claims.”
Andrew Endicott, CoFounder at Gilgamesh Ventures
Andrew Endicott is Co-Founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, an early-stage fintech venture capital firm investing globally in companies from pre-seed through Series A. Before becoming an investor, he co-founded credit card fintech Petal and recently authored the book Is Finance Technology?
Why Finovate?
“Great mix of financial institutions and fintechs all in one place. Really excited to be part of it.”
What financial services problem still needs solving?
“There are many problems in finance that are unsolved, but I feel that wire transfers are a big one.”
Katherine Avery, Founder at Chimayo Consulting
Katherine Avery is founder of Chimayo Consulting and a veteran enterprise risk executive with more than two decades of experience spanning banking, capital markets, commodities, digital assets, and AI governance. She helps financial institutions build governance frameworks that keep pace with rapidly evolving technology.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate earns its place because it’s practitioner driven rather than vendor theater. The demos are live and unscripted, judged by people who actually implement this technology, which forces a level of rigor
other conferences don’t demand.”
What should banks prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks need to operationalize AI governance now, not after deployment. The institutions that treat model risk management, explainability, and third party AI oversight as foundational, rather than bolted on post-launch, will be the ones still standing
when regulators catch up to the pace of adoption, which they will within this window.”
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
“The change I believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years is the shift from AI as a discrete tool to AI as an embedded decision maker across underwriting, monitoring, and customer interaction. That shift collapses the old boundary between innovation and risk functions. Governance can no longer sit downstream of deployment.”
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
“One trend I expect to accelerate in Q4 2026 is the move toward agentic AI in back office and compliance functions. Institutions are getting more comfortable letting AI take bounded, delegated actions in monitoring and control testing, and that comfort will
keep building through year end.”
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
“The problem fintech still hasn’t solved well enough is third party risk visibility. Banks are stitching together more vendors and platforms than ever, and most risk frameworks still can’t see deep enough into that supply chain to catch concentration or contagion risk before it becomes a real event, not just a checkbox on an assessment.”
Vivek Valecha, SVP of Intelligent Automation at Xebia
Vivek is Senior Vice President of Intelligent Automation at digital engineering company Xebia, where he leads the charge on Agentic AI to help enterprises move beyond automation into autonomous, intelligent decision-making that reimagines customer experience and unlock new levels of employee productivity.
Why Finovate?
“Finovate stands apart because it’s built for demos, not just discussions. It’s one of the few conferences where banks and fintechs see technology in action rather than in slide decks — that hands-on, no-fluff format is exactly where real partnerships and practical ideas take shape.”
What should banks prioritize over the next 18 months?
“Banks should prioritize agentic AI. Banks have spent the last few years automating discrete tasks — the next wave is about deploying AI agents that can reason, make decisions, and orchestrate multi-step processes with minimal human intervention. Institutions that move from “AI-assisted” to “AI-agentic” will have a real competitive edge in speed, cost, and customer experience.”
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
“In five years, autonomous AI agents will handle entire workflows—from underwriting to fraud investigation to customer servicing—with humans stepping in only for exceptions. That shift won’t just improve efficiency; it will fundamentally redefine what “operations” even means inside a bank.”
Jalak Jobanputra, Founder and Managing Partner at Future Perfect Ventures
Why Finovate?
Finovate offers founders an unmatched feedback loop by putting live product demos in front of banks, investors, and potential distribution partners. With only minutes to present, founders quickly discover whether their product solves a real problem.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
One of the biggest fintech trends through late 2026 will be the rise of agent-initiated payments, as AI agents begin making transactions on users’ behalf. This will require merchants, payment processors, and banks to develop secure authorization frameworks. At the same time, stablecoin settlement is moving from pilot programs into real treasury and B2B use, making machine-speed transactions practical.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well?
The industry’s biggest unresolved challenge remains digital identity. Customers still repeatedly verify themselves, share excessive personal data, and rely on fragmented systems that are increasingly vulnerable to AI-powered fraud. Secure, portable, user-controlled identity has existed technically for years, and the growth of AI agents may finally create the commercial incentive needed for widespread adoption.
Courtney Rowan, Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at Citadel Credit Union
Why Finovate?
Finovate is unique because you don’t watch presentations, you watch products. There are no slide decks, no marketing pitches, and nowhere to hide. Every company has seven minutes to demonstrate a real product solving a real problem.
What is one technology or capability that banks should prioritize in the next 18 months?
The biggest opportunity for banks over the next 18 months is embedding AI into everyday work and member experiences. At Citadel, we’re already seeing meaningful impact through employee productivity and operational efficiency, and that’s creating the foundation for even bigger gains in personalization and growth. Longer term, the greatest opportunity is combining those operational gains with personalized member experiences and growth.
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
The biggest change will be the move from AI as a feature to AI as an operating model. Every financial institution will have access to the technology, but the winners will be those that fundamentally redesign how they work. That’s the challenge we’re tackling at Citadel because we believe AI should make banking more personal, more efficient, and more accessible, not less human.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
The biggest trend heading into Q4 is the move from AI pilots to AI at scale. The institutions that can prove measurable business value will pull ahead quickly. At the same time, fintech still hasn’t fully solved proactive financial guidance. We’ve digitized banking, but we haven’t yet personalized financial wellness and advice at scale.
Patricia Montesi, EVP Qolo
Why Finovate?
Finovate rewards the working product over the best narrative. B2B payments infrastructure also gets little stage time elsewhere, and the treasury leaders and platform CTOs who care about it are hard to find in one room.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
In Q4, faster payments stop being a capability and become a product line. The rails are live. The commercial layer is not: pricing, liquidity management, exception handling. Banks that spent two years connecting to instant rails are now being asked what revenue those rails produce.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
This points to what fintech still has not solved: exceptions. We are excellent at the happy path. A payment that is returned, disputed, partially funded, or stuck between two systems is still handled with spreadsheets and email threads. That is where cost hides and where examiners look first. It requires one source of truth across issuing, money movement, and accounts, and most stacks were assembled rather than designed.
Katherine Avery, Founder of Chimayo Consulting
Why Finovate?
Finovate earns its place because it’s built around live demonstrations, not theoretical panels. In a space full of overpromised roadmaps, seeing what a tool actually does gives me a much sharper read on whether a vendor understands the governance burden they’re creating for bank clients.
What is one technology or capability that banks will need to prioritize in the next 18 months to stay competitive?
For the next 18 months, the priority isn’t a new capability, it’s governance infrastructure catching up to adoption. Banks have moved fast deploying AI across operations and risk, but many still lack a proper model inventory, defined testing cadences, and clear escalation paths when a model drifts or fails. That gap is where examiner scrutiny is heading.
Where are you seeing the most practical impact from AI inside your organization?
The most practical impact I’m seeing today is in operational risk and compliance, particularly transaction monitoring and third-party due diligence, where AI is triaging volume that used to require manual review. Unglamorous compared to customer-facing AI, but it’s where governance frameworks are being tested in real time.
What is one change you believe will fundamentally reshape fintech in the next five years?
The change I believe will fundamentally reshape fintech over the next five years is the shift from AI as a standalone product feature to AI as embedded infrastructure across risk, compliance, and operations. Once model decisions are woven into core processes rather than bolted on, governance stops being optional and becomes the determining factor in which institutions can scale these tools safely and which get sidelined by regulatory exposure.
What is one fintech trend you believe will accelerate in the final quarter of 2026?
The trend I expect to accelerate in Q4 2026 is embedded AI governance tooling, fintechs building compliance and model risk controls directly into their platforms rather than treating them as an afterthought their bank partners have to solve. Firms are getting more disciplined about vendor due diligence, and fintechs that can demonstrate governance maturity out of the gate will close deals faster.
What is one problem in financial services that fintech still hasn’t solved well enough yet?
The problem fintech still hasn’t solved well enough is third-party risk transparency at scale. Organizations are expected to maintain oversight of increasingly complex vendor and subcontractor chains, but most fintechs still can’t give their bank partners real-time visibility into where data actually flows or which fourth parties are involved. That gap creates real regulatory exposure on both sides.
See them on stage at FinovateFall
These are just a few of the perspectives you’ll hear at FinovateFall this September. From AI governance and intelligent automation to venture investing and emerging fintech trends, our speakers bring firsthand experience from the institutions building—and funding—the future of financial services.
Browse the full agenda and register today to hear these experts, watch live fintech demos, and connect with leaders from across the banking and fintech ecosystem.