Held at Kings Place in London on 14 October, the second annual Elevate conference attracted around 300 registrations and featured more than 25 speakers, with discussions spanning product innovation, customer experience, governance and the challenges of modernising financial services.

At last year’s Elevate, speakers warned against ‘AI theatre’ and pursuing projects without clear business objectives. Twelve months on, attention had turned to whether all that investment in AI was actually delivering results.

In her keynote, The AI Reckoning, author and board advisor Leda Glyptis challenged financial institutions to look beyond individual productivity gains and the growing number of AI pilots.

“Focus is a feature, not a bug,” she said, warning that poorly coordinated initiatives could introduce additional costs and operational risks.

Her message was that businesses need to measure improvements to their processes and outcomes, while addressing existing problems with data, skills and decision-making.

“If you want to be successful at your AI implementations, governance is your only friend,” she told the audience.

FintechOS CEO and co-founder Teo Blidarus opened the conference by highlighting how fragmented products, workflows and data were preventing financial institutions from making full use of AI.

“Data fragmentation is typically a consequence of product fragmentation,” he said, explaining the need to connect products, data and workflows so AI can be used across everyday banking and insurance operations.

Blidarus also said FintechOS was introducing a new approach to implementation, after acknowledging that some customers had been “stuck in very complicated upgrades”.

A year after unveiling FintechOS 8 at Elevate 2025, the company introduced its latest release, FintechOS 8 Blue Sky, with new AI capabilities designed to support product development and everyday banking and insurance operations.

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