The gap between AI ambition and real business results came under scrutiny at FintechOS Elevate 2026, as banking and insurance leaders discussed what it takes to turn investment in artificial intelligence into meaningful operational improvements.
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.
Bringing AI into everyday operations
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.
Blidarus and Byron Levin, head of presales and forward deployed consulting at FintechOS, demonstrated two AI copilots, Dex and Abi, built on the same agentic framework. Dex helps teams configure financial products, pricing, rules and workflows, while Abi supports employees and customers with day-to-day operations.
AI can help, but who makes the decisions?
In one demo, Abi guided a customer through a conversational loan application. Another used a fictional building society to show how AI could help develop and price mortgage products, assess broker applications and prepare commercial lending cases for review.
But the discussion also touched on how much decision-making should be left to AI.
“The lender, the bank, the financial institution has to own the decision,” said Joshua Weinstein, co-CEO of Gable Group, during a panel discussion on retail mortgage origination.
He warned that lenders still need to understand and explain how decisions are reached, even when AI has done much of the groundwork.
In the insurance sessions, FintechOS also demonstrated how AI could help with motor insurance pricing, claims, policy changes and payment reconciliation, with staff retaining responsibility for approving important decisions.
What does genuine transformation look like?
In the afternoon, Dharmesh Mistry, CEO of Vision 20/20 Consulting, challenged delegates to think about how AI might fundamentally change their businesses, rather than simply improve existing products and processes.
“It’s your own good numbers you have to be worried about,” he said. “Nokia had fantastic numbers. Kodak had fantastic numbers. Right until the quarter when they didn’t have good numbers.”
He reminded delegates that banks and insurers had adapted to the arrival of the internet and mobile technology, but suggested that several technologies advancing at once presented a different challenge.
“When technologies come alone, we adapt. When convergence comes, nobody’s got a framework for it because we didn’t imagine these several things coming together.”
Paroma Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India, discussed how AI was becoming part of product development rather than something considered separately.
“We don’t look at AI as a different arm of the business,” she said, explaining how the company considered technology alongside licensing, local market requirements and customer needs when developing products.
But bringing AI into more parts of a business doesn’t necessarily mean better results. Rania Svoronou, global head of AI design at Citi, warned about the risk of building up ‘AI debt’ through multiple projects that improve individual customer interactions without making much difference to the overall experience.
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