Banking Reinvented

by Backbase

Season 2

Building Albania's first digital bank with JetBank's Fatbardha Rino

After more than two decades inside established banks, Fatbardha Rino founded JetBank - Albania's first fully licensed digital bank - to build what she had always believed banking could be. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten sits down with her to unpack what it takes for a bank to go from initial setup to live operations in six months, without branches, legacy debt, or inherited processes. Fatbardha speaks about the decisions that made that possible - from hiring for character and emotional readiness over experience alone, to outsourcing development and IT entirely, to designing the full architecture upfront and confirming what was genuinely needed before buying anything. The episode also covers how JetBank chose its hero products based on specific customer behavior in the Albanian market, and why 50,000 people registered on the waiting list in the first two to three weeks - before the bank had processed a single transaction.

S2 · E6

Jun 25, 2026

33:56

What neobanks get right and incumbents keep missing, with Theodora Lau, Unconventional Ventures

Theodora Lau spent 20 years in telecom and tech before turning her focus to the well-being of consumers at the intersection of technology and money. She is the founder of Unconventional Ventures and author of Banking on Artificial Intelligence, and she has spent the last decade exploring what it means to serve a consumer well. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Theodora joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that the shift in consumer behavior is already happening, and most banks are not in the room when it does. 51% of AI users are already asking financial questions through AI tools, and the institutions not showing up in those results are missing the signals, the data, and the relationship moments that everything else depends on. The conversation covers the structural gap between neobanks and incumbents, why Nubank's 113 million customers are a product of asking different questions rather than building different products, and why the real threat to traditional banks is not a dramatic exodus but silent attrition. Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

S2 · E5

Jun 18, 2026

22:25

How fragmented banking systems became fraud's best weapon, with Feedzai’s Pedro Bizarro

Pedro Bizarro has spent 15 years building the AI systems banks use to make real-time decisions on billions of transactions. As Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Feedzai, he has seen what responsible AI requires. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Pedro joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that safety, fairness, and accuracy in AI are engineering decisions made at the start of the build, not compliance checkboxes added at the end. He walks through FairGBM, Feedzai's open source model that optimizes simultaneously for decision quality and fairness across age and gender, and why the industry was wrong when it told him he had to choose between the two. The conversation covers the asymmetry between banks and fraudsters, why fraud has become one of the top crimes in the world surpassing heroin and cocaine, and why the answer has to involve anonymous cross-institutional data sharing. Pedro also introduces RiskFM, Feedzai's new foundation model purpose-built for financial crime - designed from scratch for millisecond inference at banking scale, not adapted from LLM architecture built for something else entirely. Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub

S2 · E4

Jun 11, 2026

49:15

Why simplicity wins in banking transformation: Dirty data, feature parity, and the wild west of AI with Aequilibrium’s Adrian Moise

The credit union sector is consolidating quickly. In the United States alone, a sector that once counted over 20,000 institutions has shrunk to around 4,000. In Canada, the number has fallen below 300. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, recorded at ENGAGE Americas in Nashville, host Tim Rutten sits down with Adrian Moise, Founder and CEO of digital transformation firm Aequilibrium, to explore what it takes to survive and thrive in this environment. Adrian challenges some of the most deeply held assumptions in the industry. Feature parity, widely treated as a non-negotiable during mergers and platform migrations, is in his view one of the most expensive decisions a credit union can make. He argues that it imports legacy baggage, stifles differentiation, and risks stripping away the very value proposition that made an acquired brand worth buying in the first place. He also argues that even though the topic of AI dominates every conference agenda in financial services, most institutions remain stuck in pilots and limited sandboxes. More often than not, the obstacle is the data. Dirty, fragmented, and unintegrated, it does not get cleaner when you add an AI layer on top. Instead, it gets amplified. Tune in to also learn why in today’s market, the speed at which an organization learns is one of the most consequential advantages, and how the institutions best positioned to lead are running the cycles of iteration - shipping, learning from real users, and improving continuously.

S2 · E3

Jun 4, 2026

23:52

High-touch, high-stakes: rethinking client relations in investment banking with Fatima Mansoor

Season 2 Episode 2 of Banking Reinvented steps into a world where client bases are smaller, relationships run deeper, and every interaction carries more weight - investment banking. Host Amjad Ramahi sits down with Fatima Mansoor, Head of Client Relations at SICO, a leading regional asset manager and investment bank based in Bahrain. With nearly two decades at the firm - from broker to leading client relations - Fatima brings a practitioner's perspective on how client expectations have evolved and what it actually takes to bring AI into a high-touch, trust-driven business. Together, they explore how SICO is using AI to handle the admin and analysis so relationship managers can focus on high-value client engagement, why the hybrid model - digital tools and human advisory working as one - delivers a better experience than either alone, and what it takes to shift mindsets in an industry where people still see AI as a threat rather than an enabler. Tune in to hear how SICO is rethinking client relations, navigating cultural nuances across the Middle East's diverse client base, and putting the client at the center of every technology decision. Check out our content hub Timestamps (00:00) – Welcome to the "Banking Reinvented" podcast (00:46) – Introduction to Fatima Mansoor (02:03) – How client expectations have evolved over two decades (04:34) – Building trust through technology, not despite it (06:25) – The hybrid model: AI and human advisory working as one (08:26) – Understanding what clients actually expect (09:05) – AI in action: portfolio insights, self-service, and 360 client views (10:42) – Why human interaction still matters - and how AI makes it better (13:04) – Removing friction: faster decisions, better client outcomes (15:56) – Personalizing the investment experience at scale (17:23) – Building an agile ecosystem for the next 5-10 years (19:31) – The biggest barrier to AI adoption: mindset, not technology (21:49) – Proving value through real test cases, not roadmaps (25:04) – Why transformation has to be driven from leadership (29:23) – Advice for driving change from within (29:44) – Using AI to strengthen regional culture and identity (32:07) – Personalizing across a diverse, multicultural client base (34:22) – The biggest opportunity ahead: hybrid, personalized, ethical (34:58) – Final words: every decision starts and ends with the client

S2 · E2

May 28, 2026

42:35

The UK's largest fintech transformation with Lloyds Banking Group's Suresh Balaji

Suresh Balaji, Group CMO of Lloyds Banking Group, joins Banking Reinvented to unpack what it really takes to run a fintech transformation at the UK’s largest digital bank. The conversation covers restructuring a 250-year-old bank into agile cross-functional platforms, rolling out enterprise AI to 45,000 employees, and launching new brand platform "Bank on Lloyds." He also walks us through "Project Turing," Lloyds' blind experiment putting human creatives, AI engineers, and a hybrid team against each other to deliver the same campaign brief, judged by a jury that included behavioral economist Rory Sutherland. Plus, you’ll learn about the Three T's framework he uses to navigate transformation and the Royal Society motto that guides how he thinks about AI tools.

S2 · E1

May 21, 2026

47:38

Season 1

Rethinking banking modernization: navigating complexity and unlocking growth, with Eugene Denny, Lila Canaj and Illia Dragan

This episode of Banking Reinvented captures a panel from a recent Backbase event. The conversation brought together three practitioners with very different points of view on what modernization looks like inside a bank today. Eugene Denny, Principal Industry Advisor at Endava, Lila Canaj, Chief Retail Officer at Tirana Bank, and Illia Dragan, CPO at Salt Edge covered the following questions: how do you decide what to modernize first? What does it take for AI to deliver beyond the pilot stage? And what separates banks that are genuinely transforming from those running expensive IT projects nobody outside notices? Tune in to listen to Lila share how Tirana Bank cut consumer lending from two days to 20 minutes, became the second bank in Albania to launch end-to-end digital onboarding, and what the shift to agile squads did to the relationship between business and IT. You’ll also listen to Eugene lay out the five building blocks banks need before AI can really run - and why most banks are reaching for the model before they've built the foundation. Illia makes the case that KYC remains one of the least reformed processes in banking, and that the next frontier of open finance is cross-entity ecosystems most banks haven't started thinking about yet. Curious to find out more about customer-centric banking?Step into the future of finance -> Check out our content hub

S1 · E101

Apr 30, 2026

39:52

From fragmented to unified: making AI work in wealth & private banking with Jules Bordat

Private banks and wealth managers have been paying a fragmentation tax for over a decade. Relationship managers toggle across five systems just to prepare for a single client meeting. Annual reviews feel like initial intakes. Investment proposals go out as 60-page PDFs and die in inboxes. While humans found ways to cope with this and bridge the gaps among fragmented systems, AI can't deliver reliable results under these same circumstances. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Tim Rutten is joined by Jules Bordat, Principal Wealth Expert and Go-to-Market Lead at Backbase, to explore what happens to private banking and wealth management when AI enters an operation that was never designed to support it. Jules argues that the fragmentation problem most boardrooms thought they'd addressed five years ago looks completely different with AI in the picture - and the gap between institutions that act now and those that wait is about to widen fast. The conversation gets into what’s required to close the gap, including: Building a credible 2-3 year North Star while finding wins in 3-4 months when making a transformation Why bringing the client experience and rethinking the lifecycle is the next differentiator in wealth How AI-native signals encourages RMs and advisors to move client information from their notebooks to a unified intelligence layer The real opportunity, Jules argues, isn't cutting admin time, but restoring the human element of the relationship itself. Jules also shares his prediction on the role hyperscalers like Anthropic will play in wealth management - and why it looks less like disruption and more like infrastructure.

S1 · E100

Apr 9, 2026

34:31

Hollowing out the core: the case for an AI-native operating model, with Dharmesh Mistry

In Episode 99 of Banking Reinvented, Tim Rutten sits with Dharmesh Mistry, CEO of Vision 20 20 Consulting, to explore a question that reframes the entire core banking debate: What if the answer isn't replacing the core or wrapping it, but hollowing it out - and letting agentic AI fill the space? Dharmesh has been credited with delivering the UK's first mobile banking app, one of the UK's first online banks, and an early prototype of the single customer view at Lloyds in the late 1980s. Today, through his writing at Fintech Futures and his consulting work, he's building the case for a fundamentally different operating model in banking. The conversation covers a lot of ground: Why piecemeal AI adoption produces local returns and nothing more? Why does architecture have to come before everything else? Why does the shift from extracting value to exchanging value change what banks should be asking AI to do? Why is the window to move first - and move right - narrowing faster than most leadership teams realize? Tune in to hear a sharp, honest conversation about the biggest transformational moment banking has seen in decades - and what it takes to be on the right side of it. Curious to find out more about customer-centric banking? Step into the future of finance -> Check out our content hub

S1 · E99

Apr 2, 2026

43:33

Banks must redesign operations and jobs, not just deploy AI, with Wessel Oosthuizen from Deloitte

Heidi Custers, Strategy and Transformation Director at Backbase, sits down with Wessel Oosthuizen, co-lead of the AWS AI and Data team for Deloitte Africa, to work through why bank AI programs stall - and what it actually takes to fix them. Their starting point is a Deloitte statistic from a recent report that frames the whole conversation: 84% of companies haven't redesigned a single job around AI. Wessel argues that banks are making real technology investments while leaving their people and operating models exactly where they found them. As a result, the tech moves, but the organization doesn't. Heidi pushes on the practical reality for regulated institutions - how to move fast without gutting compliance, why standalone AI pilots rarely stick, and how a front-to-back wedge approach lets business unit leaders reimagine their own processes without waiting for a top-down mandate. They also get into wealth management, regional AI maturity, and the limits of Western-trained models, arguing that the real constraint on AI in banking isn't the technology; it's whether the people, the processes, and the data behind it were built for the world the bank operates in today. Step into the future of banking -> Check out our content hub Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:12 The Deloitte 2026 State of AI report - what 84% tells us 04:49 Employees using AI in secret - the hidden adoption problem 06:24 Why standalone AI pilots fail to move the needle 09:12 Building a fast operating model inside a regulated bank 14:05 The wealth management use case - context graphs in practice 18:31Starting small - capturing advisor knowledge before scaling 20:00 Regional differences - innovation fatigue in Europe vs. Africa's leapfrog moment 25:38 Why AI models trained on Western data get Africa wrong 29:09 The next decade belongs to better operating models, not better channels

S1 · E98

Mar 26, 2026

45:55

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