At Web Summit Lisbon 2025, one theme stood out across the stages: better systems of governance will form the foundation for AI innovation in financial services.
From scaling across borders to embedding AI at the heart of business operations, this year’s discussions showed that financial institutions are moving from experimentation to execution - and that governance will determine who gets it right.
Expanding beyond home markets was a major theme in a session hosted by Lars Gehrmann, Group Chief Digital & AI Officer at QIC Group, to explore how fintechs and insurtechs are scaling across the MENA region.
Speakers emphasised that success in new markets depends not just on capital, but on context - forming trusted local partnerships, understanding regulatory nuances, and embedding into regional ecosystems rather than managing them remotely.
AI is reshaping how businesses scale. Intelligent systems can help map regulatory requirements, automate localisation, and flag compliance gaps before launch - reducing the operational overhead that once limited international expansion.
As financial services globalise, AI governance will be the framework that enables responsible, scalable growth across borders.
In a separate session, Tim Moncrieff, Global Head of Strategic Initiatives at Visa, highlighted how payments have evolved more in the past five years than in the previous fifty.
Moncrieff described Visa’s goal for payments to be “fast, fair, and fuss-free” - and pointed to stablecoins as one of the most promising technologies to achieve this.
Yet regulatory uncertainty remains a key blocker. Governments, Moncrieff argued, should seek to harmonise regulations, while financial services should embrace those regulations and deploy AI systems to manage compliance at scale.
Smart regulation makes meaningful innovation possible.
In another discussion, Maninda Kartik, CIO for Customer and Marketing at Aviva, joined Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio, to explore what it takes for large financial institutions to modernise for the age of real-time, AI-powered services.
Kartik highlighted a challenge familiar across the sector: fragmented data and legacy systems limit the value of AI. Aviva’s work to unify millions of customer records illustrates a broader trend - that firms are investing heavily in the foundations of trustworthy data before scaling automation.
With accurate, connected information, financial institutions can deliver more relevant customer experiences and reduce operational friction - outcomes that depend less on new models, and more on clean, well-governed data.
Zango’s CEO and Co-Founder, Ritesh Singhania, joined the Growth Summit to explore the future of agentic AI in financial services.
In the agentic vision set out, a bank launching a new savings account could involve multiple specialised agents - a product agent designing the offer, a risk agent assessing exposure, and a marketing agent generating compliant campaigns.
But the industry is still some distance from that reality. While adoption levels are high with 75% of UK banks currently using AI, only 4% are ready to take full advantage of automation. Only a fraction of pilots make it to production, and consequently financial institutions have yet to embed AI across every layer of their operations.
This reflects a confidence gap - and it is understandable given the risks. As AI systems collaborate, they become deeply interconnected. A single misaligned AI agent overstating an interest rate could ripple through the institution within seconds.
That’s why organisations need an AI governance layer, where oversight agents continuously monitor, validate, and cross-check the work of other agents (under the supervision of an expert human-in-the-loop) to ensure transparency and trust.
Across the sessions, it was clear that AI is no longer an experiment in financial services - it’s becoming the infrastructure underpinning how institutions operate. But with greater autonomy comes greater exposure to risk.
The next wave of innovation will be defined by how effectively the AI systems that power it are governed. Systems that can explain their reasoning, validate their outputs, and operate within clear guardrails will earn the trust of regulators, customers, and markets alike.
Institutions must combine autonomy with assurance - or risk losing the trust that is so central to a healthy financial system.
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