Designed by technology experts for business leaders, Banktech goes beyond banking industry trends brining together the people shaping the next generation of financial services.
Eight years ago, Banktech started as a conversation about digitizing financial services.
In 2026, that conversation is over. Banks have digitized.
What hasn’t been settled is who holds the power that digital banking created — the intelligence, the money flows, and the trust that makes both usable. That is the conversation BankTech now exists to run, at a scale no other event in Southeast Europe attempts.
Over the past 8 years, Banktech has become the room where Southeast Europe’s banking leadership, and the global institutions, come to argue about what happens next — not to be told what already happened.
Building on the momentum of past successful editions, this year’s summit promises to be the most dynamic yet — bolder, and more impactful. Just check out the numbers!
And because banking is inseparable from payments, this year’s conference will once again feature a dedicated second day on
9 October, for the Retail Payments Summit: “New Rails, New Devices, New Frontiers: Retail Payments in the Age of Choice”, powered by Ingenico — spotlighting the latest innovations in retail payment and merchant technologies, bringing together partners technology leaders including Ingenico, Mellon, and key.
— we shape it.
This year’s theme, “INTELLIGENCE. RESILIENCE. TRUST”, sets the stage for an exclusive dialogue among the region’s most influential leaders on growth, trust , and resilience in a time of disruption —to shape what comes next.
For the first time in decades, banks have stopped asking how to digitize. They are asking who will control what digitization built.
From invisible banking and ecosystem finance to AI-driven innovation, regulatory transformation, and purpose-led leadership, the agenda addresses the core dilemmas facing today’s decision makers: how to drive profitable growth, fortify resilience, and sustain customer trust. Designed as a peer-to-peer forum at the highest level, Banktech 2025 delivers not only insight but also influence—the opportunity to shape the strategies, technologies, and vision that will define the future of banking.
Artificial intelligence is moving beyond automation to become a strategic capability across the bank. From retail banking and lending to risk, operations and customer engagement, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to deploy it responsibly, at scale and with measurable business impact.
In an increasingly complex environment, resilience has become a competitive advantage. Banks must modernize technology, strengthen cyber resilience, comply with evolving regulation and maintain operational continuity while responding to economic uncertainty and rising customer expectations.
As banking becomes increasingly digital and AI-driven, trust remains the industry's most valuable asset. Winning customer confidence requires transparency, responsible innovation, secure digital experiences and the ability to deliver personalized services while protecting privacy, ethics and financial integrity.
This year’s theme, “INTELLIGENCE. RESILIENCE. TRUST”, sets the stage for an exclusive dialogue among the region’s most influential leaders on growth, trust , and resilience in a time of disruption —to shape what comes next.
For the first time in decades, banks have stopped asking how to digitize. They are asking who will control what digitization built.
From invisible banking and ecosystem finance to AI-driven innovation, regulatory transformation, and purpose-led leadership, the agenda addresses the core dilemmas facing today’s decision makers: how to drive profitable growth, fortify resilience, and sustain customer trust. Designed as a peer-to-peer forum at the highest level, Banktech 2025 delivers not only insight but also influence—the opportunity to shape the strategies, technologies, and vision that will define the future of banking.
Artificial intelligence is moving beyond automation to become a strategic capability across the bank. From retail banking and lending to risk, operations and customer engagement, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to deploy it responsibly, at scale and with measurable business impact.
In an increasingly complex environment, resilience has become a competitive advantage. Banks must modernize technology, strengthen cyber resilience, comply with evolving regulation and maintain operational continuity while responding to economic uncertainty and rising customer expectations.
As banking becomes increasingly digital and AI-driven, trust remains the industry's most valuable asset. Winning customer confidence requires transparency, responsible innovation, secure digital experiences and the ability to deliver personalized services while protecting privacy, ethics and financial integrity.
The future of banking will not be decided by whoever adopts the most technology.
It will be decided by whoever understands where power is moving—and move with it.
Intelligence is becoming autonomous.
Money is becoming programmable and invisible.
Trust is becoming the only thing left that can’t be copied, licensed or automated overnight.
These are no longer independent forces. And as they converge, banking is being rebuilt from the inside out.
Together, they are creating a new operating model for banking, payments and the broader financial ecosystem.
At BankTech 2026, the entire program is organized around the three questions that convergence forces every institution to answer:
Who controls intelligence?
Who controls money?
Who earns trust?
Last year, we said the future was coming.
Today, it’s already taking shape.
The conversation starts here and Banktech Conference exists to answer them.
The question is no longer what’s next in banking.
It’s who’s ready to lead it.
The future of banking will not be decided by whoever adopts the most technology.
It will be decided by whoever understands where power is moving—and move with it.
Intelligence is becoming autonomous.
Money is becoming programmable and invisible.
Trust is becoming the only thing left that can’t be copied, licensed or automated overnight.
These are no longer independent forces. And as they converge, banking is being rebuilt from the inside out.
Together, they are creating a new operating model for banking, payments and the broader financial ecosystem.
At BankTech 2026, the entire program is organized around the three questions that convergence forces every institution to answer:
Who controls intelligence?
Who controls money?
Who earns trust?
Last year, we said the future was coming.
Today, it’s already taking shape.
The conversation starts here and Banktech Conference exists to answer them.
The question is no longer what’s next in banking.
It’s who’s ready to lead it.
Artificial intelligence has stopped transforming banking from the outside. It is now embedded at the core of how financial institutions decide, operate and engage — and as it evolves from assistant to autonomous decision-maker, the competition shifts from adoption to control: control over intelligence, over data, over the customer relationship, and over the decision itself at the exact moment it’s made.
That’s the real question boards are avoiding. Not whether banks deploy AI — every bank already has. It’s whether banks still own the layer where the decision actually happens, or whether that layer now belongs to a cloud platform, a core banking vendor,
or the AI assistant the customer opened before they ever opened their banking app.
The institutions that lead the next decade won’t be the ones that deploy AI best. They’ll be the ones that own the intelligence layer itself — the layer that now sits underneath every product, every operation, and every customer decision a bank used to think was its own.
For two hundred years, controlling money meant controlling an account: a ledger, a vault, a branch where the customer had to show up.
That definition is now obsolete, and most institutions haven’t updated their strategy to reflect it — money today is a signal that moves between platforms, invisible to the customer and, increasingly, invisible to the bank that used to hold it.
Here is the paradox boards haven’t reconciled: a bank can retain every customer relationship it has and still lose the money. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, embedded wallets and instant-payment schemes don’t compete for the customer’s loyalty — they compete for the microsecond the value actually moves, and whoever owns that microsecond owns the infrastructure of finance, whether or not their logo is on the app.
So the real strategic question isn’t who banks best. It’s who still owns the rail — because rails, unlike relationships, don’t ask permission before they route around you.
Trust is no longer a consequence of success. It is a prerequisite for it.
You can out-build a competitor’s AI. You can out-price a competitor’s payment rail. You cannot out-build trust — you can only earn it, and lose it faster than you built it. As AI makes more decisions, money moves faster, and identity becomes digital and disputable, trust has become the one asset in banking that can’t be automated into existence. It has to be designed for, deliberately, from the boardroom down.
Chief Commercial Officers
Chief Executive Officers
Chief Financial Officers
Chief Growth Officers
Chief Marketing Officers
Chief Product Officers
Chief Revenue Officers
Chief Strategy Officers
Chief Technology Officers
Chief Data Officers
Director – Global Payment Networks
Director – Digital Payments & Cards
Director – Financial Services
Director – FinTech M&A
EVP – International Open Banking
Global Head of FI and FinTechs
Global Head of FinTech Solutions
Global Head of Payment Partnerships
Global Head of Payments Markets &
Partnerships
// Group Presidenst – Global Business-to-
Business Payments
// Managing Directors– Head of
Investment Banking
// Managing Directors – Global Partnerships
// Managing Directors – Global Banking &
Financial Markets
// Senior Vice President (SVP) – FinTech
// SVP – Global FinTech Enabler Lead
// Vice President (VP) – Banks
// VP – International Banking, EMEA
// VP – Sales Cards & Digital Payments
// VP – Partnerships, EMEA
// VP – Financial Institutions
// VP – Multicurrency & Payments Products
// Global Vice President
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