AI, restructuring and pressure from the top are reshaping data teams faster than most leaders can keep up. Over breakfast, join a small group of peers at a facilitated table for an honest, off-the-record conversation about what’s working, for you and for the people you lead. Choose the topic that matters most to you right now and start Day 2 with practical ideas and a few new allies.
Financial Services Executive Speaker TBC
Many institutions have plenty of successful AI pilots but struggle to scale them across the enterprise. Proving ROI once is not enough; the economics, including the cost to serve each customer, must still hold at full scale. This keynote shares a global bank's lessons on funding the scale-up, bringing business, technology and risk groups together early, and running a fast, transparent path from experiment to production.
CFOs are now asking what AI spend actually delivered, and headline ROI is no longer enough. This flagship discussion brings data and technology leaders together to examine the full economics of AI: unit costs, adoption, operating cost, risk, and which investments to scale, fix or stop. The audience votes live on where their own firms are getting value and where they are not.
Survey results from an asset manager forum show many firms spend over $100 million a year on market data, with costs rising 10–25% annually. Despite that spend, firms still run more than 1,000 independent quality checks on the data they buy. This session presents the benchmark and the case for a more collaborative model with data providers.
Six innovators get five minutes each to pitch and demo how their product solves a real data or AI challenge facing financial services. No sales decks, just proof. Then you decide: the audience votes live to crown the FIMA US 2027 Dragon’s Den winner.
Banks and insurers face the same regulatory pressure, but they rarely agree on how to fund it, staff it or reuse the data it produces. The host reads a two-sided choice, the room moves to one side, and each person makes their case to whoever is standing beside them. By the end, the room can see which approaches are becoming standard and where institutions are still divided.
Financial crime teams are weighing where rules-based models still outperform LLMs and where LLMs unlock new efficiency. This case study shows how one institution combined both to reduce alert volumes and speed investigations.
Cyber threats, outages and large migrations all put critical data at risk, and regulators increasingly expect firms to prove they can recover quickly. Panelists share how they modernize their platforms while protecting the continuity of business-critical data and analytics.
Asset managers have spent years using data to manage risk, and they’re now turning the same data and AI toward growing assets, winning investors and reaching the right advisors, often with analytics teams that haven’t grown. The host reads a two-sided choice, the room moves to one side, and each person makes their case to whoever is standing beside them. By the end, the room can see where buy-side peers are betting on data for growth and how lean teams are making AI do more of the work.
Investment firms often run fragmented platforms that were never designed to work together or to serve AI. This case study shows how one investment data architecture team is consolidating onto a modern platform while keeping governance and metadata intact.
As AI models become commodities available to every firm, the lasting advantage may be the data they run on. Yet most asset managers rely on the same licensed feeds as their competitors, often under contracts written before AI. Panelists debate where real advantage still comes from, and how to protect it.
Years of investment in governance and quality have produced trusted data assets that many institutions still treat only as a compliance cost. Leading firms are now packaging that data into internal and client-facing products, partner data sharing and new services. Panelists share how they identify, price and govern data that creates revenue.
As financial institutions accelerate AI adoption and become increasingly dependent on interconnected data, technology, and third-party ecosystems, risks can no longer be managed effectively in isolation. Data protection, privacy, cybersecurity, technology controls, third-party dependencies, AI governance, and regulatory compliance are deeply interconnected, with implications extending beyond compliance obligations to business resilience, financial exposure, and strategic decision-making.
Drawing on more than 20 years of experience spanning software engineering, enterprise data and AI, cybersecurity and technology risk, privacy, third-party risk management, enterprise risk management, investment, and capital management, this session explores an integrated approach to understanding and managing risk across the enterprise. It examines how organizations can establish effective governance, controls, and oversight while balancing regulatory requirements, data protection, privacy, business priorities, financial considerations, and innovation.
Too many institutions discover data risk issues only when auditors or examiners find them. This session shows how first-line teams can continuously monitor their data controls, so issues surface and get fixed early and evidence for audits and exams is ready at any time.
(Choose two – 30 minutes each)
Pick two topics and join a small group of peers for an off-the-record discussion led by a financial services practitioner. Each table focuses on one problem, and you switch tables after 30 minutes so you can cover two priorities in one session.
#1 Save Hours on Every Audit Cycle: How Internal Audit Teams Are Governing and Building With AI
Chloe Cheng, Executive Director, Head of Data & AI, Internal Audit, Mizuho Americas
#2 Get It Funded: Build the Business Case That Wins Budget for Data and AI Programs
Mo Bayan, Director, Business Intelligence & Data Enablement, Sun Life
#3 Source It Right: Enforce Authoritative Data Sources So AI Outputs And Regulatory Reports Can Be Trusted
Juan Santos, SVP, Data Governance & Management Enablement Director, KeyBank
#4 Ship Faster With AI Coding Tools: Separate What Actually Works From What Executives Expect
Kevin Hickey, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Voya Financial
#5 Shine A Light On Shadow AI: See Which Agents Use Which Data And Bring Them Under Control Without Slowing Adoption
Data programs often stall chasing the perfect model, platform or framework while the business waits. This session makes the case for pragmatism: delivering usable, well-governed data in small steps, choosing good-enough standards over perfect ones, and knowing when to stop polishing and ship.
AI governance can feel abstract—until teams have a practical way to decide where oversight matters most. Steve shares a four-quadrant framework for assessing AI use cases by how critical accuracy is and how easily outputs can be verified. Applied to model risk and underlying data, it helps financial institutions focus governance and data-quality investment where errors could have the greatest impact, while still monitoring lower-risk applications.
When agents write requirements, generate test cases and chase stalled work, the jobs of the people around them change too. Panelists show how data teams redesigned roles, handoffs and review points once agents took on real work, and what it meant for speed, quality and control.
Is a data or AI challenge keeping you up at night, and could you use a fresh perspective? Maybe it's proving the ROI of AI to your board, getting governance to keep pace with innovation, fixing data quality at the source, or cutting market data costs. Jot it down and we'll share it with the room, then give you time to debate practical solutions with your peers to take back to your organization.