Organisations ought to cease treating AI as a box-ticking train to reassure their boards and as a substitute begin from ‘the explanation, the moat and the product spine’. That was the important thing takeaway from FintechOS Elevate 2025 this week.

Elevate 2025 was billed as FintechOS’s largest business occasion to this point, with greater than 150 attendees from 50-plus organisations hitting the Pan Pacific London occasion venue for the end-to-end monetary product administration platform’s annual buyer discussion board.

Kicking off the day, Teo Blidarus, CEO and co-founder of FintechOS, sketched out what he sees because the business’s expertise journey up to now: from static legacy programs, to cloud-first programs, and now to what he known as ‘AI-fluent programs’.

“The business has moved from static legacy programs to cloud first programs,” he mentioned. “Now it’s switching to AI-fluent programs.”  The catch, he added is that “we are able to’t obtain that shift with in the present day’s product engines.”

That arrange the occasion’s fundamental announcement: FintechOS 8, described by the corporate because the world’s first Unified AI ProductOps Platform, geared toward serving to banks and insurers handle the complete monetary product lifecycle with extra pace, intelligence and management.

FintechOS 8

The platform  – set to launch in Q1 2026 – marks a transfer to a multi-product lineup, with three fundamental elements:

• a ‘Unified Product Operations Heart’, pitched as a command centre for every enterprise line, aligning product technique and execution and giving people and AI copilots a shared view of merchandise and efficiency
• an ‘Agentic Workforce’, a set of ruled AI brokers to tackle work corresponding to underwriting and claims administration below clear, auditable guidelines
• a ‘Knowledge Core’, designed to decouple information from legacy programs and switch a number of information sources and integrations into reusable, ruled information merchandise

Every of those merchandise is positioned as usable by itself, however the narrative throughout the day was about their worth as a mixed ProductOps spine for banks and insurers trying to embed AI extra deeply into on a regular basis product work.

“To actually unlock progress with AI, establishments want a robust product operations spine,” mentioned Blidarus. “We’re right here to assist monetary establishments modernise their legacy programs and innovate sooner on a basis of sensible infrastructure and reliable AI.”

Panels on AI adoption

Whereas the product launch drew consideration, a lot of Elevate 2025 was dedicated to how AI adoption is definitely enjoying out inside establishments.

Through the ‘AI Unplugged’ session, panellists from LHV Financial institution, Woodhurst, BRD – Groupe Société Générale and Advisority, joined Leda Glyptis to speak in regards to the hole between board-level ambition and day-to-day supply.

AI, they argued, is usually set as the highest strategic precedence alongside current change portfolios, resilience work and regulatory programmes, with out the identical stage of readability on scope or worth.

A recurring theme was the thought of the ‘moat’. Borrowed from non-public fairness, the query posed to attendees was easy: if AI funding is supposed to deepen a financial institution’s moat, how precisely will it present up – in margins, value, pace, danger or buyer stickiness – and the way will anybody know it’s working?

We additionally heard warnings in opposition to AI theatre: pilots that exist primarily for slides, distributors with out pores and skin within the sport, and ‘AI-powered’ labels which might be unimaginable to confirm. The recommendation was to anchor AI work in clearly outlined product and buyer outcomes, not in worry of lacking out.

Leda Glyptis: 20 years of transformation, graded

In her keynote, Glyptis introduced a extra pragmatic tone of the place monetary providers finds itself after 20 years of ‘transformation’. As she put it, decision-makers have “been on the receiving finish of an avalanche of stuff for the very best a part of 20 years” and, as an business, “we have now performed okay… I’d give us a B minus. We now have not failed however we have now not aced this.”

That B minus crops up greater than as soon as in her evaluation. “We’d like transformation and transformation is one thing we’re not good at. We get to B minus,” she mentioned, pointing to analysis that means round 70 per cent of main programmes fail for predictable, typically mundane causes.

For Glyptis, the danger is that AI turns into “one thing we will do” to reply the board’s query about what the organisation is doing on AI – however nonetheless with out a stable basis. “Greater than a imaginative and prescient you want a cause,” she argued. “And 90 per cent of these AI implementations that we’re seeing on the market don’t have the explanation aside from it is a bit scary and so they have to be part of it.”

Her recommendation was to cease making an attempt to be taught every little thing from scratch and as a substitute collapse the training curve by trusting skilled folks contained in the organisation and dealing with companions who have already got the experience. “These are the surgeons already. They don’t must go to highschool. And for every little thing else, carry companions and convey them in in the present day,” she mentioned – with a transparent situation that these companions are held accountable moderately than allowed to create new dependencies.

Glyptis closed on a easy reassurance: “You’ve every little thing you want in your organisation to navigate. It’s a query of discovering the appropriate folks, getting out of their manner and never repeating the errors of the previous.”

Additionally on the agenda

Insurance coverage featured prominently all through the day, with audio system speaking via how AI is being utilized to areas corresponding to claims, fraud and underwriting.

Ian Bubb, an impartial marketing consultant at  Strategem Group, mirrored on how shortly attitudes have shifted. “Even a number of years in the past, insurers had been like, ‘this AI factor is just not going to come back’,” he mentioned. “However now, with the organisation of cloud and restructuring of information, that’s truly how AI is changing into extra actual.”

FintechOS board member Wealthy Longo touched on on a regular basis shopping for behaviour because the benchmark for monetary merchandise. “Once you purchase curtains on Amazon, on the backside it says: you obtain curtains, do you want a pole, do you want hooks? That’s a human shopping for behaviour,” he famous. “A majority of your consumers in the present day for monetary providers purchase that manner – that’s the anticipated expertise.”

A lot of the attention-grabbing use instances had been proven to relaxation on years of groundwork in cloud migration and information restructuring. As soon as information is obtainable in the appropriate form, AI can assist classify paperwork and pictures, floor suspicious patterns and refine pricing – however none of that occurs with out the much less glamorous integration and governance work.

That is the place FintechOS’s Knowledge Core and Agentic Workforce items had been positioned, with demos exhibiting AI brokers engaged on prime of datasets moderately than delivering any sort of magic-wand automation.