A candid look at what happens when top financial leaders step away from their C-suite and executive management roles to pursue other equally challenging business turns—from joining or launching start-ups to championing social causes to reshaping industries from the outside. This dynamic panel brings together executives who have successfully pivoted from traditional finance to new business ventures (of all sorts) where their finance capabilities are serving them well while allowing them to play to their desire to take on the next, new thing. They’ll share personal stories about what drove their decisions, the skills that carried over, what it took to make the leap, and the lessons they learned in taking on new chapters in their careers.

Digital finance affords financial institutions and their customers an enhanced experience, the ability to interact and conduct financial transactions across channels, and the real-time delivery of hyper-personalized new products. Yet the increasingly sophisticated exploitation of security vulnerabilities and gaps to commit fraud using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is set to unleash a tidal wave of fraud. The panel discusses the urgency for banks and financial institutions to develop a multi-layered security strategy to detect and prevent the rapidly accelerating rise of GenAI-powered fraud across channels—much of it occurring through extremely capable, global criminal and nation-state-run enterprises.

The financial services industry is on the cusp of its most transformative decade since the commercialization of the internet. Venture capital is fueling the rise of AI-native fintechs, digital identity platforms, and tokenized financial ecosystems that promise to upend traditional models. Instant payments, programmable money, and agentic AI are reshaping everything from lending and fraud prevention to wealth management and cross-border payments. But with this tidal wave of innovation comes unprecedented challenges: how do financial institutions strike the right balance between speed and security, compliance and creativity, disruption and trust?

This super panel discussion brings together venture capitalists, fintech executives, bank executives and management consultants to explore the future of venture-backed fintech innovation, its impact on all stakeholders in digital finance, and the biggest opportunities and challenges ahead. Panelists will examine where capital is flowing in 2026, which technologies will define the next wave, how banks and fintechs can collaborate without compromising resilience, and what governance and risk frameworks must evolve to keep pace.

Financial institutions that are looking to generate business outcomes with artificial intelligence (AI) must identify use cases that drive adoption by creating a strategic framework that aligns business value, data readiness and risk management. The goal is to achieve production-grade deployment that delivers a return on investment. The challenges that institutions face: data ecosystems are often fragmented and unprepared for AI scale, and risks—bias, privacy, security and regulatory compliance—can derail adoption if not addressed early. Among the points to be discussed by panelists:

The worlds of traditional payments and stablecoins, the latter of which combine the price stability of fiat currencies with the speed, availability and programmability of blockchain, are poised for convergence within financial services. If things take off as market observers expect, it could mark the start of the radical remaking of the industry, and traditional financial (TradFi) companies stand to benefit from and be greatly challenged by the rise of stablecoins. With the recent passages of the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, the financial industry is preparing for both, working to take a leading position in stablecoin cross-border payments, real-time settlement of business-to-business payments, integration with payment service providers, fintechs and card networks, merchant adoption in e-commerce, and the introduction of bank-issued stablecoins.