Drawing on lessons from leading businesses throughout her career, Lisa explores why successful leaders proactively chart their own careers, communicate their ambitions, and embrace opportunities outside their comfort zones. She will share practical approaches to understanding your value, taking calculated risks, building sponsorship networks, and positioning yourself to capitalize on unexpected opportunities, while building a career strategy that evolves with changing market opportunities. Attendees will leave with a framework for becoming the CEO of their own careers.
Over the course of a career spanning multiple global leadership positions, Lisa McGeough has learned that the most defining moments rarely come from the safest choices. In this candid keynote, she shares the pivotal decisions that shaped her path, from pursuing international opportunities and taking on challenging leadership assignments to navigating career progression while balancing competing personal and professional priorities.
Introduction: Mary Ellen Egan, Senior Director, Strategy and Content, American Banker Live Media
As artificial intelligence reshapes how financial services operate, it is also fundamentally redefining the nature of fraud and cybersecurity risk. What was once managed as a perimeter defense or a back-office risk function has become a continuous, enterprise-wide leadership challenge—where threats evolve in real time, at machine speed, across every customer interaction and internal workflow.
This panel brings together senior banking and financial services leaders to explore how the AI era is forcing a redefinition of ownership, accountability, and decision-making in cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Synthetic identities, deepfake-enabled authorization attacks, and fully automated fraud chains are no longer theoretical risks—they are active forces reshaping trust, customer experience, and operational resilience.
The conversation will focus on what leadership looks like in this environment: how executives balance innovation with security, how accountability is structured when AI systems participate in decision-making, and how institutions can shift from reactive defense models to proactive, AI-native risk governance. At its core, this is a discussion about leadership under conditions where trust, speed, and security are now inseparable.
Regulation is becoming a live mechanism for defining market structure, competitive advantage and product feasibility. In the post-GENIUS Act environment and evolution of digital-asset frameworks, regulatory interpretation increasingly shapes how capital moves, how products are designed, and how financial institutions position themselves in emerging digital markets.
The panel explores how financial institutions are shifting from reactive compliance to proactive regulatory collaboration. Panelists will share insights on building constructive working relationships with regulators, navigating cross-border jurisdictional strategy, and how they are working alongside regulators to define new frameworks and policies.
Choosing the right fintech partner is only the first step—the real competitive advantage lies in execution and commercialization. Too many institutions treat fintech integration as a simple IT upgrade rather than a core growth engine. This session shifts the conversation from defensive risk management to offensive value creation. The discussion will explore how forward-thinking banks are strategically capitalizing on their fintech partnerships to unlock new revenue streams, aggressively lower customer acquisition costs, and rapidly capture market share.
Innovation comes from well-executed, strategic dissent. Too many executives shy from voicing concerns because they lack frameworks to challenge assumptions without burning political capital. This roundtable focuses on the art of presenting a contrarian perspective in high-stakes environments. We will explore how to argue effectively without sacrificing professional equity or being mischaracterized, and how to deploy strategic pushback that drives better business outcomes.
When screens go dark, a cyber breach becomes a high-stakes business survival test. Navigating an incident beyond the firewall requires a tactical playbook to manage resulting operational fallout. This session focuses on handling critical communications, rapid regulatory reporting, and protecting customer trust. We will explore how to effectively partner with technical security teams and confidently make high-stakes operational decisions with incomplete information.
Managing a multi-generational workforce is no longer just an HR issue, it’s a commercial imperative. Yet too many leaders see age gaps as a challenge rather than a strength. To lead effectively through rapid industry shifts, executives must learn to tailor development across vastly different career stages. This session explores actionable strategies to help veterans adapt to new workflows while retaining emerging talent who demand different management styles.