For our first session of The Banking Scene LIVE in 2026 we had Jorij Abraham, Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) deliver a truly eye-opening presentation on The Global State of Scams, flavoured with local insights and statistics from Belgium and the Netherlands.

You can find a summary article of the session on our website here and Rik and Andrew discuss some of the more provocative points arising from the session in this episode.

"Rethinking Relevance" in banking is our theme for our first three conferences of 2026 in Luxembourg on January 27, Amsterdam on March 24 and our flagship conference in Brussels on May 28.

We don't do predictions, but we do discuss our views of the forces shaping 2026 in the lead-up to our first event of the year, inspired by the article that Rik wrote here.

AI has crashed into #banking with all the subtlety of a tidal wave over the last year. But if you look under the hood of most institutions, the reality is far less glamorous: fragmented systems, siloed teams and experimental AI use cases that never quite make it into production.We caught up with Deepak Pandey, Vice President of Technology at Backbase, who cut through the noise and laid out what it actually takes to turn AI into a real growth engine, not just another bolt-on to old architectures.

You can read the blog summary of the session on our website here.