Following Rik's recent presentation in Luxembourg, Andrew questions Rik about the conversations he is having today about his book, exploring the same idea from the outside in: relevance, trust, and judgment under pressure.

It is the same story as Rik originally told in his book, but seen from a different angle.

You can read the blog referred to in this video on our website here.

In the first of our "Fraud Files" series, we follow up with Jorij Abraham, Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) with questions we ran out of time to cover during our recent webinar where he presented a Benelux focused view of the Global State of Scams.

Jorij will be delivering a keynote at our flagship conference in Brussels on May 28 - secure your seat today to join in the conversations on our Fraud and Compliance stage https://thebankingscene.com/events/tbsconfbxl/

You can also find a summary of the interview on our website here.

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.

NiCKEL has expanded rapidly across France, not with a digital-only strategy as most neobanks, but with a conscious choice to rely on human contact; not through its own branches but through what they called “buralistes” in France: tobacco and newspaper shops.

Earlier this year, they announced a partnership with bpost in Belgium - we caught up with Emmanuel Legras, CEO of Nickel Belgium, to find out how this fits into their expansion strategy and what he considers to be the key secrets to their success.

You can read the summary of the interview on our website here.

UPDATE: We are excited to announce that Emmanuel has confirmed to speak at our flagship event, The Banking Scene Conference 2026 Brussels on May 28 - join us there to hear more insights!

https://thebankingscene.com/events/tbsconfbxl/speakers/

In cybersecurity, conversations today tend to focus on tools and threats, and rightly so. But Sofia Pogrebynska, IT & Cloud Officer at PayPal brought something more subtle to the surface during our discussion: the biggest shift in cybersecurity today has less to do with technology and far more to do with how organisations behave and operate.Sofia will be delivering a keynote at The Banking Scene Conference 2026 Luxembourg on January 27: “Rethinking Governance in a World of Agentic AI” - secure your seat today to debate the topic with her.In the meanwhile, you can find out how PayPal approaches #cybersecurity awareness and training in order to shift their culture to instinctively deal with threats in this episode.If you prefer to read the summary of the session, you can find it in our blog here.

If you were to ask any banking executive today whether innovation is a priority, the answer would be a resounding "yes". Yet, if you were to look into the internal processes of that same organisation, you would likely find an engine designed to do the exact opposite.

This is the "Innovation Paradox" in banking: institutions that know they must evolve to survive yet operate within structures explicitly engineered to prevent that evolution.

I explored this concept with Wasim Mushtaq, the founder of 1CG and a veteran of the financial services industry, after reading his paper that was published in The Journal of Digital Banking (which he has kindly allowed us to make available for our readers to download for free in our summary blog post found here).

With over two decades of experience, ranging from the coalface of business banking at Abbey National (now Santander) and credit operations at Barclays, to leading global transformation at Standard Chartered and serving as the interim COO of the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), Wasim offers a rare, holistic perspective. He has seen the industry from the lender’s desk, the operations floor, and the regulator’s office.

Our conversation went beyond the usual platitudes about "digital transformation" and "agile working". Instead, we dug into the structural, cultural, and leadership mechanisms that stifle innovation, change and transformation and, more importantly, how to dismantle them.

Grab a coffee and get settled in for an epic episode!