Agenda
Full agenda to be announced...
08.30 - 09.25: Registration and refreshments
09.25 - 09.30: Chairman’s welcome
Jonathan Easton, Editor, FStech
09.30 – 10.00: Keynote: Regulatory Support for AI Innovators
Ed Towers, Head of Advanced Analytics & Data Science Units, Financial Conduct Authority
Ed Towers, Head of Advanced Analytics and Data Science at the FCA, will spotlight how the UK is set to lead global AI innovation in financial services. The session will showcase the FCA’s pioneering approach, combining principles based regulation with hands-on support through initiatives like the Supercharged Sandbox and AI Live Testing. Attendees will hear how these programmes will help firms move from AI concepts to safe, real-world deployment, tackling challenges like fairness, bias, and explainability. Ed will talk about the need for industry-wide collaboration to build trust and accelerate responsible AI adoption, positioning the UK at the forefront of AI-powered financial services.
10.00 - 10.30: From policy to proof: Operating regulatory reporting in the resilience era
Suraj Rajeev, Senior Enterprise Strategist and Head of ResilientOps, UST
Regulatory expectations for operational resilience have shifted decisively. Accuracy at submission is now assumed; what regulators increasingly require is continuous, verifiable evidence, live traceability, and the ability to demonstrate impact without post-event reconstruction. Yet many firms continue to operate regulatory reporting models designed for a periodic, document-driven regulatory era.
This session explores the growing gap between policy commitments and provable operational reality. It examines why traditional reporting approaches—spreadsheets, static inventories, and manual evidence gathering—become fragile under resilience-focused regulation such as DORA and the UK operational resilience regime. The presentation reframes regulatory reporting as an operating model and data architecture challenge rather than a documentation or tooling problem.
Using practical examples, the presentation shows how a structured, relationship-based approach to regulatory information enables incident reporting, impact assessment, dependency mapping, and regulatory submissions to be generated directly from governed data.
10.30 - 11.00: Panel: Culture governance that works: Preventing nonfinancial misconduct in financial services sponsored by Smarsh
Panellists:
Annabel Gillard, Co-founder, LSE FORGOOD Initiative
Fergus Hamilton Collard, Policy Manager, Building Societies Association
Shaun Hurst, Principal Regulatory Advisor, Smarsh
Tin Lau, Chief Risk & Compliance Officer, Mirae Asset Securities
Leading banks are now treating culture as a control they can measure and manage. This panel looks at how to prevent toxic behaviour without heavy handed monitoring. We will cover clear behavioural standards, leadership accountability, psychological safety, and hiring and certification practices that fit regulated roles.
Expert speakers will show how simple language rules, sensible risk scoring, and human review can spot early signs of harassment or discrimination in higher risk channels, while privacy by design protects staff and whistleblowers. Insights from monitoring will be linked to conduct reporting, complaints handling, and regulator expectations on fitness and propriety, with evidence that supports fair investigations and remediation.
Attendees will leave with practical ways to scale culture governance: joined up communications oversight that works with HR and legal systems, supplier and third-party checks, and board level dashboards that stand up to scrutiny without discouraging speak up.
11.00 - 11.30: Coffee break
11.30 - 12.00: The integrated platform: From reactive compliance to predictive resilience
Randeep Buttar, Founder, Surety
Ian Philips, VP, GM for Intelligent Full-Stack Observability, HCLSoftware
Financial services face ongoing regulatory change and operational risk, but many institutions still respond reactively on compliance. This session sets out an integrated approach that combines regulatory intelligence, business flow observability, and explainable AI reasoning to achieve predictive compliance and resilience across the organisation. Using new MiFID III requirements as a scenario, the session will explain how obligations map to business processes, which transaction flows are affected, and where gaps exist, before outlining how teams can form prioritised action plans with regulatory‑ready documentation.
Attendees will learn how to operationalise this model within existing governance and controls, what to measure to improve time to remediation and audit readiness, and how to structure decisions using cost and risk trade‑offs to move from reactive responses to continuous, predictive monitoring and documentation.
12.00 - 12.30 AI explainability, governance, and ethical compliance: Making AI transparent, accountable, and trustworthy in high-stakes financial environments sponsored by Hawk AI
Panellists:
Abantika Chatterjee, Associate Director – AI Capability Lead, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Sarah Pearce, UK Lead Partner,Hunton Andrews Kurth
Dr Robert Schmuck, Vice President Product AML, Hawk
Jason Shiu, Compliance Manager, Vanguard
With the rise of AI across compliance, risk, and customer-facing functions, explainability, governance, and ethics have become critical priorities for financial services. This session will unpack the practical and ethical challenges of deploying AI, focusing on the need for interpretability, bias mitigation, and robust governance frameworks. Panellists will share real-world approaches to making AI-driven decisions transparent and auditable, debate how to balance innovation with regulatory and ethical responsibilities, and examine the evolving expectations of UK and EU regulators. The discussion will also address the skills and resources compliance teams need to oversee AI systems, and the risks of relying on opaque “black box” models in high-stakes environments. Attendees will come away with actionable strategies for building trustworthy, compliant AI systems that support both business goals and regulatory obligations.
12.30 - 13.00: Basel 3.1: Preparing UK banks for the next phase of regulatory change, sponsored by ARKK
Panellists:
Graham Beeke, Head of Prudential Regulatory Risk, Bank ABC
Roi Lustik-Cohen, Chief Technology Officer, ARKK
Courtney Parker, Senior Regulatory Consultant, BM&A
Chris Rouault, Product Manager, ARKK
This panel will explore what the introduction of Basel 3.1 means in practice for UK banks and how firms are preparing for implementation in light of the finalised taxonomy. The discussion will focus on the likely direction of travel, examining the operational, technical and governance implications of the new framework.
Panellists will share perspectives on how organisations are approaching readiness in the absence of final rules, including preparations for enhanced reporting and data requirements, operating model decisions, resourcing considerations, and the role of RegTech in supporting compliance. The session will also address common challenges, areas of greatest anticipated impact, and what good governance, controls and auditability should look like across modern regulatory reporting.
13.00 - 14.00: Lunch Break
14:00 - 14:30: Capitalising on Financial Tech Innovation
Philip Treleaven, Professor of Computing & Director, UCL & UK Centre for Financial Computing
This presentation covers how professionals and companies can “future proof” themselves from the “tsunami” of technology innovation currently overwhelming Financial Services and Regulation – notably from AI.
The greatest challenge for any individual or business is keeping up to date with current technology innovation (cf. "innovate or die"). Relentless or perpetual innovation: continually learning, adapting, creating and exploring new ideas, methods, or products to remain relevant and successful, or risk becoming obsolete.
Organisations, individuals, even industry sectors and countries are experiencing massive change. Many will simply disappear.
14.30 – 15.00: Panel: One year of DORA – Key lessons in digital operational resilience
Panellists:
Adam Avards, Principal, Cyber Security & Third-Party Risk Policy, UK Finance
Emma Wright, Global Co-Chair of the Privacy and Cyber practice, Crowell & Moring
More speakers to be announced
One year after the implementation of DORA, operational resilience remains at the top of the agenda for UK financial institutions. This session will explore how firms are strengthening their frameworks to withstand disruption, manage third-party and supply chain risks, and respond effectively to incidents. Panellists will share lessons learned from the first year of DORA compliance, discuss best practices for integrating resilience into day-to-day operations, and examine the evolving regulatory expectations for incident reporting and third-party oversight. The conversation will also address the most common pitfalls in resilience planning and how to measure and demonstrate resilience to regulators. Attendees will gain practical insights into building robust, adaptable frameworks that protect their organisations and maintain trust in an increasingly interconnected financial ecosystem.
15.00 - 15.30 : Session to be announced
15.30 – 16.00: Keynote session to be announced
16:00 – 16.15 : Chairman's closing remarks, quiz and end of conference
16.15 - 17.15: Networking drinks reception
