Trust is the New Data: Takeaways from Fintech Week & Expo 2026

By Dina Akhmetova, PR & communications consultant

The 3rd Fintech Week & Expo 2026 brought together global fintech leaders on February 26–27 at the Holiday Inn Arena Tower in Amsterdam - one of Europe's foremost hubs for financial innovation and digital transformation. Held under the theme "Trust, Transformation & Tech: The Future of Financial Innovation," this year's edition arrived at a pivotal moment. AI is no longer a horizon technology. Open finance frameworks are being written now. And the pressure on financial institutions to move faster, while remaining accountable, has never been higher.

Across every session, one tension surfaced repeatedly: the technology is ready. The question is whether the organizations, regulators and people behind it are.

Adoption requires a mindset change

The conference kicked off with Sako Arts, CTO of Wonderful, speaking on Agentic AI deployment in financial institutions. Wonderful is already live with full omni-channel agents operating within banks, handling everything from answering FAQs over the phone to executing real financial transactions. The client cases were compelling. But the broader message was clear: the technology is ready. The organizations, in many cases, are not.

The AI automation theme continued through the panel session on GenAI, Hyperautomation & the Next Wave of Digital Transformation, where the central question was how to scale AI beyond pilots without scaling risk alongside it. The consensus was that end-to-end AI-orchestrated workflows are closer than most expect but only where governance, trust and accountability are already embedded. In highly regulated industries like fintech, that infrastructure is fast becoming the real differentiator.

Parag Shah, Head of Operations at Takeaway.com Payments, put the human side of that challenge directly: "Adoption won't happen before mindset changes. Technology is there but people in the organization need to be open to it."

The panel pushed further. Leaders, several argued, should stop automating decisions they cannot explain. If an AI-driven outcome cannot be justified to a regulator, a customer, or a board, automation stops being an advantage and becomes a liability. Explainability is not a technical feature. It is a leadership responsibility.

Ivana Nikolik, CGO of Data & AI at Atos, framed it as a strategic question: "Does the AI adoption strategy align with the overall strategy of the organization? Not everything needs to be automated blindly. Leaders should first understand why AI reaches specific decisions and how to be accountable for them." Her conclusion was pointed: trust replaces gold. Trust is the new data.

Trust shouldn't be an afterthought

One of the panel discussions, "Payments & Open Finance Transformation," cut straight to one of fintech's most loaded questions: who bears the cost of compliance, and who reaps the reward? For neobanks, the regulatory gap between themselves and traditional institutions is often framed as a competitive disadvantage. Timothy Manoj Bissessar, Head of Legal at Revolut, pushed back on that framing. "We don't see it as a trade-off," he said, "but something we embed to make sure we continue to grow and keep our speed."

Regulation, in other words, is not a brake but rather a part of the engine.

But embedding compliance is only half the equation. The bigger question raised by panelists was whether Europe's regulatory infrastructure is keeping pace with the ambition. The verdict was cautious. If the EU genuinely wants to build an Open Data economy - one that improves consumer outcomes, drives competition and enables innovation at scale - a proper Open Finance framework is no longer optional. Other regions, LATAM in particular, are already ahead. The message from the room was clear: Europe has the talent and the market, but it cannot afford to miss this window.

Trust is not a feature. Michele Poole, Co-Founder of Finclusiv Edge, put the central dilemma plainly: are we building more connected financial systems, or just more sophisticated silos? Her answer was structural. Trust, she argued, must be engineered at every layer - from product design that anticipates failure, to operational transparency, to governance frameworks that assign accountability before scale makes those conversations harder to have.

Communication is the key

The Panel Session on Digital Identity & AI in Compliance brought together voices from across the financial crime prevention space, all pointing to the same conclusion: AI is only as powerful as the data and the collaboration behind it.

Dirk Thomas, Managing Director of EuroDaT GmbH, illustrated how transaction data can map complete pictures of money flows across accounts, allowing AI to surface the persons and patterns connected to money laundering. Natalie Detsik, Advisor in Financial Crime Prevention, echoed this from a different angle: AI-powered link analysis is increasingly effective at tracing connections between criminals and money mule networks. Her observation was blunt - "Criminals love working in networks and hope banks don't communicate with each other." Strategic collaboration between institutions, in other words, is not just good practice. It is the infrastructure that makes AI effective.

Dr. Rogério Rondini, Senior Digital Identity Architect at PwC Nederland, widened the lens. Protecting digital identity is becoming harder as younger generations grow less cautious about sharing personal data and creating new vulnerabilities that bad actors are quick to exploit.

The session's sharpest closing note came from Chana Agarunov, CEO at Mintra AML: "Seamless banking creates more opportunities for criminals to go unnoticed. We need to create the right amount of strategic friction at the right moment in the user experience to identify those criminals." Friction, deliberately placed, is not a flaw in the system. It is the point.