World FinTech Day warnings over governance & skills

Industry experts have marked World FinTech Day with warnings about governance and skills.

Senior figures from consulting and technology firms say financial services leaders face growing pressure to align digital innovation with operational reality.

World FinTech Day has prompted a series of interventions from practitioners working at the intersection of finance, technology and supply chains. Their messages focus on the risk of stalled artificial intelligence projects, the reshaping of supply chain finance and the changing skills finance leaders now need.

Alan Win, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Middlebank Consulting Group, said financial technology now plays a broader role across corporate value chains. He said fintech tools are reshaping how businesses assess performance, moving beyond traditional cost and efficiency metrics to include liquidity, resilience and supplier relationships.

"The role of financial technology is expanding beyond faster payments and digital transactions. Businesses are increasingly using fintech solutions to gain better visibility, improve decision-making and strengthen commercial relationships across their supply chains and wider value chains. Traditionally, supply chain performance has been measured through operational outcomes such as cost, efficiency and delivery. Today, fintech is broadening this view by improving access to working capital, enabling digital payments, strengthening supply chain finance and providing insights that help organisations identify risks earlier.

By connecting financial intelligence with operational data, businesses can improve cash flow management, strengthen supplier relationships and respond more effectively to changing market conditions. The convergence of fintech, data-driven platforms and supply chain management is helping organisations build greater financial agility and resilience across their value chains. As businesses navigate increasing complexity, the ability to align financial and operational decision-making will become an important factor in long-term performance," said Alan Win, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Middlebank Consulting Group.

Win's comments reflect growing attention on supply chain finance after recent disruptions in global logistics, higher interest rates and tighter credit. Middlebank Consulting Group, founded in New Zealand, works on value chain and logistics projects across Asia-Pacific, the United States and the Middle East.

Alongside these supply chain shifts, other experts highlight a widening execution gap in financial services AI projects. Many banks and insurers run multiple pilots in fraud detection, credit risk and customer service, yet struggle to move those initiatives into audited production environments connected to core systems.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Akshay Raj said the financial services industry must prioritise governed, production-ready AI over proof-of-concept projects to remain competitive.

"World FinTech Day is a good moment to be honest about a gap the industry rarely talks about: the distance between what financial services firms announce and what they actually run. There is no shortage of AI in finance today. Every bank, insurer and payments company has pilots - fraud models, credit-decisioning engines, customer copilots, reconciliation agents.

"What most of them do not have is those systems in production, governed, audited and moving real money. Industry analysts consistently find that the majority of enterprise AI initiatives never make it past the proof-of-concept stage, and nowhere is that failure rate more expensive than in financial services, where a stalled programme still carries the full cost of compliance review. The conventional explanation is that regulation slows fintech down. I'd argue the opposite: it is ungoverned architecture that slows fintech down.

"When audit trails, data lineage, access controls and model documentation are bolted on at the end of a build, every release becomes a negotiation with risk and compliance teams - and negotiations take quarters. When governance is engineered in from the first commit, those same teams become the fastest approvers in the building, because everything they need to sign off already exists. That distinction is now the competitive divide in financial services. The traditional transformation clock - twelve to twenty-four months from business case to production - was survivable when everyone ran on it. It is fatal in a market where challenger banks and fintech-native competitors ship in weeks.

"A fraud model that reaches production three quarters late has not been delayed; it has been defeated. At Unolabs, we build governed enterprise data, cloud and AI platforms to production in sixteen to twenty-four weeks, and the lesson from that work applies across the sector: speed and governance are not a trade-off. In regulated industries, governance done properly is the speed advantage - it is the ungoverned programmes that stall.

"So this World FinTech Day, the question for financial services leaders is not 'what could AI do for us?' That question has been answered in a hundred pilot decks. The question is: how much of what you have piloted is in production - and if the answer is 'not much,' is your constraint really the regulator, or is it the way you build? The firms that win the next decade of fintech will not be the ones with the most ambitious AI roadmaps. They will be the ones whose systems actually ship - governed, secure and built to last," said Akshay Raj, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Unolabs.

Raj's comments align with growing regulatory expectations around data lineage, model risk management and operational resilience. Supervisors in major markets increasingly expect financial institutions to demonstrate control over AI systems throughout their lifecycle.

As firms rewire systems and value chains, attention is also turning to the people who will lead finance functions through this change. Industry practitioners argue that technical familiarity with AI and data is no longer enough on its own.

Altis Consulting Chief Commercial Officer Katrina Pilcher said finance leaders must develop stronger judgement around AI and rethink workflows to ensure the technology complements human decision-making rather than simply automating existing processes.

"The two capabilities tomorrow's finance leaders need to develop today

"Develop judgement, not just technical knowledge

"As AI is increasingly used to analyse information and generate forecasts, future finance leaders need to know how to judge whether both the underlying data and the insights AI produces can be trusted. Tomorrow's leaders do not need to be data engineers, but they do need a solid understanding of good data governance - how data is collected, managed and secured, and how its quality is maintained over time. They need to know where the data comes from, who owns it and when AI-generated insights should be challenged rather than accepted at face value. Ultimately, one of the defining capabilities of tomorrow's finance leaders will be knowing when to trust AI and when not to.

"Learn to redesign work, not just automate it.

Tomorrow's finance leaders need to understand how to redesign workflows so AI and people each contribute where they add the most value. That means being able to rethink processes, roles and decision-making rather than simply inserting AI into existing ways of working. The organisations that see the greatest value from AI will not necessarily be those using it the most, but those that redesign work around it most effectively," said Katrina Pilcher, Chief Commercial Officer, Altis Consulting.