The 2026 program is organized around five themes that map to where US banks and credit unions are actually spending, cutting and deciding right now.
Every session is built to answer the same question: what would a senior leader do differently next quarter after two days in the room?
View the Agenda
Past the pilots. Into production. Where AI is delivering measurable outcomes in US banking, and where it is quietly being switched off.
Most US banks have run their AI experiments. The real question in 2026 is no longer whether AI works. It is which deployments earned their place in the budget, and which got quietly retired. This theme goes inside the programs that made it to production: generative AI in customer service and operations, machine learning in fraud and credit, and the governance models holding it all together.
Sessions deal in specifics, not promises. What was the measurable outcome. What did it cost to get there. What had to be true about the data, the controls and the organization before it could scale. And where banks pulled back when the math did not work.
Modernize the core without breaking it. The architecture decisions that make everything else possible, or impossible.
AI, real-time payments and better customer experience all sit on top of infrastructure. If the core cannot move, none of it can. This theme covers how US banks and credit unions are modernizing the systems underneath, without the multi-year, bet-the-bank core replacement that has sunk so many transformation budgets.
Hear how institutions are simplifying legacy environments, moving to API-first and cloud-native architecture, adopting real-time payment rails, and building resilience in. And hear the credit union view, where modernization rarely means ripping out the core and usually means something smarter.
Fraud, deepfakes and the new threat surface. Safeguarding the system without slowing transformation down.
AI did not just give banks new tools. It gave attackers new ones too. Voice cloning, deepfake-driven account takeover and AI-enhanced social engineering have moved from emerging risk to the leading cybersecurity concern for US banks. This theme is about defending the institution and the customer without making every journey slower and every control heavier.
Sessions cover fraud and financial crime, identity and authentication, operational resilience, and the regulatory expectations shaping all of it. The focus is on what is working in detection and response right now, and how leading institutions balance security against the friction that drives customers away.
Customer and member experience that pays back. The journeys driving deposits, retention and loyalty, and the ones to retire.
Transformation is felt by customers and members, not just delivered by teams. This theme focuses on the experience work that moves the numbers that matter: deposit growth, retention, loan applications, and the lifetime value of a relationship. Not redesigns for the sake of a refresh, but the journeys that demonstrably change behavior.
Explore how US banks and credit unions are using personalization, digital onboarding and service design to compete with the institutions setting customer expectations. And hear honest assessments of what to cut from the roadmap, because not every experience investment earns its keep.
Leading a bank when agents do half the work. Org design, hiring and decision rights in an AI-shaped institution.
Technology does not transform a bank. Leaders do. As AI agents take on real workflows across the institution, the hardest questions become organizational: who owns the decision, how teams are structured, what to hire for, and how to reskill people whose roles are changing underneath them.
This theme covers leadership in uncertainty, building modern capabilities, reskilling at scale, and creating teams that combine human judgment with machine intelligence. It is the theme for the leaders who have to make the rest of the agenda actually happen inside their own walls.
Every session sits under one of these five themes, mapped to a format and a speaker. See the full two-day program and plan your time across both days.