Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou

Efi Pylarinou

Dr. Efi Pylarinou is a Top Global B2B Fintech & Tech Influencer, Thought Leader, and prolific content creator.No.1 Global Woman Influencer in Finance & the Data conversation by Refinitiv 2019 & 2020. She is included in Onalytica`s 2021, Top 20 Fintech Influencers & in their Top 20 in ‘ Who`s Who in AI’ professional influencers. In 2022, she was included in the Top 50 Digital Futurists list and Top 30 Linkedin Voice by Engatica. A seasoned Wall Street professional & a recognized technology thought leader on innovation topics.She has over 195,000+ followers on Linkedin and 20,000+ on Twitter. Join her on the social platforms https://linktr.ee/Efiglobal

  1. The Riskiest Agentic AI Use Case in Finance Is Lending

    Jun 17

    The Riskiest Agentic AI Use Case in Finance Is Lending

    Agentic AI is everywhere in finance right now — agentic commerce, agentic payments, stablecoin protocols, Anthropic's ten new analyst agents. But agentic lending is the one that touches creditworthiness, and that is why the EU AI Act classifies it as high-risk under Annex III, alongside law enforcement and border control. In this episode of Conversations & Insights, I sit down with Tamara Laine, Founder and CEO of Empower, who is building agentic AI infrastructure for U.S. lenders. Tamara is an Emmy-winning investigative journalist turned fintech founder, and she comes at the bias and explainability problem from a perspective most fintech CEOs don't have. We cover: ▪️ Why agentic lending is the riskiest agentic AI use case in finance ▪️ Two decades of fintech innovation: what alternative credit scoring and    machine learning actually fixed, and what they didn't ▪️ The gig economy data point that pulled Tamara into this work: 6 out of    10 gig workers in the US say they have been denied a loan ▪️ SR 11-7 in plain language: the U.S. model risk guidance that examiners    still use to validate AI in credit decisions ▪️ The EU AI Act, Annex III, and why August 2026 matters ▪️ Why Empower does not use AI for the actual credit decision (and why    that line is harder to hold than it sounds) ▪️ "AI prepares, humans decide" — soft version of Brian Armstrong's    one-person team vision, or genuinely different? ▪️ Why 80% of AI agents that reached production were pulled back,    according to a recent Sinch report ▪️ Five-year outlook: do the LOS providers like Encompass and nCino    eventually absorb the agentic layer, or do specialist agent companies    win? The deeper question underneath all of this: when AI is making decisions that determine whether a person can buy a home, a car, or grow a business, where exactly does the human stay in the loop? And who decides where the line gets drawn? Guest Bio:  Tamara Laine https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamaralaine/ is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, fintech founder, and business growth strategist. As the founder and CEO of MPWR, she is transforming how credit and capital are accessed by gig workers, women, and underserved communities through AI and alternative data. A former gig worker herself, Tamara brings lived experience to her mission of building a more inclusive financial system. She has launched and scaled eight-figure tech ventures and is a recognized expert in financial inclusion, ethical tech, and economic innovation. Tamara also co-hosts What the Frac?, a podcast on startup growth.

    37 min
  2. The End of Account-Centric Banking: Jouk Pleiter on Backbase's AI-Native Banking OS

    May 28

    The End of Account-Centric Banking: Jouk Pleiter on Backbase's AI-Native Banking OS

    What does an AI-native bank actually look like? Jouk Pleiter, founder and CEO of Backbase, argues that adding AI to a fragmented banking stack doesn't fix the problem, it amplifies it. In this episode I sit down with Jouk to unpack Backbase's newly launched AI-native Banking OS, the shift from account-centric to customer-centric architecture, and why the operating model, not the AI model, is the real battleground for the next decade of banking. Backbase is 22 years old, serves 120+ financial institutions across 50 countries, and was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026, with its Nexus semantic layer singled out as a competitive advantage. I am a Strategic advisor to Backbase. This conversation is an independent, candid discussion of the technology and its implications. We get into: 🔺 Why "fragmentation kills intelligence" and what a unified frontline really means 🔺 Agents joining the bank workforce, and the org-chart problem 🔺The shift from account-centric to customer-centric truth: ontology, customer state graph, and the decision/evidence trail 🔺 The four layers: Connectivity, Nexus (the truth layer), the agentic layer, and Sentinel (the authority/police function) 🔺 Why Backbase is not a system of record or a data lake, and how that differs from a Palantir-style approach 🔺 LLM choice, semantic routing, and FinOps cost arbitrage across premium, open-source, and small in-house models 🔺 What beta deployments revealed, and why Sentinel turned out to be the most strategic piece 🔺 How a bank should start small, and Jouk's controversial claim: a bank can run by 500 people serving 5 million customers 💎 Guest Bio:  Jouk Pleiter https://www.linkedin.com/in/joukpleiter/ is founder & CEO of Backbase https://www.backbase.com/, the AI-powered banking platform he helped build from a small startup in 2003 into a profitable, global fintech leader. Under his founder-led stewardship Backbase scaled organically to the hundreds of millions in annual revenue, grew to a two-thousand person team, and built a client roster of 150+ banks and financial institutions serving tens of millions of end users worldwide.  Known for a pragmatic, long-term oriented leadership style, he stresses close customer partnership and relentless product innovation. Jouk partners closely with bank c-suite members to turn strategy into measurable customer and business outcomes.

    41 min
  3. Replacing the Oxygen: How TradFi and DeFi Converge! | By The Global Money20/20 Team

    May 20

    Replacing the Oxygen: How TradFi and DeFi Converge! | By The Global Money20/20 Team

    This 🔺 What does it actually look like when TradFi and DeFi converge, and why are most banking executives still missing it? I sit down with Scarlett Sieber and Dhanum Nursigadoo of Money20/20, two of the six co-authors of The New Intersection of Money: Where TradFi and DeFi Converge, launching at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, June 2-4, alongside the new Intersection stage. We cover the Holy Trinity for a Tokenized World, the wrapped tokens question, the "missing money" problem and its echoes of 2008, stablecoins versus tokenized deposits, and what MENA, Asia, LATAM, and Africa actually teach us about convergence.video is about Scarlett Sieber and Dhanum Nursigadoo About the BOOK to be launched at Money2020 Amsterdam https://buff.ly/EHjQpzu   This straight-talking book from the global team at Money20/20 is your essential guide to the convergence of traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi). It shows how digital assets, programmable money, and new regulatory frameworks are reshaping global financial infrastructure. Inside, you will explore how regulation is unlocking scale across regions, how stablecoins and CBDCs power real time cross border settlement, how tokenization brings real world assets on chain, how digital identity and zero knowledge protect users, and how AI and real time rails transform the operating model of modern finance. The result is an integrated financial system built for speed, transparency, and resilience. Whether you are a banking executive making real decisions about blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenization, a fintech founder building on both traditional and emerging rails, a regulator shaping the guardrails of the digital economy, or an investor scanning for the next structural shift, The New Intersection of Money  gives you the insights, strategic guidance, and operating frameworks to lead with confidence.

    31 min
  4. NVIDIA's Georgios Kolovos on Revolut's PRAGMA, Transaction Foundation Models & the Agentic Banking!

    May 7

    NVIDIA's Georgios Kolovos on Revolut's PRAGMA, Transaction Foundation Models & the Agentic Banking!

    Is the "AI-native bank" a distant reality — or is it already here? In this episode of Fintech Conversations & Insights, I sit down with Georgios Kolovos, NVIDIA conversations & Insights,'s EMEA Payments and Fintech Leader, to unpack what's actually happening at the infrastructure layer of financial services. We go deep on Revolut's PRAGMA — the foundation model trained on roughly 40 billion banking events from 25 million users — and what it signals for the rest of the industry.  We talk about why Transaction Foundation Models break the silos that have defined financial services for decades, why off-the-shelf models won't cut it for Tier 1 banks, and why Mastercard, Stripe, Adyen, Plaid, and Nubank are all building down the same path. We also discuss: ✅ The impressive presence of financial services at NVIDIA GTC 2026  ✅ The "AI Factory" framework ✅ Why specialized models and Transaction Foundation Models are complementary ✅ How event-sequence data (not just transactions) is the real moat behind PRAGMA ✅ Whether a "Financial World Model" — a digital twin of an entire payments ecosystem — is fantasy or roadmap Guest Bio: Georgios Kolovos is a payments executive, who has worked across the payments value chain, with issuers, digital currency wallets, and merchants. Currently Georgios leads the payments and fintech practice of NVIDIA in EMEA, working with payments companies to accelerate their Machine Learning and AI innovations. Primary focusing on Transaction Foundation Models and Agentic Commerce. #NVIDIA #Revolut #PRAGMA #AINativeBank #AgenticBanking #TransactionFoundationModels #Fintech #AIFactory #FoundationModels #PaymentsAI #DigitalFinance #ConversationsAndInsights #EfiPylarinou

    27 min
  5. Overprivileged AI: The Breach Pattern That's Lurking in Every Enterprise | The McKinsey Lilli Case

    Apr 29

    Overprivileged AI: The Breach Pattern That's Lurking in Every Enterprise | The McKinsey Lilli Case

    An autonomous AI agent walked into McKinsey's AI platform - no password, no authentication, no break-in. Within two hours it had access to 46.5 million chat messages, 728,000 files, and 57,000 user accounts. This wasn't a hack in the traditional sense. The agent used permissions it was given. My tweet about this went viral - 500,000 views https://x.com/efipm/status/2031736307.... The comment that stopped me came from Chris Biele — NFThinker https://x.com/theNFThinker — who builds cryptographic primitives for exactly this problem at Open Matter Network. So I brought him on. In this conversation we go well beyond the McKinsey incident — into what this means for JPMorgan's 200,000-user LLM Suite, why Mastercard and Visa's tokenization approach solves identity but not mandate, how zero-knowledge circuits act as mathematical circuit breakers for rogue agents, and why "harvest now, decrypt later" may be the most underreported threat in finance today. This is the conversation the industry needs to be having before the first major incident inside a bank. What we cover: → Why McKinsey/Lilli was an architecture failure, not a hack → The JPMorgan thought experiment — blast radius in a real bank → What problem  Mastercard & Visa's Agent Pay solves → Zero-knowledge proofs as agent circuit breakers → AML and KYC without sharing raw data → X402: the payment protocol that cuts out Visa and Mastercard entirely → Post-quantum cryptography and "harvest now, decrypt later" 💁🏻‍♂️ Guest: Chris Biele (NFThinker) — Core contributor BanklessDAO, co-founder Bankless Card, builder at Open Matter Network-  Chris on X: https://x.com/theNFThinker 📄 Whitepaper referenced: Codewall.AI — How We Hacked McKinsey's AI Platform 👉 https://codewall.ai/blog/how-we-hacked-mckinseys-ai-platform 💎 Chris Biele   / chrisbiele  is the GTM Lead at OpenMatter Network https://openmatter.network/, a privacy layer for the agentic economy, enabling agents to query datasets that remain locked inside an organization's own data silos. Their Masked Computing environment uses post-quantum safe MPC (mu

    36 min
  6. How Tokenized Money Is Changing Finance Forever!

    Mar 19

    How Tokenized Money Is Changing Finance Forever!

    A discussion of the latest Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) report 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆: 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀, 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. The study captures the complexity of the evolving tokenised money ecosystem, shows how emerging private tokenised money instruments are competing for different applications, analysing the evolving infrastructure and the regulatory trends shaping their development across the globe. Tokenized Money Snapshot Why Tokenized Money Now Meet Keith Bear Building a Common Taxonomy Regulation Needs a Shared Language Key Jurisdictions Compared Top Use Case Cross Border Payments Trade Finance and On Chain Settlement Public vs Permissioned Chains Interoperability Networks and Consortia Dollar Stablecoins and Sovereignty Takeaways and What’s Next 📃 Read the full publication ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eXGuMMpu 🔺 Keith Bear  Fellow at CCAF at Cambridge University .  Chair of the Digital Asset Research Programme 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-bear-2b7407/

    25 min
  7. Decoding Crypto Indexing: Challenges and Opportunities

    Mar 5

    Decoding Crypto Indexing: Challenges and Opportunities

    Can Crypto Be Indexed? In this episode I discuss with Jessica Ellerm co-founder of TheMelia https://themelia.co/, whether crypto can be indexed and why crypto indexing differs from traditional markets.  We explore the enormous token universe and the need for strong screening to avoid scams and illiquid assets, including Melia’s primary filters on minimum market cap and daily volume plus user-defined constraints.  We cover data integrity challenges such as wash trading and unreliable exchanges, and how multiple institutional-grade data feeds, averaging, and outlier detection can improve pricing.  We also examine operational realities like 24/7 trading, real-time rebalancing, changes in circulating supply, forks, and delistings, and why many crypto indexes struggle to beat Bitcoin on a risk-adjusted basis.  We close on more dynamic approaches that blend rules-based indexing with analyst and AI-agent insights, including long/short index-pair strategies.  Jessica https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaellerm/ is the CEO and Co-Founder of Themelia, a custom indexing platform for cryptocurrencies. She previously co-founded and sold an Australian superannuation fund, and has worked across high-growth fintech startups in the payments and funds management sector for the past 17 years.

    33 min
  8. bunq's CEO at Davos: AI, the US Bet, and a Contrarian Take on Stablecoins | Davos during the WEF 2026

    Feb 26

    bunq's CEO at Davos: AI, the US Bet, and a Contrarian Take on Stablecoins | Davos during the WEF 2026

    bunq's CEO at Davos: AI, the US Bet, and a Contrarian Take on Stablecoins | Davos during the WEF 2026 Description: Filmed at the House of Collaboration, in Davos during the World Economic Forum 2026. I sat down with Ali Niknam, founder and CEO of bunq, Europe's most profitable neobank, for a fireside chat that went places I didn't expect. We covered their subscription model that most neobanks ignored, the landmark legal battle bunq won against the Dutch Central Bank over AI-driven AML compliance, and what that win meant for all of Europe. We talked about bunq's US expansion strategy, the vision of making European credit history portable, and how Ali thinks about AI. And then he said something that surprised me. His take on stablecoins and blockchain is genuinely contrarian — and I don't agree with it. I'll let you decide where you stand. Thank you to the House of Collaboration and J3D.ai for hosting at Davos WEF 2026. Ali Nikman https://www.linkedin.com/in/ali-niknam-50253913/

    16 min
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About

Dr. Efi Pylarinou is a Top Global B2B Fintech & Tech Influencer, Thought Leader, and prolific content creator.No.1 Global Woman Influencer in Finance & the Data conversation by Refinitiv 2019 & 2020. She is included in Onalytica`s 2021, Top 20 Fintech Influencers & in their Top 20 in ‘ Who`s Who in AI’ professional influencers. In 2022, she was included in the Top 50 Digital Futurists list and Top 30 Linkedin Voice by Engatica. A seasoned Wall Street professional & a recognized technology thought leader on innovation topics.She has over 195,000+ followers on Linkedin and 20,000+ on Twitter. Join her on the social platforms https://linktr.ee/Efiglobal

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