FinovateEurope 2025: Mainframe modernisation, AI predictions, and tokenisation take centre stage
Prominent players from across the fintech sector convened at the Intercontinental O2 in London on Tuesday for the opening day of FinovateEurope 2025.
FinovateEurope 2025 kicked off on Tuesday with numerous fintech product demos
The conference got up and running with a host of insightful keynote addresses and informative panels tackling trending topics such as mainframe modernisation, the future of AI in financial services, and what’s next for digital assets and tokenisation.
As always, day one of the conference also featured numerous tech demonstrations, with Keyless, R34dy, and Tweezr recognised as the top demos of the day.
Mainframe modernisation
Paul Holland, CTO of Astadia, took to the main stage to address the growing urgency for financial institutions to migrate and modernise their mainframes.
Despite being a “valuable workhorse” for banks, insurance companies, and capital market firms, especially for “high volume transaction processing and vertical scalability”, Holland points out that “costs, skills, and flexibility” are driving institutions to reevaluate their reliance on mainframes.
“If you consider the applications you’re running on your mainframe systems, many of these applications are 20, 30, or even 40 or more years old in their origins. As time has gone by, they’ve been changed progressively by a variety of different development teams and outsourcing companies, and that means these applications, over the decades, have become very brittle,” he says.
Holland explains that these legacy systems are weighed down by “technical debt” from historical coding, making them “very resistant to change”. Furthermore, organisations often lack the necessary technical skills for “developing and operating applications”.
To address these challenges, Holland says that companies are adopting hybrid compute models, moving channels to the cloud while distributing core processing across hybrid platforms.
“In order to try and address the flexibility requirement, the idea of putting APIs around everything is very common,” says Holland. However, he cautioned that “API everything” is difficult when trying to modernise banking cores due to their complicated nature and the fact they’re “sometimes based on third-party frameworks”.
Many organisations are instead focusing on enhancing their “peripheral workloads around the core”, he says, gradually moving them away from mainframes. Holland suggests that refactoring, the process of restructuring code, can automate the conversion of legacy technologies to modern stacks, such as Java.
He concludes that “to deliver the agility and flexibility a company needs, the move to microservice, more modular computing is critical”.
“Data is the new blood”
Next up was a keynote address from Tracey Follows, CEO of Futuremade, who explored the evolving role of AI in financial services.
After reviewing the current numerous use cases for AI, such as analysing transaction histories and communication patterns, Follows shifted the focus to the future, predicting that “emotional responses are going to be picked up by AI systems and analysed, hopefully sending us signals about potential market disruptions before they have even happened”.
“We have to be prepared for the fact that AI is kind of going to be intrinsic into ourselves. It is going to grow with us, but it is also going to grow within us,” she says.
She further hypothesises that over the next 15 to 20 years, “your neurological responses, your cognitive patterns, your physiology will be monitored and analysed when you come to make a major financial decision”.
Follows stresses that going into the future, “data is the new blood”. This metaphor, she explains, “really does justice to the vital nature of really intimate, personal data that is going to be collected, monitored, analysed, and acted upon by agentic AI in the future”.
The development of digital assets
Nick Kerrigan, head of innovation at Swift, also addressed attendees on the accelerating growth and potential of digital assets, emphasising the transformative role of tokenisation in reshaping financial services.
“We are at a pivot point for the future of financial services, and we [Swift] believe the tokenisation of assets and currencies can reshape not only the way that value moves, but also how ownership is structured and how settlement takes place,” Kerrigan says.
“The industry is now working at speed to develop a new suite of asset classes that support the next generation of value creation.”
Within his talk, Kerrigan highlighted several significant developments, including the US government committing to supporting digital asset growth, banks launching stablecoins and tokenised funds, and regulators in the EU and APAC implementing frameworks to “underpin tokenised markets”.
By 2030, Kerrigan shared projections that the digital asset market will reach $16 trillion, with Swift “building the underlying infrastructure” that will be needed to “enable new asset forms to flow across borders”.
Over the next “three to five years,” Kerrigan expects an expansion in programmable money and smart contracts, which will transform use cases such as trade finance, corporate treasury, and cross-border payments. Moreover, he says banks will also shift from live trials to “large-scale adoption of tokenised assets”.
With digital assets becoming “integral to how money and value will move globally”, Kerrigan warns against the risk of “rising financial fragmentation” and the growth of so-called “digital islands”.
Kerrigan cautions that “without interoperability based on standards, the industry risks being stuck with new markets that don’t connect with one another”.
As the conference goes into its second and final day, attendees can look forward to fireside chats, power panels, and a keynote on how regulators are tackling authorised push payment fraud across Europe.
