The Digital Transformation & Innovation in Financial Services Conference returned to London for its sixth edition, and Infinum was part of it. We joined a panel and gave a talk on AI transformation that skipped the theory and went straight to what happens when you actually go through one.
Hosted by Global Insight Conferences at 10 Union Street on 29 September, the conference brings together leaders from banks, insurers and fintechs working through the same set of questions. How do you scale AI responsibly? How do you build data strategies that hold up under scrutiny? And how do you bring regulators, customers and your own people along for the ride?
The timing says a lot. The industry’s conversation is moving from what AI can do to how to make it work, and with regulators in the room alongside the big commercial players, “move fast and break things” no longer flies. The pressure now is to prove AI delivers measurable returns without cutting corners on data or consumer protection.
So we brought something different: our own experience.
We transformed Infinum around AI. Now we guide others through it
Our contribution came from Jonathan Boakes, Managing Director for the UK, whose story starts at home: we ran AI transformation inside Infinum first, and now we guide other organizations through it with our AI transformation consulting.
Jonathan has spent over 20 years in digital, launching products across TV, web and mobile for FTSE 100 companies, government bodies and growing businesses alike. Which means he’s seen plenty of new technology arrive, and knows what it takes to make it stick.
His day started on the Go Beyond Buzzwords panel, alongside AXA XL, Citi, HSBC, Lloyd’s Banking Group and JPMorgan Chase. Sharing a stage with some of the biggest names in financial services, the conversation stayed practical: what it actually takes to move AI past the pilot stage.
Every organisation I speak to has AI somewhere in the business. Very few can tell you what it’s actually delivering, explained Boakes.
JONATHAN BOAKES, MANAGING DIRECTOR FOR THE UK
Over two years, Infinum went from unstructured experimentation to a company-wide rollout built on unified tooling, central governance and AI champions in every team. Today, over 90% of our engineers have been through structured AI training sprints.
Jonathan shared the bad along with the good. Getting there took a team restructuring, a rewrite of how we work, and more than a few moments where adoption stalled.
Buying tools was easy, changing your organization around them is the real challenge
Buying the tools took a week. Getting people to change how they work took two years,” said Jonathan.
That struck a chord in a room full of institutions asking whether they can upskill their people fast enough to keep up. Our answer, learned the hard way: not without clear ownership, governance that enables rather than blocks, and a way to measure whether any of it is working.
Lasting AI transformation stalls in the same places: governance that blocks instead of enables, enthusiasm with no system behind it, no one driving adoption, and no way to measure what works.
That’s what we had to figure out for ourselves, and it matters even more in financial services, where every change gets checked twice.
In regulated industries, caution is a given. Standing still isn’t. The ones who get AI right are the ones who build the guardrails first, then scale with confidence.
That’s why our AI transformation program is built around the same three phases we went through:
- Clarity: We start by listening. Conversations with leadership and a close look at how AI is really being used give you a clear picture of where you stand and a costed roadmap of what comes next.
- Change: We work inside your teams on real projects, building a network of AI champions, new ways of working, and a policy people actually follow.
Capability: We hand over the playbook and the dashboard to track it, so the progress keeps going long after we’ve left.
Financial services won’t win the AI race by moving fastest. It’ll win by moving right. That was Jonathan’s case in London, and judging by the conversations afterward, it landed.
To everyone who joined us at 10 Union Street, thank you. Next, Jonathan takes these lessons to DTX at ExCeL on 14 October.