Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou

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Paolo Sironi: What Do Bankers Do at a Branch That an AI Agent Can't?

2026-10-2941:30

Paolo Sironi and I co-authored a chapter in Brett King’s “Branch Tomorrow”, arguing that physical bank branches would become 360-degree advisory hubs, not transaction counters. Brett’s own closing line in that book was blunter: branches have no role in an agentic world. Two new 2026 US surveys, Jim Marous’s Digital Banking Report and the Curinos/Adrenaline report on de novo branch expansion, and the numbers are hard to ignore (see links below). For the first time, over 50% of US bank executiv...

Why Your Bank Knows Nothing About You, with Dharmesh Mistry on The Intelligent Ledger

2026-10-1532:00

Dharmesh Mistry’s primary bank has two of his financial products. He deals with 23 organizations in total. Do the math, and you’ll see why he says banking holds maybe 2 to 3 percent of the data that actually describes a customer’s life. 💡 In this conversation, we discuss: 🔺 The four forces Dharmesh calls Quanvergence: quantum computing, agentic AI, tokenization, and digital twins, and why their convergence compresses banking’s adaptation window the way the iPhone compressed Nokia and Kodak’...

Paolo Sironi: The Machine's Biggest Hallucination Isn't What You Think!

2026-09-1028:19

In 2021, Paolo Sironi slipped the word "conscious" into the subtitle of a banking book, three years before ChatGPT turned consciousness into the debate of the decade. Quantum Sapiens, his new literary novel, is where he goes deep into concepts that matter more than ever - like knowledge, wisdom, truth, consciousness. And the machine's biggest hallucination, he argues, isn't getting something wrong. It's convincing us it knows anything at all. Paolo has spent 25+ years in financial servi...

On Open Weight Models with Sarbjeet Johal, One Day Before Nvidia Said It Is Buying Hugging Face

2026-09-0236:16

We recorded this conversation with Sarbjeet Johal, top Silicon-Valley based Technology Analyst, the day before Nvidia reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the primary hub for open-weight AI models, for $12.9 billion. That timing matters, because the entire conversation is about open-weight and open source models. Open-weight models are free to download, but Brex's Summer 2026 Benchmark highlighted the tech stack and cost that make open-weight models operational. Sarbjeet return...

Agentic Banking: The Operating System Banks Need Now - with Driss Temsamani

2026-07-2352:06

Agentic Banking is not another AI upgrade for banks. It's a new operating system and most incumbents are still running the old one. In this conversation, Driss Temsamani - Managing Director, Americas Head of Digital at Citi and author of The Agentic Bank which we discussed in the Fintech Book Club in June, explains what actually has to change for banks to become agentic, and why the gap is wider than most executives think. We cover: ▪️ Why 2022 was our Netscape moment — and why this shi...

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Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou