At MoneyLive 2026, Monica Sasso, the Digital Transformation Lead for Global Financial Services at Red Hat, provided an insightful analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing financial institutions, from leveraging new AI to ensuring holistic resilience.
Sasso distinguishes between traditional AI, which banks have utilized for decades in areas like mortgages and payments, and the current focus on generative and agentic AI. She warns that technology initiatives often fail because firms forget to ask, “What problem are you trying to solve?”.
Achieving real ROI requires three things: a clear problem definition; capitalizing on existing in-house technology across silos; and ensuring the initiative aligns with the client journey and corporate strategy. True digital transformation goes beyond mere digitisation (like a 500-page PDF) to fundamentally restructuring processes to deliver comprehensive connectivity, such as the data linking seen in the NHS app.
Sasso also notes that cybersecurity threats are becoming highly sophisticated, often involving geopolitics and argues that risk management is too vast to be managed solely by the CISO or limited to the three lines of defense, especially since consumers interact with banks via personal smartphones. Since up to 80% of payment fraud in the UK involves human error, the solution centers on people with Sasso calling for mandatory training for all staff, clients, and consumers in social engineering, helping them recognize threats and own part of the solution.
Compliance and regulation should be viewed as opportunities, not constraints and Red Hat urges firms to organize efforts across silos and articulate goals as business outcomes for shareholders, clients, and regulators, rather than simply meeting a regulatory “check box”. This approach allows firms to integrate all initiatives into a “new operating model” that is digital-first and client-led.
Finally, Red Hat highlights Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as far more than just the basis for cryptocurrencies. DLT is key for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and corporate banking use cases like trade finance. DLT’s disruptive power lies in solving the “middleman problem,” creating a trusted technological marketplace for transactions (like moving stocks or invoices) without needing an intermediary, which ultimately makes things faster and safer for consumers.
