How has the fintech landscape changed with AI adoption?
Sam Bridges-Sparkes AI is a huge accelerator for FinTech’ s ability to scale quickly. On the banking side, where we struggle with technical debt and the inability to change, AI can possibly solve that problem. We’ re seeing a lot of convergence in this area, and I think it’ ll become much more of a partnership model over time, rather than just a SaaS provider arrangement.
I think SaaS is probably in the biggest danger of disruption. Why pay someone to build simple things when my wife, who isn’ t technically literate, can knock up a website and a database in a matter of minutes nowadays? The out-of-the-box capabilities of frontier companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are progressing far quicker than anyone can keep up with in that general space.
I’ ll add to this idea of speed of delivery becoming a key KPI. Something we’ re starting to track that we haven’ t done before is delivery time, because the landscape is forever changing and the hype doesn’ t seem to fade. I’ ll give you an example: we did something with AI where we took a process from forty-five minutes down to three minutes.
The first response from the crowd was that it still takes quite a long time. Tough crowd, but that’ s because it wasn’ t a long project. The days of multi-year technology change programmes are almost forgotten now, because what we build today, in six months’ time, is likely already legacy.
Mark Watson: From a technical perspective, we use a lot of machine learning models – we had about thirty to forty of them in production. They’ re gradually being replaced by large language models. The machine learning models would take about six weeks to retrain if something changed. The large language models take about an hour to reprompt. We’ re seeing significant possibilities.
What’ s really changed is the advent of large language models. The potential applications are considerable – they can apply them to natural language, to coding to anything really that can be expressed in words. I think we are at the beginning of the cycle, not even in the middle of it.
The challenge from an executive point of view is figuring out where you are in the cycle and matching speeds to that, not trying to get too far over your skis in terms of implementing things. WATCH NOW
AI in FinTech panel at Fintech Live London 2025
88 December 2025