Summit Agenda

MC OPENS

Welcome Address by Lead Sponsor

Welcome Address by Diamond Sponsor

Welcome Address by Platinum Sponsor

FIRESIDE CHAT: Fostering Digital Culture – Rethinking the Traditional Banking Business Model

• Digitizing your banking business – something for the wish-list or is it a must-have?
• Has the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated plans and forced your hand?
• How did you tackle key roadblocks? Cultural shifts, declining budgets, learning & training
• Influencing customer decisions with digital touchpoints? Gaining leverage with multi-channel customer decision journeys [The UAE’s rate of internet penetration sits at 99.15% as of 2019, World Bank Data]

Getting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Meet the High Expectations of Today’s Banking Customers

• Combat bank fraud before it takes place? Harnessing the power of advanced analytics
• Scaling AI capabilities across your enterprise – are challenging market forces driving the need to digitize & innovate?
• Deploying an AI-first strategy as the foundation to deliver better engagement
• Customer experience insights – methods to find areas of improvement

Using Conversational Banking to Transform Customer Experiences

• Enabling human-machine interactions across platforms to service customers – phones, mobile apps, Whatsapp
• Exploring the potential to lower costs, improve operations and accelerate revenue growth
• Understanding the framework to build AI capabilities to scale & tackling the missing enablers
• How to overcome internal compliance, risk and regulatory issues relevant in the Middle East – getting the right AI-powered bots

More Data, More Slack: Beat Sluggish Data Processing with Edge Computing

• New tech almost always means processing more data – how to strike the balance with efficiency & response times?
• Is your enterprise going open source? Hybrid & edge strategies for next generation digital banks
• Using edge computing to personalize your product offering – gaining that competitive edge

CXO PANEL DISCUSSION: The CIO's Role in Transforming Traditional Banks to Tech-Driven Financial Powerhouses

• Analyzing the invisible divide between a tech company vs. a next generation digital bank – how does the CIO steer investments into going digital-first? Is the business case promising enough?
• Extending influence beyond the C-suite: exploring the role CIOs have played in helping their enterprises weather the impact of the pandemic
• How has digitization changed the mandate for CIOs? Powering the talent engine, inspiring a culture of high performance & staying ahead of the curve
• Overcoming the excuse of regulation as an excuse not to innovate – how can banks as traditional players be as efficient, secure, accessible and cost-effective as the competition?

Cloud Banking: The Game Changer for Next Generation Banking Capabilities

• Driving business innovation with cloud banking – hybrid cloud opportunities for Middle Eastern banks
• Achieving scale, speed and innovation without limits whilst mitigating risk
• Has the ongoing pandemic reshaped immediate priorities at your enterprise? Understanding how leveraging cloud banking will develop a robust business continuity plan

Digital Corporate Banking – Accelerating Change to Service Lean New Economy Companies

• Shifting trends in corporate banking – moving from relationships to platforms
• Using the technology toolkit to help your corporate customers embrace digital solutions – building platforms and scaling to improve revenue growth
• Providing advanced solutions to corporate clients related to operating capital using AI-driven risk analysis and credit products

Combating New Age Financial Crime Vulnerabilities – Digital Threat Protection

• Anonymity makes bank fraud an attractive option to cyber criminals - how to protect your bank?
• Phishing, infection threats and automatic remote-control threats – delivering authenticated services to your customer base
• Making the right investments in cyber-security technology to prevent ransomware attacks

Chief Digital Officer (CDO) PANEL DISCUSSION:

Creating Business Value by Unlocking Asset Potential

• Driving digital change across your enterprise during a pandemic – personal experiences and success stories
• Exploring recent shifts in customer behavior and business-model opportunities – understanding their implications on the digital / technological choices available at hand
• Deriving untapped value from enterprise data, ecosystem collaborations & platforms
• How is the role of the CDO expected to evolve? Trend predictions for the year ahead
• Conveying the customer’s perspective to the C-suite & emphasizing on design-thinking principles to prepare for the next normal and helping engage with customers today

Address by Lunch Sponsor

PRIZE DRAW

ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS

MC OPENS

FIRESIDE CHAT: The MENA Open Banking Revolution

• Building trust with a simple & secure ecosystem – Open Banking & Open APIs
• Getting onboard with the transformed retail experience – building independent payment networks integrated with merchants & developing trusted digital-ready products
• Sharing the pie with big-tech, neobanks, fintechs – what’s the way forward?
• Driving future growth with Open APIs – mitigating competition risk & offering customers real-time, dynamic, contextual, scalable services

Moving Beyond Digital Transformation to Build the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bank of the Future

• What does the AI bank of the future represent? Deeper customer relationships, expanded market share, stronger financial performance?
• Does the ‘AI First’ strategy deliver a superior value proposition to strengthen customer engagement with distinctive experiences? Will economies of scale afford the tipping point to enterprises founded on leading edge
• AI & analytics capabilities?
• Enabling your enterprise to personalize intelligent offers & smart servicing within omnichannel journeys across platforms / partner eco-systems

Biometrics & Blockchain – Securing Our Decentralized Solutions

• Decentralized digital identities secured by biometrics – protecting digital financial records
• Uncovering fraud with blockchain solutions for trade financing – case study
• Blockchain use cases in the Middle East – decentralized infrastructure for payment transfer & clearing
• Securing cross-border payments with remittance corridors using blockchain networks

PANEL DISCUSSION:

The Future of Payments – Redefining the Movement of Money

• Digital & instant payments – has the pandemic changed remittance customer behaviors?
• CBDC use cases to reimagine domestic & cross-border payment systems – is the efficacy & reduction in costs making it worthwhile?
• Processing cards payments in the cloud – simple APIs with direct card network integration for a seamless experience: can this stack replace legacy systems & manage compliance?
• Traditional banks taking on the payments innovation business – how to level the uneven playing field with competition from big tech (Apple, Google) & payments specialists (Paypal, Stripe)?
• With the expected global total digital payments transaction volume jumping from $6.69 trillion in 2021 to $10.52 trillion in 2025 (Statista), what’s in store for digital payments here in the MENA region?

Reconstructing the User-Experience Paradigm: Going Beyond the Opti-channel World

• 65% of UAE’s population fall under the ‘youth’ category – what can banks do digitally to better serve this segment who are more inclined towards a ‘user-experience’ over luxury
• Seamless customer experience – vertical integration of processes & platforms
• Enhancing UX – collaborate or compete? Understanding what API & BaaS brings to the market
• Is using AR / VR at your bank necessarily the best choice when it comes to better customer experience?
• RPA and AI: Outlining the next steps in the efficiency game for banks to deliver better user experiences

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Harnessing the Power of Big Data Analytics & AI to Pioneer Intelligent Banking – The New Digital Frontier

• Driving revenue growth by tapping into in-house enterprise data – can customer demographics & behavior pave the path forward for new products?
• The case for hyper-personalized banking – is there room to scale & is there market interest?
• Going mainstream with data analytics and mature AI capabilities – accelerated digitalization leveraging the ecosystem & platform players
• Bringing speed & execution to the table – how to bring the right people, culture & capability to your enterprise?

Quantum Computing & the Data Driven Disruption in the Banking Industry

• If Big Data is the new oil – what volume of data are we pumping? What revolutionary data-crunching technologies help reduce the load on existing high-performance systems?
• Preparing your enterprise IT landscape for quantum computing – is it time to sunset some of the legacy architecture?
• Quantum computing capabilities delivered as a service – bringing flexibility & connectivity to your existing infrastructure

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Revolutionizing Banking with Workforce of the Future

• Delivering a seamless & user-friendly customer on-boarding process – are RPA bots disrupting your enterprise?
• Bridging the gaps between your systems – using RPA on legacy and new data
• Putting the intelligence to work – automating KYC, AML, compliance processes
• Getting RPA systems to just work – reducing costs, turnaround times, manual errors

Chief Marketing Officer PANEL DISCUSSION:

Building Digital Marketing Dominance for the MENA Region

• How can your enterprise engage, acquire and retain customers whilst maintaining the highest levels of satisfaction by studying behavioral DNA?
• Delivering superior customer experience across omni-channel – how to bring about brand loyalty in today’s era of digital banking?
• Digital marketing toolkit – how effective is segmenting, targeting & personalization at your enterprise? Is Machine Automation & AI an effective tool for Middle East business?
• Engagement & experience – offering value by increasing your digital footprint & presence
• Exploring the martech ecosystem for complex customer journeys, fulfilling compliance & enterprise integration

Embracing Disruption in the MENA Banking Industry

• Digital banks, neobanks, big-tech, fintech, digital lenders, superapps – why does everyone want a slice of the banking & financial services pie?
• How does the ‘Bring It To Me’ economy brought on by the pandemic differ & what digital steroids can help transform your IT platform?
• ‘Banking-as-a-Service’ – knowing that fintechs have limits & pioneering with open banking platforms

Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) PANEL DISCUSSION:

Boosting Cyber Resilience for Digital Banking

• Exploring the accelerated shift to online spending & communications – have cybercrime levels risen with the onset of the pandemic? Has the exponential growth in traffic to high-risk merchant categories redefined fraud patterns in the Middle East?
• Has protecting hybrid infrastructure become more challenging? Exploring security best-practices with cloud-native & serverless infrastructure – how to safeguard your enterprise against attackers who thrive on exploiting complex networks?
• Removing vulnerabilities & securing remote work – what’s your take on employee education & incident response techniques with continued ‘Work From Home’ policies in effect?
• Advanced threat analysis & prediction capabilities with AI – how to prevent sophisticated phishing scams, digital identity theft/fraud, malware/ransomware before it even happens? How to leverage new innovations at your enterprise?

Address by Lunch Sponsor

PRIZE DRAW