Agentic AI Leaders Met in London During MoneyLive 2026 Delivering a Stern Message: Adopt Now or Risk Being Left Behind
- W.B. King
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
By W.B. King
During MoneyLive Summit 2026, which took place at the Business Design Centre in London, England on March 9-10, Lindley Gooden moderated a panel on agentic artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is rapidly transforming the way financial institutions design and deploy applications, promise faster development cycles, improve quality and greater operational efficiency.
AI-driven capabilities, however, introduce new considerations around risk, resilience and governance. The purpose of the discussion was to determine how best to harness agentic AI across the application development lifecycle, while ensuring security and control across complex enterprise environments, Goodwin explained.
Titled “The Opportunities for Agentic AI In Application Development—Enhancing Efficiency And Managing Risk, Resilience and Governance,” the panel featured Apoorv Kashyap, head of AI at the Milton Keynes, England-based fintech Santander; Marko Katavic, director of AI and decision intelligence at London-based MoneyBox; and Jamie Hackett, specialist solution architect for the Dublin, Ireland-based Red Hat, which has a U.S. headquarters in Raleigh, N.C. The session was sponsored by Red Hat, which bills itself as world’s leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver hybrid cloud, edge, and Kubernetes technologies.
AI is not Like Humans
To kick off the discussion, Gooden asked the panel why harnessing agentic AI is so essential for developers. “I’ve been a developer for a very long time. Agentic AI—using the right platform—is a game changer. It is improving productivity. It’s a differentiator between employers and employees,” Kashyap noted.
To use Agentic AI the most efficiently, Katavic said you must first determine how uncertain the platform being developed is and how that connects to the existing core operating system. “The more legacy it has to interact with and how ambiguous the business problem you are solving, the least mileage you will get right now,” he said, adding that it’s important to remember AI are not like humans. “We are using this kind of AI to deliver value exactly where this AI can deliver great value and for everything else, we have the old school expert systems that are guided by humans. By bringing them together, we believe we can transform what can happen in the space.”
Noting that many use agentic AI for code assistance and/or for testing, Hackett believes the real value lies in understanding the entire software development life cycle—end to end—and how Agentic AI can speed up that process. “One of the things we do at Red Hat really well is that we look at our existing processes and we time box every part of that process. We look at that with the lens of agentic AI—it gives us a really good base to measure our success upon. The benefits need to be measured; they need to be quantified.”
Don’t Get Left Behind
Kashyap, who has operated in the tech/coding space for 25 years, said he hasn’t seen this type of entrepreneurial excitement since the advent of cloud and then the app store. “We have these every few years, a reset button.”
Gooden called agentic AI “a field of dreams” that is capturing everyone’s imagination, making things possible that weren’t possible before, but he added, “we don’t want to be held back by the constraints and inaccuracies that might come with it—that’s the problem.”
The discussion became more interactive when Gooden asked the crowd what aspects of agentic AI they felt is most important: efficiency, standards (coding, engineering, etc.) or customer experience. Nearly half raised their hands for efficiency, only a few voted for standards, while customer service received a similar amount of hands up as efficiency, including Kashyap and Katavic.
For those banks and credit unions that do not utilize agentic AI or begin developing a coherent strategy, Hackett said they could soon feel the sting of loss. “If you have competitors that are using agentic AI in multiple processes, they are going to be able to produce better quality outcomes at a faster rate,” he continued. “If you don’t operationalize agentic AI or start looking at it seriously, you will be left behind very quickly.”