MoneyLIVE North America: Key Insights from Two Keynote Speakers
By John San Filippo
MoneyLIVE North America was held in Chicago September 14-15, 2026. For the second consecutive year, Finopotamus was privileged to be an official media partner for this growing event. Conference sessions were presented as a mix of fireside chats, keynote addresses and panel discussions. Finopotamus attended two keynote addresses.
While one address originated from one of the nation’s largest credit unions and the other from a multi-national banking giant, both keynote presentations converged on identical foundational truths. Both speakers stressed that traditional financial education and disjointed legacy communications have largely failed consumers, leaving millions without meaningful guidance when making critical monetary decisions.
Rather than viewing artificial intelligence as a pure automation engine to cut headcounts, each institution views generative and agentic AI as a mechanism to democratize high-touch advice, effectively offering private-banking-level guidance to every consumer at their point of need. Crucially, both keynotes concluded that an institution’s balance sheet brand name alone is no longer enough to guarantee loyalty; preserving customer trust requires maintaining human accountability, upskilling staff, and delivering real-time, personalized value.
Here is a closer look at the two keynote addresses.
More Human, Less Friction: Using AI to Put People First
Nadim Homsany, Senior Vice President and Head of AI at BECU, opened his keynote by examining the systemic shortcomings of American personal finance. Sharing a personal narrative regarding his immigrant parents turning a 30-year home mortgage into 49 years of debt, Homsany argued that ordinary consumers suffer because professional financial advice has long been treated as a luxury good reserved for the affluent.
“If you have money, you get a human,” Homsany noted. “If you don’t have money, you get a pamphlet and an 800 number.”
Homsany challenged the effectiveness of mandated classroom financial education, pointing to studies showing that general money lessons suffer a rapid half-life and are forgotten within five years because money habits are intensely emotional and taught around the dinner table. He asserted that real behavioral change only happens when people receive precise guidance at the exact moment a decision occurs. BECU acquired Homsany’s startup, EarnUp, in 2025 to build what he described as an always-on “self-driving car for finance. A chauffeur was always for the wealthy,” Homsany said. “A self-driving car is for everyone.”
While acknowledging the emotional stigma and vulnerability people feel around money, Homsany concluded that credit unions possess a natural advantage in deploying conversational AI because of their mission-aligned structure and member-first focus.
“The question isn’t what AI can do, it’s who we build it for,” Homsany emphasized. “And if we build it for the people who were never able to afford it, we will have made banking more human by removing the friction that always kept them out.”
Agentic Banking: Building Trust in the Age of AI
Rizwan Khalfan, Executive Vice President and Vice Chair of Strategic Growth, Innovation, and Partnerships at TD Bank, addressed how financial institutions must retool their entire operating architecture for the rise of agentic AI. Khalfan warned that customer engagement is rapidly transitioning from passive information retrieval to autonomous software agents planning, negotiating, and executing multi-step transactions on a consumer’s behalf.
“Fundamentally, our relationship with our clients is based on trust,” Khalfan stated. “I start there and I’ll end there.”
Khalfan explained that TD Bank is developing an enterprise intelligence layer to break down the traditional product silos that leave consumers facing fragmented digital experiences. He cited the example of one client receiving a mobile fraud notification while simultaneously being pitched a credit line increase by a branch advisor. By deploying a unified agentic layer across mobile devices, contact centers, branches, and third-party platforms, institutions can orchestrate connected and instantaneous resolutions.
He also insisted that the shift toward autonomous agents cannot ignore frontline institution personnel. “The focus should be how are we actually bringing our colleagues along so they believe that they have a career path, that they are being trained, they are being upskilled because we need them,” Khalfan said. “Their knowledge, their institutional knowledge, their financial knowledge, is imperative.”
Khalfan concluded that financial institutions must build comprehensive enablement platforms covering digital identity, security, and governance to remain relevant as consumers interact through non-proprietary AI environments. “Trust is being redefined,” he warned. “It’s going to be a higher bar, and we’ll have to actually raise our game to be able to meet that.”
