This year’s summit took place in York’s Guildhall. The city and the Guild of St Christopher built it together between 1449 and 1459 and split the cost down the middle. Money has moved through this place ever since. When Richard III came to York in 1483, the citizens raised nearly £450 in gifts for him, and the canvas painted for the play staged in his honour hung on the hall’s walls for years afterwards.
In 1647 English and Scottish treasurers counted out £200,000 in this hall, sealed into bags of £100 and chests of £1,000, with both sides watching the count. It was the first half of what Parliament paid the Scots to return home, and to hand back Charles I on the way. More
By the time I arrived, there was no royalty present and no cash changing hands, but the question the treasurers were there to settle has not gone away: who moves the money, and who answers for it.
Colin brought Chris’s question into the age of agents. His subject was trust and accountability in financial services, and he asked who an AI agent is really acting for when it acts on someone’s behalf. He argued for clear accountability and authority, with limits on where money can move. AI is already here… the challenge is to supervise systems that can act faster than a human can follow.
Colin also recalled his time at Apple and the lesson he took from watching Steve Jobs launch a product: it had to be both trusted and useful to the people using it. We need to keep that balance as we go further down the AI rabbit hole.
Colin also recalled his time at Apple and the lesson he took from watching Steve Jobs launch a product: it had to be both trusted and useful to the people using it. We need to keep that balance as we go further down the AI rabbit hole.
Much of the content that followed took his question and made it concrete. Here’s what stood out to me:
The first is that trust has to be designed into the experience. We heard an eye opening talk on the future of UX in FinTech. The importance of this discipline was brought to life quickly: imagine opening your bank account and seeing the wrong balance. Not an app error message, just the completely wrong figure. It’s easy to imagine the feeling that hits you.
In most industries, the experience sells the product. In FinTech, the experience is the trust.
Accuracy and security get you into the room, but they do not get you trusted, and the gap between the two is where good products slowly die. Open banking took years to earn that trust after it went live in 2018, and agents that act on a customer’s behalf will take longer.
The technology always arrives before the trust does. The design work is to close that gap: show people what a system is doing and why, tell them what it will not do, and ask before acting.
The second is that AI readiness is practical work, not just ambition.
The gains are real, but the stories leave out the failed experiments and the groundwork behind the wins. His team redesigned an app in two weeks with AI, because experts could challenge the output and tests proved nothing had broken; the same approach elsewhere in the business made a mess. On who carries the risk, he gave the shortest answer of the summit: the AI will not go to jail, you will.
The third is that better technology should widen access, not narrow it.
The chief executive of a credit union with around 40,000 members opened his talk on financial inclusion with one number: 21 million people in the UK, close to a third of the country, count as financially vulnerable. His sharpest example was his own. Within months of joining he switched off the credit union’s open banking process, because it was declining around 600 applicants a month. The UK is held up as the poster child for open banking, but implemented badly it becomes a tool for exclusion. The deeper fault is in the credit models the industry has relied on for decades, which reward the person with a mortgage and cards and decline the person with regular wages and rent paid on time. Those people do not go away; they go to a payday lender. He put the unmet potential across the industry at £2 billion, and left the room with two questions to ask of any product or policy: who is in the discussion, and who is missing.
Why Red Badger was there
Earlier this year we announced the launch of our second UK centre and, with it, our Data & AI practice, led by Rich. He has quickly become a key part of the team, and York was the first time I had heard him make the AI-readiness argument to a room rather than to me over a video call. It’s the people with lived experience who bring the most ownership and skill to clients. It keeps our clients happy, and makes for a great team at Red Badger.
The summit, powered by FinTech North, showed what is happening across the North of England. Teams there are developing new products and the training behind them, and drawing investment into both. That matters to Red Badger, and to the businesses driving growth across the North.
The feel was different from conferences I’ve been to before, particularly in London. FinTech North was set up ten years ago, and a decade on, the team has kept to the mission and aims its founders set out. It shows in the agenda: People had a track of its own, next to Money and Technology & Product. Joe and the team now holding the reins keep those values going. Our recent partnership with them is one to be proud of, and we’ll soon host a dinner with the team on payments and data. If that’s your area, you’d be welcome.
N.B. In 1647, the Guildhall saw two sets of treasurers count £200,000 by hand, with both sides checking the bags. Last week it heard how to keep that kind of trust when software does the counting.
Read more about FinTech North's Summit Day 2 here: https://www.fintechnorth.uk/northern-fintech-summit-2026-day-2-money-and-tech-product/