FINNOSUMMIT 2026: one in three sessions was about AI
Instead of summarising impressions, I counted the sessions: 22 of the 67 had AI in the title. That says a lot about where banking in the region stands.
We were at the tenth edition of FINNOSUMMIT, at Expo Santa Fe in Mexico City. Two days, five stages and sessions running in parallel.
You leave these events with a general impression, and impressions are arguable. So rather than telling you mine, I counted the sessions on the programme.
Of the 67 sessions, 22 had artificial intelligence in the title. One in three. Six were about agents and autonomy, and four about fraud and identity, which is the other side of the same question.
What changed since last year
AI stopped occupying the place of the promise and moved to that of the operation: who has it running, on which process and with what result. You can see it in the titles, which stopped asking whether it works and started asking how it is controlled.
The figure that frames the discussion comes from Finnovista’s radar: AI use among Mexican fintechs went from 60% to 77% in twelve months, with fraud incidents down 54.9% among those that applied it.
The line I took away
On the Credit & Tech Convergence panel, the person running retail banking at a chain with thousands of branches said the opposite of what usually gets said at these events.
Credit & Tech Convergence · 24 September
Rather than zero friction, we should have smarter friction.
Estephany Ley Corporate Director of Retail Banking, Grupo Coppel
Why we go
Shimli runs agents in collections, credit, support and internal operations today. That does not put us ahead of anyone: it puts us in the room. The demo stage had sessions titled Scale origination, servicing and collections with AI agents and AI agents on WhatsApp. People solving the same problems we do, sometimes better, and that is why it is worth being there.
AI changes every week and nobody keeps that pace alone. So we keep doing the same thing: sitting where the pace is set, listening to those further along, and building alliances with whoever solves a part we do not. It is the second side of the trust we wrote about after Volcano: how the agent is built matters, and so does who builds it and who they learn from.
There was a second theme that took up more of my attention than expected, and it deserves its own entry: conversational banking stopped being a support channel and became the place where people run their transactions.
Questions on this topic
- What was the netgrowing that FINNOSUMMIT 2026 introduced?
- The term the organisers used for their approach to networking: cultivating the network to generate growth, rather than collecting contacts. On the programme it took the shape of the Netgrowing Labs and a system that recommends who to meet based on each attendee's business goal.
