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A BCG study cited across the industry this year captured the state of bank innovation with unusual precision: the majority of banks remain stuck in siloed pilots and proofs of concept. Not for a lack of scouting. Not for a lack of vendors knocking. If anything, the opposite. Innovation teams inside European financial institutions have never been more visible on LinkedIn, more courted by fintechs, or more overwhelmed by inbound. And yet, the ratio of pilots that reach producti

How European banking innovation teams are staying current under delivery pressure in 2026, without surrendering their calendar to the conference circuit.

A pattern is emerging across European banks this quarter that few innovation leaders are willing to discuss publicly. Innovation offices that ran for half a decade as standalone units, with their own pipeline, their own KPIs, and their own external footprint, are being folded, renamed, or pointed at narrower mandates. CaixaBank now operates a dedicated AI Office, established to anchor compliance with the EU AI Act. Two of the largest Dutch and Nordic banks have absorbed their

In January 2026 the ECB published its supervisory priorities for 2026 to 2028. For the first time in five years, the list shrunk from three priorities to two: resilience to geopolitical and macro-financial risk, and operational resilience anchored in ICT capabilities. A few weeks later, on 23 February 2026, the EBA released a follow-up peer review on ICT risk assessment under SREP, measuring how consistently competent authorities are applying the framework across Member State

When UniCredit closed its €370 million acquisition of Aion Bank and Vodeno earlier this year, the press read it as another European bank doing what European banks do, buying a piece of fintech because the in-house roadmap could not deliver it fast enough. The more interesting reading is structural. Bain's 2026 Banking M&A report frames the moment as a "double helix" of scale and scope, with capability-driven deals delivering roughly 30% better valuation gains than scale-only

Last week, Koen attended The Banking Scene Conference Brussels 2026 at the iconic Tour and Taxis venue, joining more than 450 senior finance professionals for what is widely regarded as Belgium's largest annual banking conference. This year's theme, "Rethinking Relevance," set a deliberately provocative tone. The question at the heart of the day was not how banks should adapt to change, but whether they are doing enough to remain genuinely relevant in a landscape reshaped by