Cybersec Europe 2026

4 hours ago
2 min read

Cybersecurity has stopped being a parallel conversation to the one financial institutions are having about payments, data, agentic AI and regulation. It is the same conversation. The threat surface has moved with the rails, the models and the third parties. Any innovation meeting we run for a bank, a PSP, an insurer or an asset manager in the second half of 2026 will sit downstream of what is being said in Brussels this week.

What we are listening for

The 2026 programme has been built around the questions our institutional audience is already asking, even when they are not framed as cybersecurity questions:

Sovereignty and resilience in European infrastructure. Theo Francken (Belgium's Minister of Defence) and Mario Beccia (Director Cybersecurity, Council of the European Union) anchor a track on the geopolitics of European cyber posture. For institutions running cross-border rails, this is not abstract.
AI governance and autonomous systems. Loïc Lejoly on who actually controls the AI inside the enterprise. Anthropic's recent work on AI that finds and exploits vulnerabilities has reframed the threat model. Procurement frameworks built for traditional vendors do not survive contact with agentic systems, a point we have been making in our own writing.
The operator view. Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners on what is actually breakable. Jo De Muynck of ENISA on the European threat picture. Stefaan Hinderyckx of NTT DATA and Paul Bayle of Atos on what large operators are seeing in the field.
OT security. A new dedicated OT Theatre this year. Relevant to any financial institution with physical infrastructure exposure, and to the central banks and FMIs in our network.

Why we go

The Connector's model is built on staying current so that our institutional audience does not have to attend everything themselves. Sean and I have averaged around 75 industry events a year for five years. Cybersec Europe is one of the few where the operator, the regulator and the researcher are in the same room at the same time. That combination is rare and worth the trip.