Tuesday, 18 November, 2025
10 am GMT, 2 pm GST, 6 pm SGT

Solving Banking’s Toughest Challenges: Practical Paths to Rapid Core Modernization in 2026

In partnership with

Why attend

As banks prepare for 2026, executive leaders face mounting pressure to modernize core systems and operations – enabling innovation and accelerating growth, without compromising stability.

The challenge is no longer just internal. Customers now expect greater value, faster service, and seamless digital experiences, often at a lower cost. Meanwhile, competition is intensifying, with digital-first players and new market entrants reshaping the landscape.

From fragmented data and slow product development cycles to GenAI governance and cost efficiency, the message is clear: strategic, focused modernization is no longer optional - it’s essential.

This webinar brings together Finastra and Celent to explore how banks can address these pain points with practical, product-driven strategies.

We’ll dive into Celent’s latest industry insights on banking agility, the operationalization of GenAI and agentic AI. We’ll showcase how Finastra Essence helps banks modernizing with agility avoiding a risky “core transplant.”

Learn how the combination of rich, broad and deep banking functionality with advanced technology – such as cloud-native deployment, no-code product design, embedded analytics, and open APIs – can help your bank:

accelerate time-to-market
optimize operational costs
and deliver differentiated customer experiences.

Whether you're a CIO, COO, Head of Retail, this session will offer actionable solutions tailored to your priorities

The key take-aways

Understand the top challenges facing banking leaders in 2025-2026 – and how to solve them.

Learn how Finastra Essence enables rapid product innovation, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance.

Discover how to modernize without replacing your core system, using phased migration and modular architecture.

See how GenAI, embedded analytics, and cloud-native SaaS can transform customer experience and reduce TCO.

The webinar panel

Click to view full speaker details

Dr Mahmoud Abdawi, VP Fintech Partnerships | ⁠ FIRST ABU DHABI BANK (FAB)

I’m a Digital, FinTech, and Product Transformation Leader with 23+ years of global experience building and scaling people-centric platforms across banking, fintech ecosystems, and healthcare operations. My career has been driven by a single vision: connecting financial, data, and ecosystems to deliver personalized, intelligent, and seamless digital experiences at scale.

I helped launch and scale E20, the UAE’s first micro-SME digital bank, recognized among the Top-10 Challenger Banks globally, and I led the creation of EI+, Emirates Islamic’s next-gen digital platform — achieving 90%+ mobile adoption, onboarding 50K+ new customers in 10 months, and driving double-digit growth in digital revenues.

At First Abu Dhabi Bank, I lead strategic fintech partnerships and platform modernization, embedding AI-driven scoring models and synthetic data sandboxes to de-risk onboarding while delivering enterprise-scale integrations and accelerating POC timelines by ~40%. Earlier, I architected Expo 2020’s AI-powered data ecosystem, enabling secure, multi-entity collaboration across healthcare, payments, and travel — showcasing the power of interconnected platforms.

I hold dual MBAs (Rotman & St. Gallen), a Doctorate in Healthcare, and executive education in Data Leadership from UC Berkeley. As a UAE Golden Visa holder and bilingual in Arabic and English, I’m focused on SVP, COO, and CPO mandates where I can connect banking, payments, fintech, and health ecosystems — turning strategy into measurable outcomes and driving innovation at scale.

Margus Simson, Chief Digital Officer, Member of the management board | ⁠KOMERCI BANKA

I have delivered digital transformations in big companies for the last 25 years. My typical job is to figure out, what is wrong with the company, build the plan for the change, and lead it through the execution. My core skill is that I am able to execute transformation across business, customer service, technology, and company culture, combining them all into comprehensive modernization plan.

Komercni Banka, member of Societe Generale Group, has been my latest challenge in the long list. We rebuilt the whole bank from the scratch. Technologically it is one of the most modern banks in Europe, massive simplification of products and processes (99% products out), customer centric development according to service design principles, complete redesign of the way of working according to agile rules. Business results speak for themselves.

Before Komercni Banka I led digitalization projects practically in every mass customer industry in Estonia and Baltics - banks, telcos, energy, education, healthcare, etc.

Lucose Eralil, EVP and Chief Operating Officer | SECURITY BANK

Lucose Eralil is Security Bank's Chief Operating Officer. He oversees all operational functions of the Bank including Information Technology, Information Security, Operations, Strategy, and Innovation & Transformation, which includes strategic enterprise-wide programs. Together with Security Bank's senior leadership, Lucose defines and champions the short- and long-term technology-driven strategic initiatives, in relation to the Bank's strategic plan. With his core expertise in technology, strategy, and transformation, Lucose is tasked with uplifting the Bank's technology and infosec footprint through transformation and change. At the same time, he also leads efforts to reinvent how the Bank interacts with its customers, stitching back to the organization's customer-centricity strategy. Lucose brings with him more than 33+ years of experience in technology and transformation in the Financial Services Industry, with a track record in driving transformational change. He worked in multinationals such as the NIIT and Credit Suisse, across various executive leadership capacities, both internationally and regionally.

Daniel Mayo, Principal Analyst, Banking | CELENT

With a long-standing background in industry analysis and research, Daniel leverages considerable experience in both quantitative and qualitative analysis as well as industry focus across financial services technology sectors to advise and consult on business-led technology strategy and investment for financial institutions, technology providers, and technology investment firms.

Daniel's coverage areas focuses on the banking platform market. Complementary coverage areas include cloud, SaaS, analytics, digital transformation and platform transformation and modernization. His advisory engagements have included banking system vendor selection for financial institutions, IT benchmarking for financial institutions, and market feasibility and go-to market assessments for technology vendors.

Daniel began his career at Datamonitor, before moving into Ovum and more recently Omdia with an ongoing focus on the financial services technology market. He was also responsible for enterprise IT strategy research, and data insight programs involving extensive primary research across the financial services sector as well as institution-specific IT insight.

Daniel holds an MA and BA in Economics from Cambridge University.

Narendra Mistry, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Universal Banking | FINASTRA

Narendra has been in the financial software industry for more than 25 years and his career with Finastra spans more than 13 years in various leadership roles, including running product for International Retail. He has experience building new SaaS businesses in Digital Essence cloud banking, whilst ensuring a robust product and go-to-market strategy. Narendra was instrumental in the very successful Equation N-2 program and the Midas Service Pack program that have made the Midas and Equation business extremely stable over the years.

During his time at Finastra, Narendra has built a strong reputation of being a trusted leader who has been central to many successes on our journey. Narendra is based in London.

Join the Discussion

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This webinar is in partnership with

FINASTRA

Finastra is building an open platform that accelerates collaboration and innovation in financial services, creating better experiences for people, businesses and communities. Supported by the broadest and deepest portfolio of financial services software, Finastra delivers this vitally important technology to financial institutions of all sizes across the globe, including 90 of the world’s top 100 banks. Our open architecture approach brings together a number of partners and innovators. Together we are leading the way in which applications are written, deployed and consumed in financial services to evolve with the changing needs of customers. Learn more at finastra.com.

CELENT

For over 20 years, Celent has helped senior executives make confident decisions around their technology strategies to execute at scale.

As the financial services industry rapidly evolves, there is more complexity, with new regulations, startups, technologies, and applications to stay on top of and prioritize. Celent helps you connect this ever-changing puzzle. We offer objective advice and clarity, backed by a database of thousands of solutions and award-winning global best practice use cases. With real-life domain expertise, we also guide you through the maze of emerging tech in the pursuit of value.

Our people, data, insights, and relationships form the foundation for you to use Celent to make confident technology decisions in financial services.

We are now a part of GlobalData.