Across 47 sessions on the Festival and Club Stage, the programme reflected the current priorities of the industry – from artificial intelligence and embedded finance to regulation, investment strategies, and new market structures. With contributions from established financial institutions, fintech scale-ups, investors, and policymakers, the festival fostered dialogue across sectors and borders.

Across keynotes and panel discussions at FIBE 2026, AI, particularly the rapid emergence of agentic systems, stood out as the defining force reshaping financial services and technology. The dominant narrative across sessions was a clear shift from experimentation to execution: while AI is lowering barriers to entry and accelerating innovation, it is simultaneously raising expectations around performance, scalability, and regulatory readiness. As Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO at Taktile, summarised: “2026 will be the year where AI comes to financial services. The technology is there and the models are now outperforming humans at complex tasks. This underscores the sense that the industry is entering a new phase of practical deployment rather than theoretical potential.”

A recurring theme was the broad, system-level impact of agentic AI across the entire financial value chain. This included both customer-facing transformation and internal operational redesign. In this context, Yorick Naeff, CIO at ABN AMRO, said: “we believe that agentic AI will significantly disrupt the banking space on both sides of the fence, so from the client’s perspective and from the company’s perspective,” highlighting the dual nature of the shift currently underway across banking and fintech.

At the infrastructure level, speakers emphasised that the foundations of an agentic economy are already forming, even if not yet fully visible in end-user products. As Efi Pylarinou, Global Fintech Thought Leader, explains: “A lot of primitives are built for the agentic economy, enabling agentic financial services starting with payments. You might not be hearing about them because they're primitives and they are not yet connected. I expect that we will get the bits of the puzzle together sooner rather than later. This reflects a broader view that the enabling layers for AI-driven financial services are being built as we speak despite lacking regulations and standardized governance structures.”

Taken together, the discussions converged on a central insight: AI is not only transforming what financial services can do, but fundamentally changing how success is achieved. In this new environment, execution has become the key differentiator, determining which institutions are able to translate technological capability into scalable, compliant, and customer-facing impact, while ensuring robust risk management, auditability, and regulatory alignment in an increasingly AI-native financial ecosystem.

Beyond the stage programme, FIBE continued to function as a working platform for the industry. Networking formats, partner spaces and mentoring sessions enabled direct interaction between startups, financial institutions, investors and regulators.

Early feedback from the visitor survey indicates a consistently high level of overall satisfaction, with top-box scores remaining above 90%, in line with previous years. The data also points to a continued increase in audience quality, with a higher share of respondents from C-level and senior management roles compared to previous editions. Early feedback indicates that networking was the most important driver for attendance (66.8%), followed by the programme (33.6%).

“The goal of FIBE is to create a space where conversations lead to collaboration,” said Lisa Dally, FIBE project lead. “What we continue to see is that the value of the festival is defined less by individual formats and more by the quality of exchange across them. The strong focus on networking, combined with an increasingly senior audience, reflects that FIBE is becoming a place where industry stakeholders come not just to listen, but to engage and build connections that extend beyond the event itself.”

By bringing together stakeholders from across Europe and beyond, FIBE reinforced Berlin’s role as a central meeting point for Europe’s finance and technology ecosystem. The combination of startups, established financial institutions and international investors continues to define the city’s relevance within the European landscape. This positioning was also reflected in the on-site experience and quality of exchange. As Romain Grimal, BlackFin, noted: “FIBE has, in my view, firmly established itself as the pan-European flagship conference for fintech. The lounge area was particularly strong this year. People came to us, conversations emerged organically, and many told me how positively surprised they were by FIBE. Especially because it is ‘human-sized’ – in contrast to the large industrial trade fairs around the world.”

The next edition of the FIBE fintech & finance festival will take place on April 7 and 8, 2027 at CityCube Berlin.

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Press photos and impressions from FIBE 2026 are available via: Media library FIBE Berlin

About Messe Berlin
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About Berlin Finance Initiative
The Berlin Finance Initiative (BFI) sees itself as the umbrella of Berlin's fintech ecosystem, uniting traditional banks and fintech companies. As the voice of Berlin's finance and technology industry, the BFI actively advocates for its diverse interests and strengthens ties to global markets. The BFI is a proud partner of de:hub FinTech Berlin and Germany Finance and was founded in 2020 by Achim Oelgarth and Caroline Wahl.