Agile ideas and practices have their roots in IT software development and only recently developed into a school of thought for general management. On the other end of the spectrum, IT operation units in banks have stayed as stronghold of process focus, specialisation and top-down KPIs. In this presentation, the speaker will provide some experience from Erste on how to make IT operations flexible, interesting for employees and provide more value to customers – without endangering stability.

• Agile, software, operations, banks
• Why operations are “different”
• Systemic challenges: Stability, specialisation, silos
• The way out – Practices & experience: Error culture, SRE, XFT, self-selecting teams

The pace of change in the banking industry in South East Europe has increased significantly due to COVID-19. Is the change sustainable? What does the future look like in the region?

• Profile in the banking industry in SEE 6
• Banks: The solution or the problem?
• Customer behaviour changes as a result of COVID-19
• SEE banking by 2023

The journey towards digitalisation can be an arduous one. For digitalisation to succeed, we need to ensure we have the buy-in of all stakeholders. Maintaining this may be harder than originally perceived, especially when the capability trap kicks in.

Why blockchain payment networks have not become the de facto standard for Payment Market Infrastructures? Is the problem related to adoption of the technology for this use case? Are we too early in the evolution life cycle for this to be feasible? We will explore some of the opportunities and challenges related to this.

• What are the current realities
• Which current barriers to entry exist
• Which industry forces are creating a case for change
• Which timelines do we see as realistic to achieve this