May 12, 2025
The pace of change in financial services shows no signs of slowing down. With rising customer expectations, fierce competition and increasing regulatory pressure, leaders are being challenged to deliver smarter, faster and more resilient digital services.
We recently brought together a group of senior technology and business leaders from across Australia’s financial services sector for a focused discussion on how organisations are navigating this complex landscape. Held in Sydney in collaboration with the executive leadership network Factor, our roundtable discussion explored how organisations are implementing artificial intelligence and emerging technologies for sustainable growth.
Here are some of the insights we heard from the expert tech leaders about their real-world experiences in this fast-moving landscape.
AI remains top of the tech agenda in many organisations. But interestingly the conversation around how to utilise AI effectively and maximise its value has evolved significantly in the past 12 months.
Last year, while the AI hype remained sky-high, financial organisations were excited about its potential to accelerate change with many experimenting and implementing it quickly. But when AI failed to deliver, most blamed the emerging technology itself, rather than the underlying data or foundational elements.
Now, this experimental, try-it-and-see-what-happens approach has given way to a much more business-focused mindset. Leaders are now eager to unlock the real business value of AI by first putting the vital foundational elements to succeed in place – starting with quality data platforms that enable real-time access to accurate, well-structured, usable data.
Leaders also want to be more strategic in their approach to implementing AI across the organisation. Key questions they are looking to answer as they shape the future of AI in their business include:
In particular, many organisations are looking to AI to reduce operational costs and gain a competitive edge by accelerating the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), reflecting what my colleague Phil Parker has recently heard from tech leaders in Europe. Implementing AI within software development in a way that is both responsible and delivers value is clearly a global challenge.
During the Sydney roundtable discussion, we looked at the role of AI agents and how they offer a steel thread from strategy to execution with the design and delivery of AI, enabling transformational change at pace, accelerated initiatives and augmented expertise.
Within software delivery, we’ve strived to use and optimise the design and delivery feedback loop to create better software faster, with each journey around the loop improving our SDLC. With AI we can accelerate this even further, supporting all aspects of the sprint planning and backlog grooming process in 6 key themes:
Transformation design and strategic alignment
Delivery engineering and build management
The insights and learnings gathered through the process then flow back to the start to inform the design and alignment of the next iteration or a future AI initiative.
A final discussion point was the importance of finding the right support in unlocking the value of AI and navigating digital transformation journeys. There was universal agreement from the leaders in the room that they are being asked to do more with less, whether that’s in terms of fewer people, reduced budgets or tighter timescales.
Leaders are looking beyond their existing partners to tackle these challenges as traditional vendor-supplier relationships are no longer offering the proactive support and value they need in the current landscape. To sustain innovation while reducing long-term costs, financial organisations need to work with organisations that understand their current challenges and are prepared to support them by “doing more with less” themselves. This is especially true as AI continues to disrupt and challenge existing ways of doing things. Many organisations are stating they are using AI to transform businesses but being able to demonstrate real-world value from initiatives is much less common.
For Equal Experts, we’ve built our reputation by demonstrating how we do more with less. We are values-driven, trusted technology partners, providing more than just people who code and build tech. With more experience than other consultancies and a focus on client outcomes over our own short-term interests, we can assign smaller, more expert teams who can solve problems faster, upskill internal teams and deliver value at a lower overall cost to our clients.
Thanks to everyone who attended our roundtable event and shared their expert insights with us – it’s incredibly clear that the world is moving fast and those who haven’t begun their digital and AI transformation journey are already falling behind.
At Equal Experts, we’re embracing Responsible AI Delivery. That means helping our clients navigate this shift and take advantage of the opportunity without falling into the traps of hype, endless POCs, or major AI product and engineering failures. We avoid context-free claims and focus on using AI to deliver faster time to (sustainable) value, at lower cost.
Responsible. Reliable. Robust.
If you’re ready to lay the foundations for effective AI adoption and explore how Agentic AI-enabled delivery can uplift your technology productivity contact me today and book a complimentary 30-minute AI use-case validation discovery.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
