Day 1
08:45-10:00
Registration & Networking
Start the day by meeting the people you’ll be learning alongside. Early conversations, familiar faces, and a few new connections before things get going.
08:30-09:25
Women in Tech Breakfast
A staple at CTO Craft Con events, this is a space for women in technology leadership to come together, share experiences, and build meaningful connections with others who get it.
10:00-10:05
Chair’s Opening Remarks
We’ll open the day by bringing everyone together. A quick welcome, a look at what’s ahead, and how to get the most out of the event.
10:05-10:35
Keynote – The Inevitability of Tech Debt
Every fintech carries it. The decisions made at speed in year one, the shortcuts taken to hit a compliance deadline, the architecture that made sense before you scaled. The question isn’t whether you have tech debt. It’s whether you’re leading it or it’s leading you.
Harry Jell has co-founded and scaled a regulated credit card business from scratch. He’ll share what it actually looks like to manage rewrites and accumulating debt inside a business where regulators, investors, and customers all have a stake in your platform staying stable.
10:35-11:05
Building 10x Organisations Using Modern Productivity Metrics
10x developers may be a myth, but 10x organisations are very real, as proven by the influential study performed in the 1980s, ‘The Coding War Games.’ This session will take a detailed, granular look at the barriers to productivity developers face today and modern approaches for removing them.
You’ll learn about the history of productivity theory, and how previous practices have influenced our current understanding. DevOps and Platform Engineering philosophy is clearly converging on developer experience.
But which of these approaches works? DORA? SPACE? DevEx? What should we invest in and create urgency behind today so we don’t have the same discussion again in a decade?
11:05-11:30
Your Architecture Is Your Ceiling
AI is brilliant when helping with your newest services and sometimes next-to-useless in your oldest. That’s not a tooling problem, and no amount of prompt engineering will make it go away.
The reason is structural. AI leverage depends on loose coupling – twice over. Boundaries contain the blast radius of a mistake, but a well-bounded domain is the natural unit of AI comprehension. Where those boundaries are missing, AI can understand your system but you can’t trust its changes. In a regulated environment, change without verifiable safety is worth very little.
The good news: AI leverage unlocks domain by domain, the moment each one crosses the loose-coupling threshold. AI hasn’t made architecture optional. Architecture is now the whole game.
11:30-12:00
Coffee & Recharge Break
A quick reset before diving back in. Stretch your legs, continue conversations, or meet someone new.
12:00-12:25
The Parts That Stay Human
AI-first development has fundamentally changed both halves of your engineering organisation. First, Hywel will examine your role as a leader, focusing on the aspects that should never be automated away. Second, he will look at the shifting reality for your engineers as they transition from individual contributors to architects and system orchestrators. Join us to learn what makes the difference between high and low expertise with AI for engineers, what areas leaders must lean into, and how to empower your team to exploit AI’s full potential without losing the heart of your organisation.
12:25-12:50
One Fintech Platform, New Wrapper: Extending Core Infrastructure Into Cash ISAs
For its first decade, Flagstone was a single-product company: one platform, £20bn in assets under administration. Then we targeted the Cash ISA, a £360bn market largely untouched by innovation since its creation.
This talk covers what it takes to launch a second product on top of a platform you can’t afford to break: the architectural trade-offs, the constraints that shaped our technical decisions, and the specific bets we made to support growth from £20bn to £50bn.
If you’re scaling a fintech beyond its first product, these are the decisions you’ll face too.
12:50-13:15
Self-Serve Analytics: Dream. Reality. What Actually Changed
For a decade, self-serve analytics promised to put data in everyone’s hands. Then AI arrived and promised to finish the job. But the uncomfortable truth is that neither changes what actually matters: without solid data foundations, you don’t get insights or better decisions, you just get faster access to the wrong answers. This talk unpacks what the last ten years have actually taught us, what AI genuinely changes and what it doesn’t, and what it really takes to turn data access into decisions that stick.
13:15-14:25
Networking Lunch
A quick reset before diving back in. Stretch your legs, continue conversations, or meet someone new.
14:25-14:50
The New Bottleneck: Why Verification Is the Real Competitive Edge in AI-Assisted Engineering
AI has solved the wrong problem. Individual developer velocity is up, but company velocity isn’t keeping pace. Teams using AI open roughly twice as many pull requests. Review time climbs. Bugs and production incidents follow.
Writing code was never the constraint. Verifying it was.
Using AI is no longer a differentiator. The teams that pull ahead are the ones who harness that speed without sacrificing correctness. In a regulated environment where FCA, PRA, and DORA set the bar on operational resilience, verification isn’t a tax on speed. It’s what lets the whole business move faster.
Leave with a clear argument for where verification deserves investment, and where to start.
14:50-15:15
The Self-Healing Bank: Turning customer and operational signals into an agentic engineering pipeline – from raw signal to proposed change.
Xapo Bank is building a single, ambitious capability: every signal, wherever it comes from, flows into one agentic engineering pipeline that turns it into a proposed change – a fix, an improvement, or a better experience.
Kamil will share how they channel signals from two directions into the same automated loop. From customers: app store reviews, Trustpilot, support conversations, feature and UX requests and more, flowing automatically into the engineering backlog and onward into AI-proposed pull requests. From inside the bank: production anomaly detection, analytics and incidents that trigger automated root-cause analysis, proposed changes, and first-draft post-incident reports ready for human sign-off.
The result is a bank that increasingly detects, explains, and improves itself – turning scattered feedback and operational signals into engineering action. He’ll walk through the architecture behind it, the wins, and the hard lessons from building it for real.
15:15-15:40
Replacing the Engine While the Business Keeps Moving
Replacing a legacy system is difficult enough. Replacing one that still needs to support a global business every day is another challenge entirely.
At BlackRock, Sandra Clarke is leading a high-performance legacy replacement across globally distributed teams, with no opportunity to pause the system while the work takes place. She’ll explore the leadership, alignment and delivery challenges involved in modernising critical technology while keeping the business moving.
Full session details coming soon.
15:40-16:10
Coffee & Recharge Break
A quick reset before diving back in. Stretch your legs, continue conversations, or meet someone new.
16:10-17:25
Breakouts
Choose from four interactive sessions designed around peer discussion and practical participation. These are not presentations where you sit back and listen. Each session will be guided by an experienced moderator or facilitator, with attendees invited to share their own challenges, experiences and ideas. Come ready to join the conversation.
Breakout 1
Leadership in AI-Assisted Engineering
To realise meaningful returns on AI investments, leadership must take accountability and ownership of establishing best practices, enabling engineers, measuring ROI and impact, optimising spend, and ensuring proper guardrails are in place.
When prompting practice and reflexive AI use is driven from the top down, engineers can align on the highest value use cases and experience peak productivity gains. When coupled with DX’s AI Measurement Framework, leaders can gain a clear picture of AI’s true impact, identify the real bottlenecks in the SDLC that can be augmented with AI, and drive improvement. Leaders will be able to juxtapose increasing costs with new value realisation, to discover and improve impediments to readiness and effectiveness with AI.
In this session, Justin will walk the room through what the most effective leaders of AI-enabled engineering organisations are doing to drive satisfactory utilisation, augmentation, and psychological safety across their teams. You will leave with a framework you can apply to your own organisation immediately.
Breakout 2
AI Governance in FinTech: Lessons from the Field
AI is spreading across engineering teams fast. In financial services, the governance layer hasn’t kept up – and most organisations know it. In this session, Coder’s EMEA Field CTO Eric Paulsen shares what he’s seeing on the ground: the AI governance frameworks that are working in FinTech, the gaps that keep appearing, and what it takes to think clearly about a production-ready operating model in a regulated environment.
Then the room takes over. Table discussions, peer sharing, and a group debrief – because the most useful perspectives here are each other’s. You’ll leave with a clearer view of where your organisation stands, and what to do about it.
Breakout 3
Creating Your Personal User Guide
You have written documentation for every product you have ever shipped. Yet the people you lead and work with have to reverse-engineer you: how you make decisions, how you like to receive feedback, what you look like under pressure. They usually learn it slowly, and often by getting it wrong first.
This session fixes that. A Personal User Guide is the README for you as a leader. It is a short, honest document that tells the people around you who you are, not just how to work with you. Done well, it shrinks the time it takes to build trust with a new report, peer, or stakeholder from months down to a single conversation. For people who have worked with you for years, you’ll be surprised at how much they didn’t know about you.
This is not a session you sit through. You will work on and leave with a first draft of your own guide. Drawing on years of facilitating human-centred leadership for some of the world’s most influential brands and evaluating thousands of founders as an early-stage investor, Andy shares the exact framework he uses to build trusted relationships quickly.
Breakout 4
Paralysed by Progress: How CTOs Are Navigating the Age of Everything, All at Once
The pace of change has never been faster, and the pressure to keep up has never been louder. AI pivots, new stacks, shifting regulation, competitors making bold bets that may or may not pay off. This roundtable gets honest about what it actually feels like to lead through that noise: what CTOs are actively chasing, what they’re consciously ignoring, and what they simply can’t afford to get wrong. How do you filter the signal from the noise? How do you maintain technical stability and team confidence when the landscape shifts every quarter? What do you deprioritise—and how do you defend that call?
We don’t need any polished case studies. Just honest conversation about decision-making under relentless pressure, the strategies, the pivots, and the things they wish they’d known sooner.
17:25-20:25
Afterparty
After a full day of ideas and discussion, join us at Tank & Paddle to unwind over food, drinks, games and a little friendly competition. It’s a relaxed chance to continue the conversations from the day and connect with fellow attendees.
Day 2
08:15-09:30
Registration & Coffee
Start the day by meeting the people you’ll be learning alongside. Early conversations, familiar faces, and a few new connections before things get going.
08:15-09:15
CTO Breakfast
Join us for breakfast and start day 2 in the strongest possible way by tackling a real challenge facing you in your leadership role and supporting your fellow technology leaders with theirs.
CTOs and senior engineering leaders often face challenging roles where advice and support can be difficult to find.
In this interactive breakfast session, you’ll engage in a Troika Consulting exercise, sharing a real-world professional challenge with a small group. Peers will offer fresh perspectives, experiences, and advice, giving you a clear insight into the CTO Craft Circles experience and the benefits of support, new ideas, and increased resilience while meaningfully extending your network in the CTO Craft Community here at the Conference.
Please note this is a limited-capacity session and requires pre-registration. Attendees will be sent information about how to register ahead of the event.
09:30-09:35
Chair’s Opening Remarks
Building on the conversations, ideas, and connections from yesterday. A quick look at what’s ahead, and how to make the most of your final day at CTO Craft Con.
09:35-10:05
Keynote – Moving Towards Self-Optimising Products
Your product is gaining traction! Now the problem becomes how to automatically deliver a better experience to more customers, in more contexts, across more of your product. Solving this requires a different approach to product development.
Steve Martin has built and delivered intelligent products in multiple industries. He’ll walk through a holistic example of how to make this transition in a product engineering organisation, starting with how to make problems accessible to ML optimisation, and extending through ways of working and technical implementation.
10:05-10:30
Keynote – DORA x DORA: Where Engineering Excellence & Compliance Meet
DORA means very different things depending on who you ask. In one world, it’s about engineering performance: how quickly and safely teams can deliver change. In another, it’s about operational resilience: how well an organisation understands risk, withstands disruption, and proves it can stay in control.
The goal of this talk is to build a bridge between the two whys of the two DORAs. For example, what’s the difference between reliability as an engineering performance metric and reliability as a compliance obligation? And what’s the difference between fast recovery as a sign of high-performing delivery and recovery as a regulatory expectation? Maybe these are closer than they first appear. Both are asking whether we can change systems without breaking trust, and whether we can recover when things go wrong.
So the question becomes: can we design workflows where good engineering naturally creates the evidence compliance needs? Can we move from “compliance is an engineering drag” to “compliance is part of normal, acceleration-friendly engineering”?
10:30-10:55
Transformation By Design: why AI forced us to rethink product development from the ground up
AI promised to make engineering teams faster. What it actually did was expose every assumption we’d made about how product development works.
At Funding Circle, the UK’s leading SME finance platform, we didn’t just adopt AI tooling — we found ourselves rethinking the ways of working between product management and engineering, how we write and validate requirements, how we structure squads, and how we govern AI adoption across the organisation.
This talk is an honest account of that journey: what broke first, what we redesigned, and how we’re using an AI guild to scale learnings across the org. If you’re past the pilot stage and wondering how to make AI transformation stick, this is the session for you.
10:55-11:25
Coffee & Recharge Break
A quick pause to reset and dive back into conversations that are already flowing.
11:25-11:50
Agile, Metrics, AI… Does nothing work?
How missing pieces make everything look broken. When people started painting the walls of caves, they provided us with solid advice about software delivery that our industry forgets about once every 5 years. This session will look at why trendy software revolutions never materialise into real benefits if those old ideas are missings
11:50-12:35
Panel – AI Wrote the Code. Who’s Checking It Before It Touches Money?
In fintech, code moves customer money and sits in front of regulators. AI now writes a growing share of it, and your engineers have less context on what shipped. Your risk team already asks the obvious question: does that mean more risk in the systems you’re accountable for?
CFOs want proof the AI spend pays off. CEOs want every team using it now, before competitors move first.
This panel will discuss how they validate AI-generated code before it reaches a regulated environment, how they measure its value without losing CFO trust, and how they brief the board on AI adoption while staying audit ready.
12:35-13:00
Culture is What you Reward
Engineering leaders invest time in defining values, refining processes, and building culture. But what truly shapes how an organisation behaves where things are in flux?
In the daily work rhythm, subtle signals send powerful messages. Who gets recognized? Which ideas are celebrated? What happens when someone pushes back? How do leaders respond when priorities collide?
Through stories from engineering leadership, this talk will explore the often overlooked moments that shape culture every day and why they are more influential than we realize.
13:00-14:10
Networking Lunch
A quick reset before diving back in. Stretch your legs, continue conversations, or meet someone new.
14:10-14:35
Always On, Not Burnt Out: Resilience for Fintech Leaders
Fintech moves fast, but sustained performance depends on leaders who can manage pressure without passing stress, fear, and overload to their teams. This talk explores how resilience, emotional intelligence, and practical burnout prevention help fintech leaders stay effective in high-change, high-demand environments. It covers how to reduce friction, build trust, improve decision-making under pressure, and create the conditions for healthier performance and stronger adoption of new ways of working, including AI. The session also includes a practical mindfulness exercise, giving the audience a tangible tool they can use immediately to reset, refocus, and lead with greater clarity and calm.
14:35-15:00
The Missing Vault: The Platform Controls Every AI System Needs
A customer reports a suspicious AI response. The investigation finds no breach, no compromised model, and no infrastructure failure, yet something critical is missing. Through the story of a fictional fintech incident, this session explores the platform controls needed to safely scale AI in regulated environments, introducing the seven “vaults” that protect data, identity, secrets, policies, prompts, decisions, and auditability. The central idea is simple: most AI incidents aren’t model failures, they’re platform failures.
15:00-15:30
Coffee & Recharge Break
A quick pause to reset and dive back into conversations that are already flowing.
15:30-16:45
Breakouts
Choose from three interactive sessions designed around peer discussion and practical participation. These are not presentations where you sit back and listen. Each session will be guided by an experienced moderator or facilitator, with attendees invited to share their own challenges, experiences and ideas. Come ready to join the conversation.
Breakout 1
Who Owns What? Org Design for Engineering Teams That Deliver
How you structure your engineering teams is a strategic decision, not an operational one. Reporting lines, squad boundaries, and ownership models all shape how fast your organisation can move and how much coordination overhead it carries. This session is a peer conversation for senior technology leaders on the structural decisions that accelerate delivery and the ones that quietly slow it down.
Facilitator coming soon
Breakout 2
When Probably Isn’t Good Enough: Managing AI Risk in Fintech and Financial Services
It seems like generative AI is everywhere, but systems that are probabilistic by design sit awkwardly in an industry built on audit trails, consumer duty, and accountability for decisions. We need to worry about hallucinations, silent errors, prompt injection, data leakage, and model drift in an industry where every decision requires evidence and a reason. Join this breakout to work through where AI risk actually concentrates, and what it takes to move fast without leaving the company exposed.
– Map where the real risks sit, from technical failure modes to those that threaten regulatory compliance and consumer duty
– Discuss which controls hold up in production — evaluation, guardrails, human oversight, auditability — and where each of them breaks down
– Share what you and your peers are doing to put AI into regulated workflows while keeping the results trustworthy
– Explore whether new technologies and explainable AI are on the horizon or a pipe dream
Breakout 3
Beyond the Incident Report: Building Resilience Before the Regulator Asks
DORA makes operational resilience a regulatory obligation, not just good practice. But most engineering teams are still treating it as an incident management problem rather than a design problem. This session gets into what resilience actually requires at the platform and team level, and how fintech engineering leaders are building it in from the start rather than bolting it on after an audit.
Facilitator coming soon
16:45
Chair’s Closing Remarks
After two days of practical insights, honest conversations and new connections, our Chair will bring CTO Craft Con: Fintech 2026 to a close with a recap of the key themes and final reflections from across the event.