Archives: Agenda

• Comparing capabilities and trade-offs between Large and Small Language Models
• Use cases in financial services: scale vs efficiency
• Future outlook: hybrid approaches and evolving model architectures

Description: The session explores how organisations need to manage cyber risk and complexity. We’ll explore the current landscape, and how digital transformation, business pressures and compliance requirements are driving ever more complex networks. We’ll look at the cost and impact of that complexity, and then how organisations can consolidate their technology stack and simplify their security through unified platforms to solve those challenges, including exploring some real world customer stories.

This forward-looking session explores how cybersecurity in financial services will evolve over the next 12–18 months. Drawing on GlobalData’s latest research, it will examine: 

• The adoption and security implications of emerging technologies – including cloud, AI, 5G, IoT, and quantum computing.
• How evolving business models and ecosystems in banking and financial services are reshaping cyber risk.
• The balance between innovation, risk, and operational resilience in an increasingly complex digital environment.

In recent years, some of the most damaging cyberattacks in Europe share a common thread – identity. As traditional defences strengthen, attackers have shifted tactics, moving away from malware and exploits toward abusing legitimate credentials, permissions, and trust relationships within enterprise environments.

This session considers how attackers use identities to navigate industry-standard defences. We’ll explore the anatomy of an identity-based attack – from initial access through to organisational-wide takeover – and highlight recurring patterns seen across European enterprises.

Today’s breaches aren’t the result of poor security but of unseen complexity. Hidden identity attack paths buried deep in Active Directory and Entra ID provide adversaries with millions of routes to critical systems.

We’ll conclude with a strategy to move from reactive defence to proactive identity risk management. By continuously mapping and removing identity attack paths, organisations can eliminate the bridges adversaries depend on.

• The real cost of “free” software and the security gaps it creates
• How technical debt in open-source stacks becomes a growing risk for financial institutions
• Why traditional “shift left” approaches are no longer enough
• What a secure-by-default model looks like and what organisations should expect from their tools and teams