AWS Financial Services Symposium Sydney

Kick off the day by picking up your badge, grabbing breakfast, and connecting with fellow attendees before sessions begin.

Keynote - Rethink Everything
Join us as we hear from John Kain, Head of Financial Services Market Development at AWS, who will introduce the event's theme: "Rethink everything." Executives from leading organisations will join John to share how they are harnessing AI to become more secure and resilient, improve the performance of their mission-critical applications, and seize new growth opportunities. Attendees will learn how AI is enabling financial institutions to fundamentally rethink how they operate their business, how they modernise their core systems, and how they connect with their customers.

Speakers:
John Kain, Head of Financial Services Market Development, AWS
Andrew McMullan, CDAIO, Westpac
Tim Whiteley, CIO, ASX
Angela Howie, Head of CSM, AWS
Paul Johnston, CEO, Tower Insurance

Pause, refuel, and reconnect — enjoy a tea break with fellow attendees between sessions.

Running AI Agents at Scale: Trust, Governance and Control in Financial Services
Join PwC and NAB for a deep dive into the agentic AI blueprint for a large, regulated financial services organisation. As more agents move into production, the challenge shifts from building them to governing them. Together we will unpack the foundational AI capabilities an enterprise needs to run agentic AI with confidence, embedding trust, accountability and observability across the agent lifecycle, so every agent stays owned, controlled and behaving as intended, even at scale.

Speakers:
Ted Bowler, Partner, PwC
Rajiv Rajah, Executive AI Technology, NAB

Agentic customers, agentic workers and agentic operations are here: are financial services ready?
Agentic AI is reshaping how banking and insurance organisations operate. As digital workers increasingly augment and automate complex processes, leading institutions are reimagining operations, decision-making and customer engagement at scale. Leaders share how they are building the data foundations, AI capabilities and operating models required to enable agentic workforces, and explore what it takes to create intelligent, adaptive and autonomous operations in the next era of financial services.

Speakers:
Abigail Holman, AI & Data Partner, Deloitte
Michael Williams, Banking and Capital Markets Lead, Deloitte
Dan Levi, Executive, Home Ownership Valuations, NAB
Kylie Bryant, NZ Partner, Deloitte

One Platform, Thousands of Agents: Mizuho's AI Strategy on AWS
Mizuho Financial Group — one of Japan's three megabanks — had an ambition to scale AI agents across the enterprise. The challenge: most teams lacked the infrastructure expertise to build, deploy, and govern agents safely at scale. Mizuho's answer — a scalable production platform on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that standardises the entire agent lifecycle. Learn how Mizuho achieved 70% faster agent development, 50% reduction in proposal preparation, and freed bankers to spend 3x more time with clients, with a roadmap to scale thousands of agents enterprise-wide.

Speakers:
Fujii Tatsuto, Chief AI Officer, Mizuho
Yuushi Saito, Assistant General Manager, Mizuho

The AI-First Insurer: How Techcom Life Transformed Life Insurance in Vietnam on AWS
Techcom Life, a subsidiary of Techcombank (one of Vietnam's largest private banks), launched as a cloud-native life insurer on AWS in 2025 and captured the No. 1 Bancassurance position in Vietnam within the first four months of 2026. In this session, Techcom Life's CEO and CIOO will share how the company leapfrogged legacy constraints by building an "AI-first" architecture from inception on AWS.

Speakers:
Ravi Senaratne, CIOO, Techcom Life
Mukesh Pilania, CEO, Techcom Life

Enjoy and reconnect over lunch — a great opportunity to discuss the morning's sessions and build new connections.

From Financial Company to AI Powerhouse : Hyundai Card on AWS
Hyundai Card, one of South Koreas leading credit card companies, didn’t follow the AI playbook — they wrote their own. They built a proprietary data and AI architecture on AWS that would see them double their customer base to 13 million, deliver industry-leading market share and spending per customer, and achieve the sector's lowest delinquency and churn rates. This session unpacks the technology decisions behind those results, the data strategy that made them possible, and Hyundai Card's vision for AI-powered financial services.

Speaker:
Kenny Bae, Executive VP, Hyundai Card

How Japan's Largest Trust Bank Protects "Trust" with Speed, Culture, and AWS
Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group, Inc. (SMTB) — Japan's largest trust bank — built their security strategy on culture first: instilling Amazon's Leadership Principles across 1,900+ engineers and consolidating nearly all security applications onto AWS. That cultural investment paid off. When financial institutions globally scrambled to address Mythos-class vulnerabilities, SMTB responded in weeks — because they had built the operational muscle to move fast with conviction. Under the CISO's leadership, multi-layered defences deploy natively within the platform and production upgrades run at a cadence most banks would consider impossible. This session reveals how culture became SMTB's strongest security control.

Speaker:
Junya Ueda, Managing Executive Officer CISO, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group, Inc.

The Age of AI: Tomorrow’s Intelligence

AI costs have fallen 10x annually and autonomous agents now handle tasks lasting hours, not minutes. And yet many enterprises are still in the early innings. In this session, Olivier explores what's powering the agentic AI revolution, where it's creating competitive opportunities across three battlegrounds - customer experience, operations, and engineering velocity - and what leaders should do now.

Speaker:
Olivier Debaillon, Head of AI ANZ, AWS

When Attackers Have Agents Too: How a CFD Broker Built Agentic Cyber Defence in Production
In May 2026, ASIC issued its "minute to midnight" warning to financial services firms on cyber resilience. For Eightcap — a regulated CFD broker serving traders globally — these weren't hypothetical risks. The security team needed to move faster than human-only SOC operations could deliver. This session reveals how Eightcap deployed agentic AI across its security operations on AWS to close the gap when offensive tooling outpaces human-speed defence. Hear what's in production today, what worked, what didn't, and how they govern autonomous security agents under ASIC and multi-jurisdiction regulatory requirements.

Speaker:
Nicholas Harman, CISO, Eightcap

Power through the afternoon — grab a tea, recharge, and gear up for the remaining sessions.

CommBank Companion: The Future of AI in Banking
Commonwealth Bank is putting AI directly into the hands of banking customers. CommBank Companion, now in testing — is a conversational AI experience inside the CommBank app — lets retail and business customers build budgets, explore home-buying scenarios, and ask natural-language questions about their finances. This session unpacks how CBA brought Companion from concept to production, including the design features and technical guardrails for safety and accuracy at scale and the phased rollout strategy — from employee testing to customer testing before a broader rollout.

Speakers:
Michael Baumann, Executive GM of Customer, Digital and AI, CBA
Alison Hobb, Financial Services Account Lead, AWS

Reimagining Dealmaking in the Era of AI
Barrenjoey recognised early that generative AI would reshape their business and moved fast to turn that conviction into production capability. In this session, Barrenjoey pulls back the curtain on their journey navigating AI governance, skills, and adoption, and why an intentional in-house capability is shaping their build-vs-buy decisions. Learn how they built an agent-ready knowledge base that connects intelligence across the firm and is already accelerating insight generation for Corporate Finance dealmaking. A practical blueprint for firms ready to move beyond experimentation.

Speakers:
Adam Julian, CTO, Barrenjoey  
Jack Ryan, Principal Corporate Finance, Barrenjoey 

What Comes Next: Six Trends Defining the Agentic AI Era
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Agentic AI has arrived — but the real question is what comes after. In this thought-provoking locknote, AWS Chief Technologist Rada Stanic reveals six key trends charting the trajectory of agentic AI, and how it’s reshaping how we build, govern, and trust intelligent systems. The organisations creating the future aren't waiting for permission. Are you?

Speaker:
Rada Stanic - Chief Technologist, AWS

Join us for closing reflections on the day's highlights, followed by a networking reception — the perfect way to wind down and build lasting connections.

Explore how AI and cloud-native infrastructure are accelerating decision-making across the trade lifecycle, from research and execution through to reconciliation, surveillance, and client advisory. In this zone, you'll experience live demos showcasing how capital markets firms and wealth managers are using AWS to distill actionable insights from vast data sets, automate complex operational workflows, and help professionals deliver personalised client outcomes at scale.

Explore how AI, agentic automation, and cloud-native services are transforming retail banking and lending, from the first customer conversation through to ongoing care. In this zone, you'll experience live demos showcasing how leading financial institutions are using AWS to reimagine the home loan journey, strengthen fraud and scam defences, streamline compliance, and deliver compassionate customer outcomes at scale.

Explore how agentic AI, modern cryptography, and cloud-native infrastructure are reshaping the payments landscape, from how consumers pay and merchants onboard, to how organisations detect fraud and process invoices. In this zone, you'll experience live demos showcasing how financial institutions and fintechs are using AWS to modernise payments rails, embed intelligence into every transaction, and prepare for a future where AI agents transact autonomously on behalf of customers and businesses.

Explore how financial institutions are deploying agentic AI at scale while maintaining the control, auditability, and regulatory compliance that prudential and conduct-risk frameworks demand. In this zone, you'll experience live demos showcasing how AWS enables provable policy enforcement, governed agent-to-agent communication, continuous quality assurance, and automated evidence generation, so you can move from AI experimentation to production with confidence.

See agentic AI in action across the insurance value chain, from underwriting and document processing through claims, customer service, and catastrophe response. In this zone, you'll experience live demos showing how AWS helps insurers automate complex decisions, run intelligent operations end to end, and stay connected to policyholders even when disaster strikes, powered by Amazon's satellite and logistics network.

Attendees will have exclusive access to curated Financial Services content developed to address current market trends, business challenges, and opportunities relevant to leaders.

No matter where you are on your AWS journey, this Symposium will provide inspiration and strategic insights tailored specifically to the opportunities and challenges within financial services. Past speakers have included executives from Ally Financial, Coinbase, Nasdaq, Moody's and many more.

The AWS Financial Services Symposium program is designed for executives of financial services firms, Director level and above.

The event will be held at Ilumina in Sydney, NSW on August 4, 2026. Please plan travel to be at Ilumina at 9:15 AEST on August 4. Core event programming will end at 17:30 AEST.

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No. Registration is complimentary and includes access to sessions, Expo, meals, and receptions.

We do not have a dedicated hotel block for this event.

No, AWS does not reimburse or validate parking or other accommodation and travel associated costs.

The dress code is business casual. We recommend smart, professional attire appropriate for a conference environment.

Yes. All attendees must be at least 18 years of age on the day they pick up their conference badge.     

Please be prepared to present a valid government-issued ID at check-in.

AWS expects all participants (attendees, staff, speakers, sponsors, etc.) to comply with the Code of Conduct and behave in such a way as to create a safe, supportive environment while at the conference and any conference-related events. Review the full Code of Conduct here.

No. We do not offer continuing or professional education credits, or a certificate of attendance.

You will receive a QR code wihin the week of the event to expedite your check-in. Note that your registration may be placed on a waitlist. You will be notified if and when you are released from the waitlist.

The event agenda will be updated on this site and posted in the AWS Events App, which launches the week of the event.

No. Space in the keynote hall is limited and registering forr this event does not guarantee keynote access. The keynote will be livestreamed in breakout rooms to accommodate overflow seating.

No, there is no reserved seating. Please arrive early to sessions you are interested in seeing.

All sessions will offer live captioning and the keynote will offer sign language. Accessible restrooms will be available, as well as accessible seating during meals.

Yes, please email us at mdelmot@amazon.com to share dietary needs no later than 14 business days before the event.

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