Ep 57: Rebuilding a Bank in the Age of AI:
Inside Emirates NBD’s transformation
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What does it really take to rebuild a bank from the inside out-without breaking it, and without losing what made it trusted in the first place?
In this episode of Money Majlis, Suvo Sarkar sits down with his former colleague and co architect of Emirates NBD’s transformation, Miguel Rio Tinto, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer at Emirates NBD. Together, they revisit an eight year journey that turned a commercially strong but technologically constrained bank into one of the region’s most advanced digital institutions, and now a live testbed for large scale AI in financial services.
Miguel takes us inside the AED 1 billion technology overhaul that rebuilt Emirates NBD on a cloud native, software defined foundation, from private cloud and consolidated core banking to a modern data platform and a 2,300 strong engineering organisation working in cross functional tribes. He is candid about what went wrong along the way, including the tense August 2020 core migration in the middle of Covid, and the hard decisions the executive team had to make to sacrifice short term innovation for long term resilience. This is transformation without the PowerPoint gloss, told by the person who had to live with the risk every day.
The conversation delves into what Miguel calls the most striking technology wave of his career: generative and agentic AI. He explains how Emirates NBD is moving beyond pilots to industrialised AI, from sanctions screening and transaction monitoring to conversational servicing and large scale deployment of AI engineering tools that are already changing the economics of software development inside the bank. He is explicit about which roles may disappear, how productivity is being measured, and why he now trusts properly guided AI generated code more than traditional hand written code.
Suvo and Miguel also tackle open banking in the UAE, embedded finance and digital assets with unusual honesty. Miguel lays out why Emirates NBD wants to be both the region’s best embedded bank and its best direct to customer digital bank, how he thinks about tokenisation and stablecoins beyond the hype, and why ecosystem strategy only matters if it creates genuine network effects rather than a collection of pilots.
Finally, they zoom out to cybersecurity, regulation and the global leaderboard in banking technology. Miguel shares what keeps him up at night, what a modern threat model looks like and why he still believes well prepared incumbents will come out of the AI era stronger than they went in. It is a combination of ambition, humility and optimism-about UAE, about technology, and about banking’s ability to reinvent itself in the next decade-that makes this conversation both strategic and surprisingly human.
Produced by : Poddster
Giving partner : Goodworld
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