Most banks partner with fintechs to innovate. Commercial Bank International decided to build its own innovation arm from scratch. CBI’s arm launched as an independent unit inside a traditional bank, moving at startup speed on AI, Web3, tokenised assets, and even gaming finance. Joining me is Giovanni Everduin, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at CBI and Co-Founder of the innovation arm. Giovanni, why build your own instead of just partnering?
We still partner with fintechs — that model did not change. But what we realised is that partnering with a fintech as a bank is prohibitively more difficult than when you build a separate entity that has a very different setup, organisational structure, and risk appetite. We tried innovation within the bank — and many people have tried that in highly regulated environments. The thing that makes a regulated, listed environment really good at what it does tends to also make innovation very difficult — for good reason. So if we really want to try new things, the calculated risks we need to take — we cannot and should not do that within the bank. So we set up the arm as a separate entity, raised through CBI, owned by the bank, with a separate licence and a separate team. Its mandate is fundamentally different. Its risk appetite statement can be very different from the bank. And as and when we have tried and proven use cases there, we can take them back to the bank at a more mature state.
What has actually changed in institutional adoption of digital assets in the last year?
The suits are here. When I started going to these conferences, it was hoodies and t-shirts. We were recently at Token 2049 in Singapore. It used to be t-shirts and hoodies — I would say now it is 80% suits. That is the most visible signal. The institutional players are here.
AI can do incredible things in financial services. Where do humans still need to stay in charge?
When you deal with people’s money and their livelihood, the central bank of the UAE has rightfully rolled out considerations for banks to put in place when they use AI. AI is technically capable of doing these things, but you need humans in the loop to validate assumptions and avoid bias — because while both a person and an AI can have a bias, the long-tail impact of a model is much bigger. It can impact 50,000 decisions at once. For our work with banks in this region, we are assisting decision-making, not automating it.
You described yourself as obsessively intellectually curious. Is that a superpower in banking?
Answers have become free — but questions have become the currency. If answers are free but questions are the currency, my concern for us as humanity is that we will become lazy. The way to think about it: you can drive a forklift that lets you carry heavy weight, but it does not make you stronger. Being AI-native is knowing how to operate a forklift. Being intellectually curious is going to the gym. I think it is a superpower — as long as I apply that curiosity to other people’s problems. If I go down my own rabbit holes, which I tend to do, I can be quite annoying.
Is the biggest challenge to innovation culture or technology?
Culture first and foremost — legacy mindsets. People are overworked and busy. Curiosity is a luxury that requires mental space. That is one reason why we set up the arm separately — it operates on a Silicon Valley startup culture, and we hope pieces of that can flow back into the bank slowly. But technology should not be underestimated either. Legacy systems, API quality, data availability — there are many reasons innovation is hard.
What does CBI’s innovation arm look like in two years?
If we do a good job — there is no innovation arm. There is just CBI. The notion of the ability to innovate, the willingness, the systems, the structures, the culture — all of that embedded in the bank. Setting up the arm was a countermeasure to an existing situation. Its purpose should be to make itself redundant. The biggest compliment I would get is people in the bank knocking on our door saying — can you help us with this? Right now we are going to them. The moment we have more requests than we can fulfil, we have done a great job.
Thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thank you for having me.
