Tomi Popoola is an acclaimed FinTech speaker and one of the most dynamic voices in the Finance & Banking Speakers circuit. With a strong background in data science and software engineering, Tomi sits at the intersection of financial innovation and emerging technology.
From AI-powered fraud detection to cloud-enabled financial inclusion, she is helping shape a more accessible, efficient, and intelligent financial ecosystem.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Tomi unpacks the evolving role of artificial intelligence and cloud computing in the FinTech space—and explains how businesses can strategically harness these tools to scale faster, serve smarter, and stay ahead of the curve.
Q: In what specific ways has artificial intelligence transformed the financial services sector, particularly in areas like accessibility, risk management, and personalisation?
Tomi Popoola: I’ll say it’s shaped it for the past few decades, and it’s made huge progress. So, when you think about artificial intelligence and machine learning at the same time, right, you would see the huge leaps that the financial sector has made and how it’s grown.
Examples could be fraud detection. You find small businesses are able to do fraud detection a lot earlier—so helping, one, the end users but also their businesses as well.
Another thing is access. Access is a huge thing, because previously, without AI and ML, you wouldn’t find that people in, you know, underserved countries have more access to certain financial services. So, it’s provided access.
When you think about credit scoring—we typically used to use traditional data credit scoring or the traditional methods—but now we have alternatives brought in because of new data, new data sets being brought in, new perspectives to look at.
But then also you can look at tailored financial decisions—so both financial decisions as well as financial services and solutions for people. Because now that we have more access to data, now that we’re using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can easily tailor certain solutions to people.
Because of this, when you’re increasing your customer base, you’re increasing the innovation of the financial sector—but also making sure that the limits are endless and the possibilities are endless.
So, I’ll say it has shaped it from where it started, it’s currently shaping it, but there’s still a huge growth aspect out there that is yet to be tapped into. Being able to leverage AI in the perfect way for certain scenarios would definitely help this—as it already has been helping.
Q: How can fintech companies strategically implement AI to optimise operations, boost customer retention, and drive measurable ROI?
Tomi Popoola: What I’ll say is that, in terms of harnessing the benefits, you need to think about your business. You need to think about the benefit it can bring to your business and your end users. If you don’t think about it that way, it could be very counterintuitive otherwise.
So, first of all, what does your business lack? And then, how can you make your business more efficient? But then also, how can you turn that into return customers, customer satisfaction—but also increasing and improving your ROI?
An example of this could be—say you’re a business that deals with customers. So you’re a B2C business, right? What you can think of is, “Okay, my customers could possibly have questions,” or they could need to speak to certain agents or customer service.
Then you could build a pre-programmed chatbot. A pre-programmed chatbot could have different answers to your FAQs, or different recently asked questions or disputes that you could help solve.
What that does—it’s a two-way thing. From an internal perspective, that could reduce your operational, administrative overhead, the number of people being sent to actual agents or human agents.
But then also, from your customer’s perspective, that could increase the customer satisfaction—making that process more efficient and then wanting to actually come back to use your service, buy your service—depending on what that looks like.
So again, it could cut their waiting time and solve those disputes. That’s just one example. Another could be personalised experiences, better decision-making—so when it comes to lending, things like that.
So I think one thing, when it comes to how businesses can harness the technical benefits, is actually looking at data being power—when used correctly.
Q: What role has cloud computing played in democratising access to advanced technologies like generative AI, and how has it accelerated innovation across the fintech ecosystem?
Tomi Popoola: I think this is one question that I love, because when you actually think about innovation and you think of creativity, you actually think about the cloud a lot more than what people would say.
Because prior to the cloud, we had on-premise data centres. What this meant was that it was very, very hard for small businesses to actually survive. You need your servers, you need your databases, so you’re going to have to go and buy these things—basically—which could be very expensive, and you can easily start to incur technical debt.
Now, with the cloud, what that does is virtualises all of this, and you’re basically paying for the service as you’re using it. This allows for more innovation a lot quicker.
So, one—you have small businesses that can easily pay for this per-user subscription for their technological usage. But then also, you have quick learning and quick innovation without technical debt.
Take generative AI as an example. The cloud has provided access to generative AI, so you can easily scale generative AI. You can build LLMs, you can build models, you can scale them, you can deploy them—and this allows for a lot of quick growth, but then also for market competition.
Previously, to be able to do things like this would cost so much money that small businesses could not afford. And also, large businesses as well could not afford to just maybe put all their eggs in one basket.
But the cloud has created this concept of two-way door decisions, where you can innovate. And if that didn’t work out for you, it doesn’t work out for you—you can come back from that. But then also, you can easily scale. You can serve large amounts of customers and learn new things at the same time.
So when you think about continuous integration, when you think about CI/CD, when you think about robotics, when you think about containerisation—but then also even things as basic as being able to create your own website—right? So many of these have been made possible in modern day because of the cloud.
This exclusive interview with Tomi Popoola was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
