Talk to anyone in technology today and AI is likely to be top of the agenda, with endless debate about what the latest tools can do for your business. Pinar Kurekci, CTO of digital-first Lidion Bank, takes a more measured approach to AI, however. Rather than adopting new technology simply to chase trends, she believes the priority should be understanding where it can genuinely add value.

“We shouldn't be asking how much AI we can adopt. The better question is how can we use AI to bring tangible benefits?” she says. “Technology shouldn't be adopted just because it's fashionable. It should solve a real problem.”

That pragmatism is arguably rooted in Pinar's own career journey. A computer engineer by training, she spent her first 20 years working with technology companies where engineers had considerable freedom to experiment, test ideas and change direction quickly when something didn't work. Joining Lidion Bank six years ago marked a significant change. It was her first experience inside a regulated financial institution, and she describes the shift as “a completely different world”. In those early months, she viewed regulation as a limiting parameter. Over time, though, she came to see regulation and innovation as complementary rather than competing forces.

“Now I feel the opposite, because working with Lidion, I understood that innovation without control can create risks. But control without innovation limits progress. The balance is what allows you to develop in the right way.”

When Pinar joined, Lidion was a much smaller organisation undergoing a rebrand, with many processes still handled through standalone tools. The Bank's technology environment has evolved significantly over recent years through a broad modernisation programme, modernising its architecture, migrating systems to the cloud, streamlining internal and external processes, building an API gateway, and significantly increasing automation. But for Pinar, the technology itself was never the hardest part.

“You can implement any system or replace any technology,” she says. “The difficult part is transforming processes, the mindset of people, and removing friction from daily operations.”

That friction shows up in small, everyday ways. Before, staff might have spent time digging through email threads or chasing colleagues to track down information a customer needed. Now, with workflows running automatically, that information is simply in front of them, freeing teams to focus on the customer. “The Bank has become more efficient, and that’s reflected in the experience of our customers. We’re seeing higher satisfaction in our surveys and more positive feedback.”

Such customer trust matters enormously in an industry that lives and dies by its reputation. Banks hold their customers’ money, information and future plans. “At Lidion, we operate on trust,” Pinar says. “That means the ability to innovate safely is just as important as the innovation itself.”

That balancing act has only grown more demanding as expectations around operational resilience, cybersecurity and governance continue to evolve. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), for example, requires financial institutions to strengthen their ability to withstand and recover from technology-related disruption. “Resilience isn't something you implement once and forget,” Pinar says. “The world changes, technology changes, new threats emerge. You have to keep adapting.”

That mentality shapes how Lidion now approaches threat detection day to day. The Bank maintains dedicated security monitoring capabilities supported by automated tools designed to enhance its cyber resilience. “We increasingly leverage automated tools alongside human expertise to identify and respond to potential threats more effectively.”

Another huge industry-wide change has been the fact that modern banking has stopped operating in isolation. “Today, there’s no bank working in an isolated mode,” she explains. “Everything is connected.” Banks work with partners, partners connect to platforms, and platforms sit within wider ecosystems. It’s this interconnectedness that gives customers more choice and flexibility in how they access their banking services.

For Lidion’s CTO, there has been a concerted effort to build infrastructure to support those connections. Through its integration platform, the Bank links with multiple partners and their underlying systems, giving customers more freedom in how they use its products. “We can give clients many options by enabling them to send money anywhere, in different currencies, quickly and in a controlled way,” Pinar says.

The same modular approach shapes how Lidion builds and adapts its products. Rather than building every solution from scratch, the Bank assembles technology components that can be adapted, replaced or reconnected using common standards. Such flexibility matters more as business customers expect their banking partners to plug directly into their own technology stacks. The Bank’s systems need to meet what clients need today while staying adaptable enough to grow with them.

Which brings the conversation back to the technology dominating so much of financial services right now: AI. Pinar is genuinely optimistic about what it can bring to banking, especially as it evolves rapidly across software development, customer interaction and data analysis. But at Lidion, that optimism is tempered by a clear focus on purpose. In a regulated industry, introducing new technology without fully understanding its risks can create new vulnerabilities of its own, so the CTO is taking a cautious, deliberate approach to approving AI use cases, while already applying the technology in selected operational and cybersecurity-related processes to support efficiency and resilience.

As AI and other technologies keep advancing, Pinar expects new challenges to surface, from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats to the eventual impact of quantum computing. Lidion's response is to stay ahead of them by continually researching emerging technologies and strengthening its resilience and risk frameworks, rather than waiting for the challenges to arrive.

“What I've learned in my career, above all, is that trust must come first,” she says. “Whatever you bring in, implement or change, you have to think about client trust first.” For Lidion, that means innovation, security, resilience and customer value moving forward together, not one at the expense of another. “That will continue to be our focus with any new technology that we adopt,” she concludes.