Finance leaders face pressure to adopt AI while maintaining control and board confidence. In legacy organisations, modernisation is a trust challenge, not just technology. In this session, Vladimir Novotny, a senior finance leader at a multinational financial institution (132,000 employees, 10 countries), will share practical approaches to modernising finance amid complex systems and regulatory constraints. Drawing on experience at Home Credit, including processing ~200,000 daily loan approvals, he will demonstrate how finance teams built consistency in KPIs and governance for high-volume decisions, and explore why AI pilots stall and why trusted metrics and controls must precede AI investment.

What CFOs will learn:

Building board-level trust in numbers across regions and functions

Essential governance foundations before scaling AI or automation

Moving from reporting cycles to decision readiness with legacy systems

Why most AI initiatives fail to progress beyond pilots

How trusted data enables AI that improves speed without compromising control

Repositioning finance as a decision authority, not just a reporting function

Real-world lessons from scaling finance operations in complex, regulated environments