Horizon 2030 for Banking: The Autonomous Horizon – AI in 2030, with Richard Harmon

What will decide whether a bank adopts AI successfully by 2030? Richard Harmon, VP and Global Head of Financial Services at Red Hat, offers an answer that has little to do with which model you choose. In this episode he names two things: culture, and controls.

The first is about an institution learning to use genuinely new tools. The second is about using them under strict control, with the auditability and traceability that financial services firms cannot operate without. Richard's particular concern is what happens as AI becomes more autonomous, evaluating systems and making decisions on its own, and why guardrails, transparency and explainability move from desirable to essential at that point.

He draws a parallel that software teams will recognise: shift-left thinking, and the discipline of knowing what a piece of code must do and how it will run securely in a regulated environment before a line is written. He argues AI needs the same treatment, and explains what that looks like in practice.

The episode closes with a look ahead. Richard describes the outcome he hopes for, a global community keeping AI secure rather than a single firm holding a monopoly on a capability, and connects it to a concern he hears often in Europe: sovereignty. His view on why open source is the best answer to that concern, and what fifteen years of open source in regulated finance tells us about AI's next decade, is worth hearing in full.

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Red Hat Summit Connect comes to London on 8 October, bringing together the people building the next generation of banking infrastructure. Find out more and register here.

Watch every episode of Horizon 2030 for Banking from Red Hat on FF News, starting with the series trailer.