At FTT AI Transformation this summer, we spoke with Ioanna Tsekoura, Head of Customer Experience at Snappi, Greece’s first licensed neobank.

With a career rooted in understanding people, Ioanna is now leading customer experience at a bank built from the ground up. As she explains, the opportunity to design a new banking proposition from scratch is both exciting and challenging. It means setting the standard for experiences that feel intuitive, simple and genuinely useful from day one.

Outside work, she is also gaining daily insight into the expectations of highly demanding customers — through parenting a young child. The lesson? People expect outcomes to be immediate, effortless and, ideally, to contain “a bit of magic”.

Nobody asks to speak to an AI but rather  they focus on the challenges they need addressed by their financial services provider. Technology (AI) can be integrated to make banking smarter but it is up the organisation to make sure the outcomes are warmer, more personalised and, ultimately more effective.

For Ioanna, AI’s role is not to replace the human touch, but to remove the friction that prevents banking from feeling human in the first place. Used well, it can help organisations understand customer pain points, anticipate needs and deliver more personalised support, whilst ensuring every interaction remains warm, relevant and easy to navigate.

In the interview, Ioanna also discusses:

• How Snappi is using AI to identify customer pain points and reduce friction.

• Why customer experience must be designed around real-life outcomes, rather than technology for its own sake.

• How leaders should approach AI transformation.

• Whether leaders need to be the smartest person in the room and what future leadership may look like in an AI-enabled world.

Watch the full interview below to hear Ioanna’s perspective on the priorities for banks and financial-services leaders as AI reshapes the customer experience.

Join in more discussions around finding the right balance between human and technology and the characteristics that will help define success in the future at the next FTT AI Transformation, co-located with the FTT Fintech Festival on 9-10 November in London.