Cost:

Free  |  By Invitation Only  |  Registration Required  |  Limited to 20 Participants

 

Registration closes at 11:59 pm EST on June 1, 2026 or when all seats are full.

 

 

Building the Future

Women Technology Leaders on AI Strategy, Transformation, and the Future of Financial Services 

 

Convened by the Financial Women's Associaion in partnership with AWS, a member of the FWA President's Circle, as part of our ongoing thought leadership work at the intersection of technology, leadership, and the future of financial services.

 

The most consequential technology decisions in financial services right now are not being made in vendor briefings or conference keynotes. They are being made in the offices of leaders like you, under real pressure, with real constraints, and with very few peers you can speak to honestly about it.

AI is no longer on the horizon. It is already embedded in the strategies, the engineering organizations, the risk frameworks, and the workforce decisions of every major financial institution. When institutions are deploying AI coding tools to 40,000 developers at once, deploying agents that operate autonomously across critical workflows, and navigating regulatory expectations that are still being written in real time — the leadership challenges do not show up in the press release. The organizational resistance, the governance tradeoffs, the security implications, the calls you made with incomplete information: that is the conversation that rarely gets had. This is that room.

We are bringing together a small, senior group of women technology executives from across financial services — leaders overseeing large engineering organizations, navigating regulatory complexity, making high-stakes calls on AI strategy, and defining what responsible enterprise AI actually looks like in practice. Different institutions. Shared problems.

Because regardless of where you sit, the questions are strikingly similar:

 

• How do you build genuine organizational conviction around AI when your engineers are skeptical and your risk team is watching?
• How do you move fast enough to stay competitive without outrunning your governance?
• How do you embed AI across the developer lifecycle without losing the engineering talent you have invested years in developing?
• What does it actually mean to deploy AI responsibly when the stakes — regulatory, reputational, operational — are this high?
• Where do you draw the line between bold experimentation and irresponsible risk?
• As agentic AI moves into critical workflows, how are you thinking about closed-loop cyber defense — and whether your remediation capabilities can keep pace with the speed of AI-enabled threats?
• And honestly, what have you already tried that did not work?

 

These are not hypotheticals. They are the questions keeping people in this room up at night.

 

Under Chatham House rules, this is a space to speak candidly about what is working, what is not, and what you are still figuring out — with the confidence that the conversation stays in the room. No attribution. No recordings. No polished talking points required.

 

The value is not in the agenda. It is in who is around the table, and the quality of conversation that becomes possible when the right people are finally in the same place, off the record.

 

FEATURED SPEAKER

Tiarne Hawkins

Co-Founder & CEO, Optica Labs  ·  Author & Host, You & AI

Co-Founder and CEO of Optica Labs, Tiarne builds the safety infrastructure enterprises need to deploy AI with confidence — continuously testing, evaluating, and governing AI systems in motion. Her work spans the full AI lifecycle, with clients including AWS, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. She is the forthcoming author of The Negotiation: AI, Power, and What It Means to Stay Human (2026).

 

 

FSI FACILITATOR

Vivian Lai

Capital Markets Technology Executive

Vivian Lai brings decades of capital markets technology leadership to her role as facilitator — with a track record of driving transformative change across trading, risk, and operations at major financial institutions.

 

 

YOUR HOST

Karla Ferry

Global GenAI GTM Leader, Financial Services  ·  Amazon Web Services

Karla Ferry leads go-to-market strategy at the intersection of AI and financial services at AWS, working with the world's largest banks, capital markets firms, and insurers on their most consequential AI transformation decisions.

 

 

 

Agenda — June 2, 2026

12:00 – 1:00 PM    Arrival & Lunch   Attendees arrive; hot lunch served

1:00 – 1:15 PM      Kickoff & Opening Remarks   Karla Ferry, Global GenAI GTM Leader, Financial Services, Amazon Web Services

1:15 – 1:30 PM      FWA Welcome   Albana Theka, President, Financial Women's Association, and Founder, Theka.io

1:30 – 2:15 PM      Keynote   Tiarne Hawkins, Co-Founder & CEO, Optica Labs

2:15 – 3:45 PM      Roundtable Discussion   Facilitated by Vivian Lai, Capital Markets Technology Executive

3:45 – 4:15 PM      Open Exchange   

4:15 – 4:30 PM      Wrap-Up & Closing Remarks

4:30 – 5:30 PM      Cocktails & Networking

 

 

Presented in Partnership with:

 

Attendance is by invitation only and limited to senior women technology leaders in financial services.