Inside Reinvent Forum Paris: What banking leaders are really saying

Patrice Bernard, author of the French financial innovation blog C’est pas mon idée, attended the Reinvent Forum Paris 2026. In this article, he shares his key takeaways from the event and what they reveal about the real priorities shaping banking today.

Last week, Qorus hosted its Reinvent Forum 2026 in Paris, giving me an opportunity to take stock of the real trends shaping banking—primarily in Europe, though participants from a handful of other markets, including South Africa, Canada, and Brazil, were also represented—far removed from the media noise and hype.

The first and clearest takeaway from the sessions I attended is strikingly simple: while most banking executives express strong interest in artificial intelligence, usually reflected in cautious, limited deployments, their primary focus remains digital transformation. In doing so, they implicitly—and rightly—acknowledge that the process is far from complete. Even then, institutions are approaching it in very different ways.