This exclusive interview with Tomi Popoola was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
Artificial intelligence and cloud technologies are reshaping financial services at pace, driving smarter decision-making, broader access to financial products, and faster innovation across the sector. From fraud detection to personalised customer experiences, data-driven technologies are redefining how modern finance operates.
Tomi Popoola is a Fintech Speaker and technology thought leader whose work focuses on how AI, machine learning and cloud infrastructure enable businesses to scale efficiently and compete in an increasingly digital economy. She brings a practical, commercially grounded perspective on how organisations can translate emerging technologies into real-world value.
In this exclusive interview with the AI Speakers Agency, Tomi Popoola shares how AI has shaped the financial landscape, how businesses can harness its technological benefits, and why the cloud continues to underpin innovation across the technology sector.
Question 1. How has artificial intelligence transformed the financial sector over time, particularly in areas such as access, risk management, and decision-making?
Tomi Popoola: “I would say it has shaped it for the past few decades, and it has made huge progress. When you think about artificial intelligence and machine learning at the same time, you see the huge leaps the financial sector has made and how it has grown.
“Examples could be fraud detection. Small businesses are able to detect fraud a lot earlier, helping end users but also their businesses as well. Another thing is access. Access is a huge thing because previously, without AI and ML, you would not find that people in underserved countries had access to certain financial services.
“It has provided access. When you think about credit scoring, we typically used traditional data and traditional methods, but now we have alternatives brought in because of new data sets and new perspectives to look at. You can also look at tailored financial decisions, both financial decisions and financial services and solutions for people.
“Now that we have more access to data and we are using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can easily tailor solutions to people. Because of this, when you increase your customer base, you increase innovation in the financial sector, while also ensuring that the limits and possibilities are endless.
“I would say it has shaped it from where it started, it is currently shaping it, but there is still a huge growth aspect that is yet to be tapped into. Being able to leverage AI in the perfect way for certain scenarios would definitely help, as it already has been helping.”
Question 2. From a practical business perspective, how should organisations approach AI adoption to deliver measurable value for both customers and operations?
Tomi Popoola: “In terms of harnessing the benefits, you need to think about your business. You need to think about the benefit it can bring to your business and your end users, because if you do not think about it that way, it could be very counterintuitive.
“First of all, what does your business lack, and how can you make your business more efficient? How can you turn that into return customers, customer satisfaction, and improving your ROI?
“An example could be if you are a B2C business that deals with customers. Your customers could have questions or need to speak to agents or customer service. You could build a pre-programmed chatbot that has answers to FAQs, recently asked questions, or disputes that you could help solve.
“From an internal perspective, this could reduce your operational and administrative overhead and the number of people being sent to human agents. From your customer’s perspective, it could increase customer satisfaction, make the process more efficient, reduce waiting times, and encourage them to come back to use or buy your service.
“Another example could be personalised experiences and better decision making, such as in lending. One key thing for businesses is actually looking at data being power when used correctly.”
Question 3. In what ways has cloud computing fundamentally changed innovation, scalability, and competitive dynamics across the technology sector?
Tomi Popoola: “This is a question I love, because when you think about innovation and creativity, you should think about the cloud more than people often do. Prior to the cloud, we had on-premise data centres, and this made it very hard for small businesses to survive.
“You needed services and databases, which meant you had to buy these things, and that could be very expensive. You could easily start to incur technical debt. With the cloud, all of this is virtualised, and you are paying for the service as you use it.
“This allows for faster innovation. Small businesses can pay per subscription for their technological usage, while also benefiting from quick learning and quick innovation without technical debt.
“Take generative AI as an example. The cloud has provided access to generative AI, allowing you to scale it, build large language models, deploy them, and grow quickly. This also increases market competition, because previously these capabilities would cost so much that small businesses could not afford them, and even large businesses could not afford to put all their eggs in one basket.
“The cloud has created the concept of two-way door decisions, where you can innovate and, if something does not work out, you can come back from it. You can easily scale, serve large amounts of customers, and learn new things at the same time.
“When you think about continuous integration, CI/CD, robotics, containerisation, and even something as basic as creating your own website, many of these have been made possible in the modern day because of the cloud.”
