Christopher White, SVP North America, intive

Today we're delighted to speak with Christopher White, SVP North America at intive, a global AI-native software engineering company. With over 20 years of experience spanning investment banking, media, entrepreneurship and technology, Christopher brings a unique perspective on how AI is fundamentally reshaping financial services. In this interview, he shares his insights on agentic AI, the challenge of legacy technology, and why governance-by-design is becoming a C-suite priority.

My questions are in bold - over to you Christopher:

Who are you and what's your background?

I'm a senior business and technology leader with over 20 years of experience across digital products, business planning and incubation, media, and AI engineering.

My career started in investment banking at Crédit Agricole Indosuez before I moved into media, first in digital business development at EMI Music and then leading new ventures at FremantleMedia. I later became an entrepreneur, helping to build Gaming Media Group, a $25 million e-gaming business that we sold in 2013, and Spark Digital, a 350-person technology consultancy that we sold to intive in 2021. Alongside that, I've been an active angel investor and startup advisor since 2012.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I'm SVP North America at intive, a global technology and AI-native engineering company with more than 1,700 professionals across Europe, the US and LATAM.

I'm responsible for driving growth across North America, working with clients including News Corp, SoFi, Happen Bank, Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros. We work with market leaders across financial services, media, commerce and healthcare, helping them build AI-powered digital products and solutions that transform how they operate and compete.

My role spans go-to-market strategy, strategic partnerships, customer success and overall regional strategy.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

intive is an AI-native software engineering company founded in 1999. Our model combines human ingenuity and oversight with intelligent AI systems, using lean approaches to help clients move quickly from ideas to working products and business outcomes.

Our global team of more than 1,700 people brings expertise well beyond AI, including software and embedded engineering, IoT, scalable cloud solutions and human-centric design. We work across industries including automotive and mobility, commerce, financial services, healthcare, life sciences and media.

Tell us how you are funded?

intive has been backed by MidEuropa, a leading European private equity investor, since its acquisition of the company in 2019.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

intive was founded in Finland in 1999 and has evolved over more than 25 years as technology has moved from traditional software development through digital transformation and now into AI-native engineering.

Financial services has become one of our major areas of expertise. Today, we're helping institutions tackle two problems at once: the cost and complexity of legacy technology, and the need to innovate much faster. We're using AI to transform business processes, modernize legacy products in months rather than years, reduce costs and create significantly better customer experiences.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

We typically work with CTOs, CEOs, CPOs and other senior business and technology leaders at large enterprises. They value the combination of deep industry knowledge and engineering expertise, and our ability to work across the entire value chain — from innovation and PoC experimentation through process transformation, legacy modernization and new product development.

Our commercial model varies according to the problem we're solving. We work through focused discovery and AI sprints, project-based product and engineering engagements, and longer-term dedicated teams and strategic partnerships.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I'd eliminate the enormous amount of friction created by legacy technology. Financial institutions have incredible data, expertise and customer relationships, but too often these sit on top of systems that make meaningful change expensive and slow.

If I had a magic wand, banks would have modern, interoperable technology foundations that let them innovate at the speed of a FinTech while retaining the trust, scale, security and regulatory discipline of an established financial institution. AI makes that increasingly achievable: the opportunity is not simply to automate existing processes, but to fundamentally rethink them.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Don't treat AI as just another technology implementation. It represents a much more fundamental shift in how software will be built, how work will be performed and, ultimately, how financial products and services will be delivered.

AI success won't necessarily be determined by running the most AI pilots today, but by doing the foundational work, too: modernizing legacy systems, improving data accessibility, redesigning processes and putting the right governance in place. That is what allows AI to move from interesting experimentation to measurable business impact.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

I use a mixture of specialist publications and broader technology and business sources. The Financial Times is probably my most consistent source for the intersection of financial services, markets and technology. I also follow Finextra and American Banker, as well as TechCrunch for the startup and investment side of FinTech. Events such as Money20/20 are useful for seeing where the industry's attention and investment are moving.

Increasingly, though, some of the most useful information comes directly from practitioners. I follow founders, investors, bank technology leaders and AI researchers on LinkedIn and elsewhere. You often see important shifts emerging in those conversations before they become established industry narratives.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

Brett King, who has been talking about the structural transformation of banking for years and is particularly good at connecting technology developments with what they mean for the future customer experience.

Simon Taylor, who is one of the most insightful commentators on FinTech, banking infrastructure, payments and digital assets. He has a knack for making complicated developments understandable without losing the substance.

Leda Glyptis, because she brings the perspective of someone who has worked inside large financial institutions and understands why transformation is difficult. I particularly value her perspective on the gap between talking about innovation and actually delivering it inside complex organizations.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

Quite a few, although Wise is probably the one I appreciate most because I spend a lot of time between the US and Europe. It's a great example of FinTech solving a very tangible customer problem (moving and managing money internationally) and making something that historically felt opaque and expensive remarkably simple.

I also use the digital products of several traditional banks and card providers. What's interesting is how much the distinction between a "FinTech" and a financial institution is disappearing from the customer's perspective. Consumers simply expect every financial product to have the immediacy and usability that the best technology companies have taught them to expect.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

I've been particularly impressed by what Ramp is doing with agentic finance. They're moving beyond using AI simply to provide insights or automate individual tasks and are beginning to give AI agents the ability to participate directly in financial workflows, with defined identities, permissions, budgets and audit trails.

I think that's a glimpse of where the industry is heading. We're moving from software that helps a human do something faster to intelligent systems that can execute significant parts of a process, while humans establish the controls and handle the exceptions.

What makes that particularly interesting in financial services is that autonomy and governance have to develop together. Identity, permissions, limits, traceability and human oversight need to be designed into the system from the outset. That combination of AI autonomy and governance-by-design is something I think we'll see much more of over the next few years.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

First and foremost, agentic AI is moving from pilots into real workflows, where AI has greater autonomy to execute end-to-end processes. It's an incredibly exciting prospect, but it also makes this the moment for organizations to get serious about their data foundations, software architecture, systems design and governance. AI-native has never felt more relevant, and our mission is to help companies build those foundations ahead of this shift.

Alongside that, we're seeing the rise of governance-by-design. Until recently, governance standards often seemed to be struggling to keep pace with the technology, but that is changing. There is much greater awareness of the risks and of the need to treat governance as part of the blueprint rather than a rushed afterthought. Importantly, stronger embedded governance is no longer being championed only by IT departments, and is increasingly a C-suite priority.

The third trend is the continued blurring of the line between FinTechs and incumbent financial institutions. Banks are adopting the product thinking, technology and customer experiences pioneered by FinTechs, while successful FinTechs are developing the risk, compliance and operational disciplines traditionally associated with banks. Competitive advantage will increasingly come from combining the best of both worlds: trust and scale with speed and innovation.

Many thanks to Christopher for taking the time to share his insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about intive on their website.