Reinvent or Disappear: Inside The AI Reckoning Reshaping Asia’s Banks

In this Good to Great Podcast episode, hosts Mindu Hapangama and Jacob Callaway sit down with Naren Gunawardana, Managing Director at Synpulse in Singapore and the person banks across Asia call when their AI transformations get stuck, to ask why an industry with all the money, talent, and urgency in the world finds it so hard to make AI real. Every bank has a strategy on a slide; far fewer have AI working on the floor. Gunawardana takes us past the press releases and inside the machine, revealing what agentic AI actually does in a live regulated environment, why most pilots quietly die in a sandbox, and the unglamorous work of data, governance, and trust that will decide which banks reinvent and which disappear.