Global Fintech Fest · 4.7 Million Words

Overheard at GFF

Ever wondered what they actually talk about at GFF? I ran a full analysis of what gets spoken about at the conference. 758 sessions across four editions transcribed, 4.7 million words, to work out which topics are hot and which are not.

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Themes on the GFF stage · 2025
each dot is one theme · mentions per 10,000 words

Everything they talked about.

Twenty-seven themes, tracked across every published session from 2022 to 2025. Each dot is one theme, placed by how often it is spoken about per ten thousand words, so a long keynote and a short panel count on the same scale.

The corpus is 758 sessions.

Ten themes carry the conference.

The top ten account for the overwhelming share of everything said on stage. Lending and credit leads every single year, though it is not as hot as it once was.

One theme never moves.

Regulation.

Between 22.1 and 24.7 mentions per ten thousand words in every year measured, and present in at least 90% of sessions annually, reaching 94% in 2025.

No other theme is remotely that stable, or that pervasive.

And one arrived from nothing.

Across 1.25 million words of 2022 sessions, there is not a single mention of generative AI or large language models. Not rare. It is absent.

By 2025 the two AI themes together appear in more than a third of every session on the programme.

Chapter 5

From zero to a third of the programme.

This is the cleanest signal in four years of transcripts, because it starts at a true zero rather than merely a low number. Agentic AI stayed at zero for two years after that.

Generative AI & LLMs Agentic AI
01 23 20222023 20242025 2.95 2.17 both at zero

Mentions per 10,000 words. Agentic AI is not a gradual build. It is absent, absent, a rounding error, then present in 31% of all 2025 sessions.

A conference agenda is a lagging indicator of what an industry believes.

Chapter 6

What rose and what fell.

Lending is still the most-discussed theme in 2025, but it has fallen roughly a quarter from its 2022 peak. What grew in its place is striking: three of the four fastest-rising themes are protective rather than expansionary.

Biggest movers, 2022 to 2025
change in mentions per 10,000 words

Green rises, red falls. The themes that fell hardest are largely the ones launched with the most fanfare. Open networks, the digital rupee, embedded finance and climate finance all peaked early and receded.

Lending's decline is larger than any other movement in the corpus by a factor of two and a half: −8.68 mentions per ten thousand words, against a next-largest fall of −2.85. But it falls from a base so high that it remains the single most-discussed theme on the programme.

Four years ago this was a conference about what the industry could build. It is now substantially a conference about what the industry has to defend: from fraud, from data law, and from the regulator who was always already in the room.

Chapter 7

What each year sounded like.

Separately from the fixed theme list, every term in each year was scored by log-likelihood against all other years.

The arc reads cleanly: a metaverse moment in 2022, central-bank digital currency and open-network commerce in 2023, cross-border rails and public infrastructure in 2024, and in 2025 a wholesale shift to language models, agents, the compute underneath them, and the data-protection law that governs them.

Chapter 8

Four themes that peaked and faded.

The corpus is long enough to watch enthusiasm cycles complete. Each of these rose, drew a dedicated track, and then thinned out, visible not only as fewer mentions but as fewer sessions willing to touch the subject at all.

The metaverse does not even appear as a tracked theme. It surfaced instead as one of the terms most distinctive to 2022 in the pass above, and vanishes entirely thereafter.

The pattern is uncomfortable for anyone launching a category: the themes that fell hardest are largely the ones introduced with the most institutional fanfare. Open networks, the digital rupee, embedded finance and climate finance all peaked early and receded.

Chapter 9

All twenty-seven, in full.

Mentions per ten thousand words, by year. The final column is the share of that year's sessions in which the theme appears at all. That is the difference between a theme being discussed intensely and being discussed widely.

Theme202220232024 2025TrendChangeSessions ’25

Sparklines are scaled to each theme's own maximum, so they show shape rather than magnitude. Themes overlap by design: a session about fraud in digital lending counts toward both.

Chapter 10 · The reversal

Early signs from Day 1: 2026

GFF 2026 was billed on three pillars: agentic AI, tokenisation and quantum. Measured on the four years of sessions that preceded it, only one of the three had any momentum. Tokenisation was in steady decline, and the billing looked aspirational.

No individual sessions are published yet, but the full-day room feeds for Day 1 are, and they can be read against the equivalent 2025 feeds, room against room, so the recording format is held constant. On that comparison the earlier reading was wrong.

Room feedTokenisationAgentic AIQuantum

A conference theme is a forward bet, not a description of last year. On four years of evidence the tokenisation pillar looked like wishful thinking; on the first day of the actual event it was the third most-discussed subject in the building. The lesson is about the limits of extrapolation, not about the organisers.

Chapter 11 · Method

How this was counted.

Every video published on the channel was enumerated, then its metadata and English auto-captions retrieved and parsed into a local database. Two passes run over it: a hand-built lexicon of 27 fintech themes, and an unsupervised keyness comparison of each year against the rest.

758
Sessions
4.74M
Words
27
Themes
2022–25
Years compared

Median session length is near-identical across all four years, between 37.6 and 41.4 minutes, so these trends are not an artefact of the programme being recorded differently over time. Every number is reproducible from the published recordings.