For this issue of WealthTech Talks, we spoke with Sabrina Del Prete, Founder and CEO of Kore Labs, a digital turnkey solution for product governance and intelligence for financial institutions. Prete’s career spans over 30 years in financial services, with leadership roles at JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, and Coutts, and later as Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Williams & Glyn (RBS Group).

In this interview, Prete shared insight into how product intelligence is reshaping financial services and how the financial services landscape is evolving in 2025-2026. Prete also shared her experience in building Kore Labs.

What led you to start building Kore Labs?
Building Kore Labs was never just about technology—it was about fixing a fundamentally flawed system. Financial products profoundly impact people's lives, yet outdated ways of working hinder product governance and innovation. Consider the PPI scandal: 64 million insurance policies were impacted and £38 billion in compensation. I wanted to use technology to restore the balance of power between financial firms and their customers—for the benefit of all.

Today, we work with Tier 1 financial institutions whose collective reach extends to over 140 million individuals across 40 countries. I also serve as a Board Trustee of the London Foundation of Banking & Finance and collaborated with the FCA through their Innovation Pathway programme.

What problem does Kore Labs solve for financial institutions?
Financial institutions operate in a highly regulated environment, with increasing pressure to drive efficiency and innovation while ensuring customer protection. Many struggle with manual processes, siloed and incomplete data, and a lack of transparency in product governance. This leads to regulatory risks, operational inefficiencies, and hinders more customer-centric, data-driven decision-making. As a veteran in financial services, I have experienced this firsthand.

KorePRM® is Kore’s flagship SaaS solution—a product intelligence platform designed to address these challenges. It provides financial institutions with a 360-degree view of their products and access to real-time, actionable insights. With KorePRM®, they can standardise processes, embed compliance, and unlock previously inaccessible data for product intelligence. The solution transforms fragmented product information into a structured, accessible resource that supports better decision-making across the wider organisation.

Should financial institutions build or buy a product intelligence platform?
While some institutions opt to build in-house systems, this approach is often more complex and costly than anticipated. Developing and maintaining a platform like Kore, which combines digital tools with a sophisticated data and rules engine, requires significant specialised resources across the entire organisation—not just within IT and engineering. It also demands a sustained commitment to continuous improvement in order to keep pace with evolving regulations and technological innovation.

Institutions that choose to invest in a specialised SaaS solution like KorePRM® gain a competitive edge, benefiting from continuous innovation, industry expertise, and faster deployment. Purpose-built for financial institutions, our platform ensures regulatory alignment and offers advanced capabilities, including domain-specific AI, that would be costly and time-consuming to develop in-house.

I've been on both sides of this decision. The build option always looks attractive on paper, but it almost never works out that way in practice.

How is product intelligence reshaping financial services?
Financial firms have long relied on Business Intelligence to track financial performance, Customer Intelligence to refine engagement strategies, and Risk Intelligence to manage exposure. Yet Product Intelligence—the ability to understand, govern, and optimise financial products in real time—remains underdeveloped. This blind spot costs billions.

For leadership teams, the stakes are clear: a regulatory failure could result in heavy fines and reputational damage; missed market opportunities mean handing growth to more agile competitors; and inefficiencies in product portfolios silently erode profitability without clear visibility into where and why.

Our new module KoreInsight addresses these challenges by centralising product data, transforming fragmentation into actionable intelligence. KorePRM® can assist financial institutions in the transition from reactive crisis management to proactive control, and help identify risks before they escalate into headline-making scandals.

How does better product intelligence translate into improved customer outcomes? Better data leads to better products, and better products create real value for customers.
Financial services exist to support people in their everyday lives—whether they’re buying homes, saving for retirement, or growing businesses. To serve these needs effectively, products must be well-designed, fairly priced, and continuously refined. Yet too often, financial products have fundamental gaps that leave customers facing unsuitable commitments or missing opportunities.

When institutions make informed product decisions, the benefits for consumers are tangible. They gain access to financial products that are clearer, fairer, and built to serve real needs—not just market trends. Stronger risk management ensures customers are protected, while transparency builds trust. This is where product intelligence becomes critical.

True success isn’t just about compliance or efficiency—it’s about creating financial products that genuinely improve people’s lives. At Kore Labs, we help institutions design and manage products that drive real, measurable impact.

Looking forward, how do you see the financial services landscape evolving in 2025-2026, and what role will product intelligence play?
Financial institutions must navigate regulatory shifts, economic uncertainty, and changing customer expectations. Market volatility and digital transformation will continue to shape the industry, and firms that embrace data-driven decision-making will gain a competitive edge.

Product intelligence will become a critical differentiator, allowing firms to streamline operations, mitigate risks, and improve customer engagement. Institutions that fail to act risk falling behind, as digital challengers increasingly use advanced analytics to drive innovation and grow market share. In a rapidly evolving landscape, financial institutions can no longer afford to rely on outdated methods. They need to move quickly and leverage data to drive purposeful, impactful outcomes.

About Kore Labs
Kore is a Software-as-a-Service solution for end-to-end digital product management and product governance for the global financial services industry. We offer a set of digital tools and embedded controls to support activities and processes involved in the creation, management and monitoring of financial products - from ideation to retirement.

Our cloud-based platform offers two complementary products, KorePRM® and WikiKore®. Together, they provide comprehensive support in effectively handling financial products within a controlled and digital environment, with the purpose of ensuring gold-standard product governance and effective product management across the board.

Kore has achieved client traction across multiple markets, with blue-chip clients such as Lloyds, Intesa Sanpaolo and Rabobank. The company has also been recognised by multiple regulatory bodies, most notably our acceptance into the highly selective Financial Conduct Authority’s Innovation Pathways Sandbox in February 2024. Kore is also part of the Investment Association’s Innovator Engine and was sponsored by Innovate UK with ~£1.4m of grants for “game-changing innovation”.

For more information, click here to view Kore’s profile.

About the WealthTech Talks Interview Series
In the WealthTech Talks interview series, we interview senior executives from leading wealth management firms, solution providers, and WealthTech influencers to learn more about them, their journey, their perspectives on the market, and how they see the future of wealth management.

Read the latest editions in the series below!

• Kai Linde, Co-founder of QPLIX – click here to read the interview
• Tanya Bartolini, co-founder and CRO of Jacobi – click here to read the interview
• Cassian Scott, CEO of Instinct Digital – click here to read the interview
• Alberto Cuccu, COO at Objectway – click here to read the interview