On 17 June 2026, Salv won the Fintech Zone Award at EBAday 2026 in Copenhagen, selected by a panel of independent judges from a field of 16 finalists.
EBAday, organised by the Euro Banking Association, is one of the largest annual gatherings of European banking professionals. The Fintech Zone is its competitive showcase, where shortlisted fintechs pitch live to judges drawn from across banking and payments. The people in the room were the institutions that will benefit from collaborative fincrime fighting.
Barnabás Ferenczi, Head of Growth at Salv, pitched on Salv’s behalf and accepted the award on stage. He said:
“It’s a recognition of the mission, because the mission is important to all of us. Even my kids understand helping banks to collaborate to take joint action against financial crime, and that helps all of us.”
— Barnabás Ferenczi, Head of Growth, Salv
Watch the acceptance speech
Announcing the result, EBA director Daniel Szmukler said the judges had “a difficult but exciting time coming down on a final result, because the pitches were all so good. At the end, one stood out to the judges just a little bit more than the others.”
Why the judges chose Salv
Salv has created the proven infrastructure for fincrime data sharing. It lets banks and payment companies share financial crime intelligence with each other in real time, turning isolated signals at individual institutions into a shared picture of how criminals actually move money.
Criminals are multi-banked, share information, and coordinate across borders. The institutions trying to stop them mostly don’t. Salv closes that gap, and that was the case we made on stage.
Collaborative intelligence sharing between banks and payment companies is both possible and overdue, and a room of senior banking professionals agreed.
Learn more about how Salv Bridge works HERE →
Acceptance speech in full
The following is a lightly edited transcript of Barnabás’s acceptance speech on stage at EBAday 2026.
Interviewer: This is like the Oscars of EBAday. If you could, please tell our amazing audience what it is you do, so people get more familiar with you.
Barnabás: Happy to. What I’ve been hearing from the panel are words like “sharing,” “fraud mitigation,” and “the Nordics.” And that’s actually our story.
At Salv, we help banks fight financial crime that is already networked. The bad guys are already multi-banked, so we enable banks to collaborate with one another and take joint action: joint screening against a shared pool of bad actors, and joint investigation of suspicious cases — powered by shared data. And that data is shared in a GDPR-compliant way, even at a personal, PII level.
So instead of shying away from the GDPR discussion, we enable consortia of banks and bank associations to organise this data sharing — letting their members take joint action in a way that is already compliant with GDPR today, while preparing for full compliance with the incoming AML and PSR regulations.
On a personal level, I joined Salv about two months ago. What really keeps me going is that this is a mission even our children understand. When I moved to Salv, my kids told me: “Papa, finally you’re doing something meaningful — something we understand.”
So let’s fight financial crime together. Join the platform, join the fight, and together we’ll make the world much safer. Thank you for the recognition.
Interviewer: Thank you, Barnabás. Even before you received the award, there was an article on Finextra by Madhvi Soni quoting an event poll from these past two days — and it shows just how relevant your work has become. In that poll, 78% considered data sharing the most effective way to strengthen fraud risk mitigation.
