Unchain Festival

UNCHAIN Fintech Festival is the summer festival for Central and Eastern European fintech, organised by UNCHAIN Media and staged inside the historic Oradea Fortress in Oradea, Romania. The festival positions itself as the nexus where Europe's growth market meets the global fintech community, gathering 700+ business delegates from 40+ countries — a deliberately curated crowd in which CEOs, founders and upper management dominate the delegate mix.

The 2026 speaker roster is headlined by Marek Belka, former Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Poland, alongside payments and fintech leadership from the Czech National Bank and the Central Bank of Hungary's FinTech Lab. It sits alongside Money in Transition: Digitalisation and Innovation in Payments, Money20/20 Europe and EBAday as calendar anchors for the same audiences.

What happens at UNCHAIN Festival

• A conference programme across themed tracks: Regulation & Compliance, Banking Digital Transformation, Next-Gen Transactions (payments and cross-border), Blueprint for Digital Assets (stablecoins, CBDCs and tokenised deposits), Roadmap for AI, Insurtech, Sustainability in Action, and "Fintersections" — sessions on innovation transfer between traditional industries and fintech.
• The UNCHAIN Startup Tournament — the official pitching competition for early-stage fintech startups on the Innovation Stage, alongside a dedicated startup pass track and the Digital Bank Award.
• A festival format unique in the region: conference stages, networking areas, the official party and city tours run inside and around Oradea Fortress, deliberately mixing senior business content with a social programme built for relationship-building.
• Open-application roundtables and panels ("Join the Conversation") that pull delegates into the programme rather than leaving them spectators.

Who attends

The delegate base is concentrated in CEE financial services: regulators and central bankers (the Czech National Bank's payments leadership and the Central Bank of Hungary's FinTech Lab feature among 2026 speakers), board-level executives from banks across the region (Komercni Banka, mBank, NLB Banka, Partners Banka, Magnetiq Bank, Ziraat Katilim), insurers and insurtech leadership (BNP Paribas Cardif, Interamerican), consumer lenders such as TF Bank, and fintech founders, investors and professional-services firms from across Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. UNCHAIN is not a crypto festival and not a mass-market expo — it is the curated annual reunion of the CEE financial-services community, small enough that the delegate list matters and senior enough that partnerships get signed on site.

Dominant themes at UNCHAIN Festival 2026

• Banking digital transformation in CEE — neobank competition, cloud-native cores, and the digitalisation of incumbent regional banks.
• Next-generation transactions — the cross-border payments roadmap and emerging payment technologies across CEE markets.
• Digital assets at scale — stablecoins, CBDCs, tokenised deposits and the interoperability and regulatory questions around them.
• Regulation and compliance — the evolving EU fintech regulatory landscape, data protection and AML across different CEE markets.
• The AI roadmap — risk management, fraud detection, customer support and personalised financial products.
• Insurtech — data and AI in underwriting and claims, and digital-first insurance models.
• Sustainability in action — climate tech, data infrastructure and decarbonisation financing.
• Country focuses — festival research has spotlighted Ukraine's wartime fintech resilience, Hungary's instant-payments market and Romania's banking consolidation.

Planning to attend

Oradea sits in north-west Romania near the Hungarian border. The most convenient routes are a direct LOT flight from Warsaw, a connection via Bucharest, or flying into Budapest and using the festival's pre-scheduled shuttles. Partner hotels include the DoubleTree by Hilton and Ramada by Wyndham, with discounted blocks via the organisers. The festival is in-person only and runs in English. On the regional calendar, Money Motion in Zagreb each March and Technobank in Belgrade each spring bracket the CEE fintech year that UNCHAIN anchors in June.

Use the expense calculator below to estimate the total cost of attending — registration, flights, hotels, meals, and ground transport — based on your origin city.