The Rise of The Customer Robots

By Andrew Vorster, Head of Growth, The Banking Scene As a lifelong Sci-Fi fan, I’ve read countless books and seen a vast number of movies in the genre. Oftentimes, I’ve yearned for the ability to be cryogenically frozen, to be reanimated at a far future date when intergalactic space travel is a reality and technology has advanced to a point beyond my wildest imagination.

Of course, many of the Sci-Fi futures turn out to be dystopian, which obviously holds far less appeal!

And many of these dystopian futures are the result of sentient machines or rogue artificial intelligence that turn on their human creators …….. which brings me right back to today and the future(s) that we are on the brink of enabling through the application of AI in banking.

While not nearly as exciting as being cryogenically frozen or exploring galaxies far away, the prospect of having access to a vastly superior “intelligence” that works tirelessly on my behalf as a customer is extremely alluring. 

Less than 5 years ago, I would not have thought something like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and many other GenAI platforms would have been available within my lifetime. Yet, these have rapidly become part of the banker’s toolkit in record time!

I can’t open LinkedIn without my feed being flooded with analyst reports and announcements of new use cases for GenAI in financial services. From back office and operational efficiency to regulatory compliance, customer service, KYC, risk and credit scoring to fraud fighting and more, there doesn’t seem to be an area of banking and financial services that isn’t considering how GenAI can be applied.

Enter the Age of Agentic AI.

Now there is a new kid on the block and it seems my feed is now being overtaken by stories and analyst reports of Agentic AI.

It is essential to clarify the distinction between agentic and generative AI. While both leverage LLMs, they operate with different levels of autonomy. Generative AI is a powerful, yet fundamentally reactive, tool that has expanded the reach of traditional AI in areas such as information synthesis, content generation, and natural language interaction. The widespread deployment of GenAI in horizontal use cases, such as employee copilots and chatbots, has been prolific, but its impact on a company's bottom line has so far been limited, a phenomenon referred to by McKinsey in a recent report as the "gen AI paradox". 

Agentic AI offers a way to overcome this by transforming GenAI from a reactive tool into a proactive, goal-driven virtual collaborator that can automate complex business processes end-to-end. This shift unlocks far more than efficiency, and it creates new opportunities for operational agility and revenue.

McKinsey argue that “Agents deliver more than efficiency—they supercharge operational agility and unlock new revenue opportunities”. If you want to find out what these are and how to do this in your own bank, you’ll have to read their paper or any of the multitude of analyst papers on the topic of Agentic AI, because I want to talk to you about something far more personal. Customer Agents.

Most of the industry is currently focused on leveraging this new paradigm to increase efficiency, boost profits, and reduce costs, with a quick hat tip to a recent pilot carried out by Visa in partnership with Pay.UK, where their new AI tool for Faster Payments could help save UK customers over £330 million per year on fraud and APP scams, which is very customer-focused (and also reduces costs).

But few, if any, are considering the impact and implications of the inevitable “Customer Agents” that I believe will rapidly follow.

Banks have historically been structured to maximise profits, which doesn’t necessarily align with their customers’ wants and needs.

Customers essentially need banks to keep their money safe (which doesn’t always happen, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole right now), and most want to improve their financial health.

We recently discussed the findings of a collaborative study by Argenta, Deloitte and Ghent University, which revealed that less than 50% of Belgian households and only 12% of individuals feel financially healthy. 

There are many possible explanations for this (economic, geopolitical, personal stress, financial literacy and more), but the factor I’d like to focus on is that I believe banking has become increasingly complex over the past few years, and “doing nothing” has become a default behaviour for many customers.

Banks are currently benefitting from “customer inertia”, not because we are inherently lazy, but because it’s too tedious to deal with all the admin required to do anything about our situation.

I believe this is about to change, sooner than banks would like to think about it.

I’m waiting for the first 3rd party organisation (I doubt it will be a bank) to offer “Customer Agents” that will work tirelessly on my behalf to improve my financial health. 

I expect such an agent to compare prices, fees and rates across multiple banks and make use of open banking and APIs, optimising cash flow, debt, savings, and investments to ensure I’m always getting the most favourable outcome. 

It will also act as my personal financial coach, advising me on spending, giving me nudges, and adding friction where necessary to make me reconsider if I really need to make my next purchase, by instantly calculating the impact on my future financial position and forcing me to make more conscious, deliberate decisions. 

Perhaps it will even occasionally suggest that I spend some money on a holiday or take my wife out to dinner, because financial health is not just about accumulating wealth!

It will always act on MY behalf, never influenced by sales or profit targets set by a bank, but by my personal goals, moral and ethical values and lifestyle preferences.

I expect that many of you will now be rolling your eyes, believing that I’ve slipped into the world of Sci-Fi once more, especially if you’ve worked in banking for a while and are aware of the many barriers that stand in the way of this becoming reality - regulation being the top of the list!

Changes on the Horizon

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has introduced a Consumer Duty of Care, requiring financial institutions to prioritise customer needs, help them achieve financial objectives, ensure product suitability, value, and responsive service.  Initiatives like the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet Architecture, Reference Framework and the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) are working towards secure and interoperable multi-purpose wallets that act as containers for digital assets, credentials, tickets, and keys, working in tandem with an agent software component that can add, remove, or process items.

New protocols like the Open Agents Protocol are emerging to allow agents to discover and compose capabilities dynamically. They support negotiation and cooperation between agents and services, and they define “intent-centric” communication instead of endpoint-driven interactions.

These are all building blocks that will enable my Sci-Fi future to become a reality sooner than you think.

Are you building a dystopian future that works for your bank but holds far less appeal for me as a customer?

Or are you building the utopian banking future I (and I suspect many of your customers) would like to see come about? 

I’d love to hear about it either way!