HOW AGENTIC AI ACTUALLY WORKS INSIDE BANKS AND FINTECHS

For the last couple of years, most banks and fintechs have used AI as an assistant. Chatbots answering FAQs, tools summarising documents, copilots helping employees work faster. Useful, but limited.

What comes next is agentic AI. Systems that can plan, decide, and execute multi-step workflows on behalf of customers and employees. Not just answering questions, but completing the task end to end.

More than half of financial services executives already report using AI agents in some form today. This is no longer theoretical.

Here is how I see the shift.

WAVE 1: GENERATIVE AI FOR HELPING

This is prompt-based AI. Ask a question, get an answer. It improves productivity, but humans still drive the process.

WAVE 2: AGENTIC AI FOR DOING

This is where AI agents orchestrate entire workflows. For example, not just explaining mortgage options, but comparing offers, coordinating third parties, submitting applications, and returning validated choices for approval.

This shift creates three new economies that will reshape financial services.

THE ASSISTANCE ECONOMY

Agents deliver full customer journeys. From discovery to transaction. Capital One’s agentic concierge in auto finance reportedly drove up to 55 percent higher customer engagement in participating dealerships. That is the power of moving from advice to action.

ADAPTIVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Interfaces stop being static. Experiences adapt in real time based on context, intent, and behaviour. Only 21 percent of banking customers today are fully satisfied with personalisation. Agentic AI turns segmentation into segments of one.

AGENTIC TWINS

This is the most radical shift. A customer-owned AI agent that holds identity, preferences, and permissions, and interacts with banks on the customer’s behalf. Instead of firms owning fragmented customer data, they must earn consent from the customer’s agent by delivering real value.

There is also a clear split in how this plays out.

Incumbent banks are seeing the fastest ROI in back-office use cases like KYC, fraud, and compliance. Fintechs, with modern stacks, are moving faster on customer-facing agentic experiences.

The real risk is not experimenting. It is treating agentic AI as another tool layered on top of legacy processes. The winners will be the ones who rebuild workflows, data models, and customer journeys around agents as a core capability.

This feels like a once-in-a-generation inflection point for financial services. Similar to mobile banking. Or online payments.

The question I keep coming back to is simple:

Are you designing AI to assist your business, or to run parts of it?

Author

Ai Base Network (ABN), ABN ASIA was founded by people with deep roots in academia, with work experience in the US, Holland, Hungary, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. ABN Asia is where academia and technology meet opportunity. With our cutting-edge solutions and competent software development services, we're helping businesses level up and take on the global scene. Our commitment: Faster. Better. More reliable. In most cases: Cheaper as well.

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