Financial Services Consumers Are Ready For an AI Revolution — Are You?

Excellent customer service and smooth online experiences have become table stakes for financial services institutions (FSI) to attract and retain customers. While competitive rates, fees, and pricing are key factors in driving loyalty to an FSI, customers expect more digital-first experiences. Moreover, interactions need to be quick, personalized, and available 24/7 on mobile apps, websites, and social media.

But financial services representatives and advisors are feeling overwhelmed. Our latest research shows that it’s becoming more challenging to meet customer expectations:

• 47% of consumers often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives
• 56% of consumers say their institutions don’t proactively anticipate their financial needs
• Only 15% of customers say their institutions exceed expectations when it comes to delivering actionable insights and tips that improve their financial health

This is where digital labor can make a difference. The latest wave of AI — agents — is set to bring about massive change for financial services through a new source of digital labor that automates tasks, enhances customer experiences, and ensures the highest compliance.

Our Connected Financial Services Report surveyed 9,500 global consumers to uncover what they expect from FSIs and the pain points they’re facing. Let’s explore how specific AI use cases can create faster, more seamless experiences for customers of financial services.

In this blog:

Financial services enters the agentic AI era

AI technology is constantly evolving, and FSIs are capitalizing on the opportunities it offers. At first, predictive AI helped FSIs by providing proactive notifications or alerts to clients. Then generative AI came along and made it easier for users to access information. FSIs that use generative AI saw a 26% increase in productivity.

Now, the agentic AI era is here. These autonomous agents are advanced forms of AI that can perform tasks independently, without human intervention. They operate within the parameters and policies set by your organization, ensuring compliance and guardrails are always adhered to.

Agents can assist with tasks like changing a PIN or providing standard statements and documents. This helps customer service representatives spend more time on important issues. Currently, one of our AI in financial services statistics show that representatives only spend 39% of their time directly working with customers, with the rest spent largely on low-value administrative work.

Most of your customers expect AI to play a big role in their financial services experiences in the next five years. In fact, 76% believe that AI will be a standard part of their financial services relationships within that timeframe. Customers also have specific ideas about what AI will do for them. For example, 65% believe that AI will speed up financial transactions. That’s up from 46% in 2023.

How AI agents help you serve customers more effectively

Fifty-four percent of consumers trust the use of AI agents in financial services. As part of our survey, we asked financial services customers what AI use cases interested them the most. Here are some of their top picks.

Preventing and detecting fraud

Our research found that 77% of consumers are interested in AI that helps prevent and detect fraud. However, the dispute process is often manual, and service representatives spend too much time trying to resolve issues. Agentic AI is the solution.

Transaction dispute management can be a breeze with the help of AI-powered, automated tools. These tools can simplify customer communication and reduce call volume by generating response emails to acknowledge or resolve a transaction dispute.

Completing routine tasks

Customers value AI tools that help them take routine tasks off their financial to-do list. AI agents can help you automate common service requests, like updating addresses, reversing fees, and managing beneficiaries. This allows you to quickly and efficiently provide customers with the seamless service experiences they’ve come to expect.

Advisors spend a lot of time on routine tasks. Automating these tasks can free up advisors’ time to focus on helping clients reach their financial goals. With more time, advisors can create detailed plans and give tailored advice. This improves customer satisfaction and makes the advisory process more successful.

For example, you can simplify meeting preparation with the help of AI agents. AI-powered summaries can combine recent interactions and communications into a clear and concise overview. With a summary of financial accounts, plans, and goals at your fingertips, you can easily prepare for meetings.

Getting financial education and advice

When data is scattered across various systems, it’s hard to provide personalized engagement that aligns with the unique situations of each of your customers. By centralizing your data, you unlock AI-driven insights that enable meaningful conversations about financial education and advice. We found 60% of consumers think this is a compelling AI use case for FSIs.

AI agents make it easy for bankers to create financial plans and goal summaries that are tailored to each client’s needs. For wealth managers, AI agents can help summarize and view a client’s overall asset portfolio and allocation. This gives wealth advisors insight into the client’s risk tolerance and financial goals, so they can provide the right advice on asset allocation to help clients achieve those goals.

More AI in financial services statistics: Building trust between customers and digital labor

Financial services customers are open to using AI agents, but they’re not entirely sold on them yet. One AI in financial services statistic shows only 10% of consumers completely trust AI agents, and 44% report they somewhat trust them.

Here are three recommendations to help you prepare for agentic AI with trust in mind.

Data: Customers’ trust in your data stewardship is key to expanding your use of AI. Data is the foundation of all forms of AI, including agents. In fact, 88% of technical decision makers in financial services believe that AI’s outputs are only as good as its data inputs.

To get the most out of your data and take full advantage of agentic AI, FSIs need to ensure that data is accurate, current, relevant, accessible, secure, and governed. Check out The Financial Services Playbook for Effective Data Maturity for more information. This playbook outlines the five steps to data maturity for banking, insurance, and wealth and asset management firms. You can keep up with the rapid pace of evolving AI technology by following these steps.

Governance: In the highly regulated financial services industry, involve your legal, risk, and compliance teams in your digital engagement plans from the start. Be transparent about you goals and let them guide you so your strategies are safe and compliant.

Strategy: Before you create your agents’ scope of work and guardrails, make sure you consider the following:

• What are your most important roles and jobs that need to be done? 
• Will your agents work independently or will they need assistance? 
• Should your agents be empowered to make decisions on their own or will they need human approval? 

Once you have answered these questions, you can start designing the scope of work and guardrails for your AI agents.

Take your FSI to the next level with agentic AI

Financial services consumers have expressed their openness and enthusiasm for AI-powered agents like Agentforce, which help FSIs in delivering outstanding customer service and digital experiences. Are you ready to take the next step in your AI journey?

Moving to agents will benefit everyone involved. Your customers will enjoy faster, more seamless sales and service. Your representatives and advisors can focus on relationships that foster better financial health when they are free from repetitive tasks.

To get started, prioritize use cases for AI and agents that solve customer issues. See examples in the Build the Workforce of the Future in Financial Services with Autonomous Agents webinar. Partner with your team to identify the jobs that would be best completed by assistive or agentic AI. Choose tasks that make things easier for customers and employees.