The banking sector is on the brink of a technological revolution, driven by the advent of agentic artificial intelligence (AI). This transformative technology promises to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and elevate customer service across various organizational levels. By adopting a customer-journey-based approach and ensuring front-to-back integration, banks can strategically prioritize areas for growth and navigate the complexities of the evolving economic landscape.
Front Office Applications
Enhancing Digital Adoption
In the front office, banks are focusing on incentivizing digital adoption among customers. They provide general account information, transaction details, payment support, and more through self-service channels, including chat, web, mobile apps, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Integrating human-assisted channels ensures that complex customer journeys are completed seamlessly.
While digital adoption simplifies many tasks, it also confronts banks with the challenge of maintaining personalized interaction. Agentic AI plays a crucial role by providing the flexibility to switch between self-service and assisted-service channels smoothly, ensuring continuity without compromising the customer experience. It helps mitigate the impersonal nature of digital interactions by understanding the customer’s preferences and history, guiding them through their journey in a manner that feels personal and responsive to their needs.
Empowering Customer Care Professionals
Customer care professionals (CCPs) increasingly handle specialized and complex scenarios such as claims, disputes, default payments, and advisory services. Tools powered by agentic AI enhance the customer experience by swiftly addressing issues within policy constraints, ensuring first-time accuracy, and minimizing resolution time discrepancies between experienced and less experienced staff. Agentic AI solutions provide CCPs with real-time insights and recommendations, massively boosting their ability to deliver precise and personalized assistance.
For instance, when dealing with a claim dispute, agentic AI can analyze transaction data to ascertain the nature of the dispute, guiding the CCP through specific steps to resolve it promptly. This results in a more efficient process and allows CCPs to focus on the nuances that require human intervention, optimizing the balance between technology-driven actions and human judgment. Moreover, this seamless integration not only speeds up the resolution process but also improves overall customer satisfaction by providing timely and accurate solutions tailored to individual needs.
Streamlining Transaction Disputes
A striking example of agentic AI’s capability is in managing customer transaction disputes. Through a dynamic IVR-based questionnaire, agentic AI can determine at the outset if a transaction is disputed (conducted by the customer) or fraudulent (not conducted by the customer). This prioritization enables accurate routing to the appropriate CCP, who is then equipped with pre-populated information, such as the intent of the call, customer profile, risk status, and transaction identifiers.
This preparation allows for faster and more precise chargeback processing or legitimate denial, complete with necessary documentation. In scenarios involving fraudulent transactions, agentic AI can also cross-reference transaction patterns with external data sources to identify any unusual activities or common fraud schemes, thus providing CCPs with critical information that helps them make informed decisions quickly. Overall, this reduces the time taken to resolve disputes, which not only enhances customer trust and satisfaction but also optimizes operational efficiency by reducing the workload on human operators.
Mid Office Applications
Democratizing Scenario Planning
In the mid office, agentic AI democratizes scenario planning for professionals in marketing, risk management, and finance. Traditionally, these roles involve significant manual effort and are susceptible to cognitive biases, groupthink, outdated information, and slow decision-making. Agentic AI overcomes these challenges by enabling parallel computations for various scenarios and providing optimal strategies. By offering a level of computational power and adaptability that was previously unattainable, agentic AI allows for a more agile and accurate approach to scenario planning and decision-making processes.
This technology helps create dynamic simulations based on real-time inputs, thereby enabling professionals to anticipate and act on potential market shifts, customer behaviors, and regulatory changes before they occur. These capabilities represent a significant shift from the conventional methods where decisions were primarily reactive. AI-driven insights ensure that the strategies developed are robust, well-informed, and capable of accommodating a wide array of possible outcomes, thereby reducing the risks associated with uncertainty and enhancing the overall resilience of the bank’s operations.
Optimizing Marketing Campaigns
For developing marketing campaign strategies within a given budget, AI agents can run multiple parallel computations to generate several effective scenarios. This adaptive approach allows for moving beyond static customer segmentation to dynamic, hyper-specific microsegments that can change based on real-time data from demographics, behaviors, psychographics, churn risks, lifetime values, segment overlaps, and anomaly detections.
By continuously refining these segments, banks can ensure their marketing efforts are precisely tailored to the evolving preferences and behaviors of their customers. This not only enhances the effectiveness of marketing campaigns but also maximizes the return on investment by targeting the right message to the right audience at the right time. Additionally, agentic AI helps marketers identify and capitalize on emerging trends more quickly, providing a competitive edge in an industry where customer preferences can evolve rapidly.
Enhancing Risk Management
Within the B2B risk management domain, AI agents offer continuous monitoring of correlated variables, including market trends, social media sentiments, and geopolitical events. This real-time data assessment enables proactive scenario planning, moving away from conventional quarterly or annual reviews, and ensuring decisions are based on the most recent and correct data. This capability enhances strategic planning by creating a culture of responsiveness and resilience, ultimately leading to a competitive advantage.
By reducing the reliance on outdated or static data, agentic AI ensures that risk management strategies are always aligned with current realities. This allows banks to identify potential threats and opportunities earlier, thereby improving their ability to make proactive adjustments to their strategies. This level of insight creates a robust framework for risk management, which not only protects the bank’s assets but also ensures sustained growth and stability in a rapidly changing market environment.
Back Office Applications
Streamlining Partner Onboarding
Back office processes also stand to gain significantly from agentic AI. These professionals often face inefficiencies due to the manual nature of tasks like capturing, assigning, following up, and coordinating various activities, which consume a considerable portion of their average handle time (AHT). Partner onboarding is a pertinent example, involving steps such as document collection, validation, contract review, and profile setup with necessary permissions for both self and delegated users.
This traditionally lengthy process, laden with follow-ups and back-and-forth communications, can extend over several months. However, agentic AI can execute these deterministic steps swiftly, recommend optimal approaches, and potentially reduce completion time from months to weeks or days. The automation of such processes frees up valuable human resources, which can then be redirected towards more strategic and high-value activities that require human judgment and creativity.
Expanding Use Cases
Beyond onboarding, the applicability of agentic AI spans diverse use cases in financial services firms, including colleague onboarding, payroll processing, servicing, maintenance, and software development. Upon maturation of the technology, agentic AI could autonomously handle complex tasks such as trading based on real-time market analysis while adhering to robust guardrails and controls.
Agentic AI’s ability to learn and adapt over time also means that it can continuously improve its decision-making processes and efficiency. For example, in trading, AI can quickly adapt to changing market conditions, making split-second decisions that could maximize profits or minimize losses. This level of sophistication not only enhances the operational efficiency of back-office functions but also contributes to the overall agility and competitiveness of financial institutions in the marketplace.
Human-AI Collaboration
Synergy Between Machine Precision and Human Intuition
The evolving synergy between machine precision and human intuition is a key aspect of agentic AI. As AI agents continuously learn and adapt, the ultimate potential is realized when these agents infuse human intelligence into decision-making processes. While AI handles large-scale data processing and analysis, humans are freed to focus on creative problem-solving and making nuanced decisions that necessitate a personal touch. This synergy ensures that the combined output of human and machine efforts is greater than the sum of its parts.
The collaboration between humans and AI creates an environment where each can leverage its strengths to overcome the other’s limitations. AI can process vast amounts of data quickly and identify patterns and insights that might elude human analysts. On the other hand, humans bring context, experience, and creativity to the table, allowing for more innovative and empathetic solutions. This blend of capabilities fosters a more dynamic and effective approach to problem-solving and strategic planning in the banking sector.
Enhancing Service Quality and Client Satisfaction
The banking sector stands on the verge of a monumental shift, spurred by the rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI). This cutting-edge technology holds the potential to significantly boost productivity, streamline various functions, and enhance customer service across all tiers of financial institutions. The integration of AI is not merely a technical upgrade but a strategic move that encompasses the entire customer journey, ensuring effective front-to-back operations. Banks that adopt this holistic approach can better prioritize key growth areas, making the most out of AI’s transformative capabilities. Furthermore, this integration allows banks to adeptly navigate the complexities of today’s evolving economic environment. As AI continues to evolve, its impact will likely shape the future of banking, from increasing operational efficiency to fostering deeper customer relationships. By continuing to embrace these technologies, banks are positioning themselves to stay competitive and innovative in an ever-changing market landscape.