Mark Scrivens, FPT Software UK Chief Executive Officer, FPT Corporation
Over the last decade, automation and data-driven insight has been transforming the major functions for banks and financial services businesses, including risk assessment, fraud detection and delivering hyper-personalised services.
A survey by The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) shows that three quarters (75%) of UK financial services firms are already using artificial intelligence (AI), with a further 10% planning to use it over the next three years. This is a further leap from the 58% using AI in their joint 2022 survey.
Beyond improving digital customer experience in financial services, AI is making a significant impact across key banking and financial processes. For instance, AI can enable financial services providers to accelerate the loan and credit application processing time from approximately six days to less than 24 hours, while cutting costs and improving operational efficiency. Leading financial firms are utilising AI to transform their operations and get ahead of competitors.
The power of Agentic AI
In the evolving world of AI, Agentic AI takes Generative AI’s (GenAI) content creating abilities a stage further. With the potential to think more for itself without human supervision, it can automate more complex processing tasks.
Agentic AI leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as powerful reasoning engines that can send commands to existing tools, which enables it to perform actions and learn through trial and error. It powerfully draws on multiple agents to autonomously learn and adapt to give rapid automated decisions, speeding up many financial actions and processes.
In an industry highly targeted for valuable and confidential data, Agentic AI can also play an important role in an enterprise defence strategy. It can act as a front line of defence to detect risks, prompt instant response, and automate recovery to protect data and minimise downtime and make business processes more resilient.
While The Bank of England / FCA study shows that only 2% of AI use cases have fully autonomous decision-making, we can expect this number to rise in the next three years.
Next generation financial services
Banks and financial services are already adopting AI and emerging technologies to build, launch, and scale fully digital banking experiences – from apps to digital-first branches to fully cloud-native banks.
With the help of a digital team or technology partner, banks are seeking specialist tech solutions to enhance their mobile and internet banking platforms, digital onboarding with biometric verification and using API-driven analytics for personalised customer engagement and customer insights.
Corporate banks are also modernising their systems and delivering secure, efficient services to business clients. This might be designing a mobile banking platform, trade finance and supply chain finance systems or a customisable dashboard and reporting for corporate employees and users.
Fintechs looking to disrupt traditional financial solutions can accelerate product development by embracing digital lending, BNPL platforms, digital wallets and embedded finance solutions.
The real-world of Agentic AI in financial services
Agentic AI goes beyond automation to unlock new avenues for innovation and creativity. By taking on the burden of operational tasks, employees are empowered to focus on higher-priority work – strategic problem-solving, driving innovation, and delivering exceptional customer experiences.
FPT partnered with a top international bank (headquartered in the UK) and implemented Agentic AI to accelerate its loan and credit application processing from six days to less than 24 hours. This involved the development of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) digital lending platform that connected the bank and its customers for digital lending services.
As a result, this streamlined the loan and credit application process by removing cumbersome customer paperwork. In so doing, this simplified the onboarding process for banks with pre-processed applications for qualified customers. With AI-based credit risk assessments that utilise extensive datasets beyond standard credit scores, lenders can make rapid and accurate lending decisions based on borrower repayment behaviour.
For financial services organisations, combating fraud to protect customers’ assets and identities is a 24/7 challenge. The scale of this is such that Industry body UK Finance estimates that criminals successfully stole £1.17 billion through banking fraud and scams in 2024. However, banks can now use AI agents to analyse transaction patterns in real-time, block suspicious activities and adapt to the latest fraud techniques.
Ensuring the safe and beneficial use of Agentic AI
As with any new technology, it will take time for Agentic AI to become a trusted and commoditised technology solution. Improving Agentic AI will mean addressing some big AI ethical concerns, such as bias mitigation, transparency, and privacy. Also ensuring effective human-AI collaboration, clear data practices and cybersecurity will be essential to develop trust and viability of Agentic AI as a safe and beneficial technology.
Across the financial services industry, Agentic AI has become an indisputable complement to GenAI and is driving worldwide digital banking innovation. It will enable forward-thinking finance business leaders to build new efficiencies and deliver the future of finance.