CXOs in Banking and Financial Services (BFS) institutions are critically evaluating the business outcomes of AI investments. Key questions remain: How can we fast-track AI proofs of concept to large-scale projects with tangible business outcomes? What investments does it take to realize enterprise-wide impact?
As digital transformation accelerates, legacy systems, once the backbone of financial operations, are now bottlenecks to agility, innovation, and customer-centricity. Enter Agentic AI: a new paradigm that transcends traditional automation and offers a pragmatic path to modernizing legacy infrastructure while unlocking exponential value.
The Legacy Challenge: More Than Just Technical Debt
Legacy systems in BFS are often monolithic structures, deeply embedded in mission-critical workflows, built on outdated languages like COBOL and lack documentation. Their rigidity impedes real-time responsiveness and integration with modern platforms. Their complexity also makes migration risky and resource-intensive. Moreover, the scarcity of skilled professionals who understand these systems exacerbates the problem, creating operational bottlenecks and compliance risks.
From Legacy Burden to Intelligent Agility
Unlike rule-based automation, agentic systems are autonomous, goal-driven, and context-aware. They interpret business rules, adapt to dynamic environments, and collaborate with humans and other agents to execute multi-step tasks. This makes them uniquely suited for BFS workflows that demand precision, compliance, and agility, such as customer relationship management, underwriting, risk assessments, and regulatory compliance among others.
These agents are not just reactive—they are proactive collaborators. A major broker-dealer and trading API provider faced challenges to modernize its fragmented infrastructure. Autonomous agents orchestrated onboarding, regression testing, and environment provisioning across legacy systems and cloud-native platforms. This approach enabled shared services, reduced infrastructure readiness time by 90% and testing effort by 70%, ultimately driving a 50% reduction in operational costs. The example showcases how Agentic AI can intelligently coordinate workflows across legacy and modern systems to deliver scalable, cost-efficient outcomes.
Architecture and Governance: Building for Scale
Modernizing legacy systems in BFS is not just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic overhaul. Agentic AI introduces a layered, modular architecture that enables financial institutions to transition from rigid monoliths to agile, intelligent ecosystems. This transformation hinges on two pillars: composable architecture and robust governance.
Successful deployment of Agentic AI requires robust, composable architecture. Leading implementations feature layered designs with GenAI foundations, secure data fabrics, agent orchestration studios, and observability dashboards. These systems support multi-agent communication, human-in-the-loop governance, and integration with COTS and legacy platforms via SDKs and APIs. This modularity also enables seamless integration with commercial platforms and legacy systems, ensuring continuity and flexibility.
Governance must be embedded from the outset. CXOs must take responsibility for establishing frameworks that ensure explainability, fairness, and compliance in AI-driven decisions. It includes real-time observability, budget controls, and structured review cadences that align technology with regulatory and ethical standards.
CXOs must shift the narrative from “legacy as liability” to “legacy as leverage.”
The first imperative is anchoring modernization in business outcomes. CXOs must lead domain-led transformations where Agentic AI is deployed in high-impact areas such as customer onboarding, KYC, loan processing, risk assessments, and compliance. This requires deep collaboration between business and technology teams and ensures that modernization delivers measurable outcomes—not just technical upgrades. A North American fintech powering major banks leveraged agent-driven systems to overhaul its treasury operations. Pricing adjustment cycles, previously taking up to six weeks, were reduced to same-day responsiveness. Not only did this boost competitiveness, but it also alleviated pressure on operational teams, exemplifying how Agentic AI can deliver rapid, measurable business value.
Equally important is to shift from a “rip-and-replace” mindset to a “retain-and-reimagine” strategy. Agentic AI enables legacy systems to coexist with intelligent micro-services and autonomous agents that orchestrate workflows across old and new platforms. This approach preserves core functionality while accelerating time-to-market, reducing the risks associated with full-stack rewrites, and modernizing the user experience layer. For example, a leading wealth management giant rewired its customer support using AI. By deploying autonomous agents that could interpret and resolve complex customer queries, the firm reduced query resolution time from 4–5 minutes to just 4–7 seconds. These agents seamlessly integrated with legacy systems, ensuring compliance and delivering context-aware, hyper-personalized support, demonstrating the tangible impact of agentic AI on customer experience and operational efficiency.
Finally, modernization is as much about people as it is about platforms. CXOs must foster a culture of AI fluency, upskill teams across functions, and create pathways for legacy system experts to transition into AI-enabled roles. Engaging ecosystem partners—technology vendors, analysts, and advisors—further accelerates transformation and ensures alignment with industry best practices.
For today’s leaders, the imperative is clear: act decisively, scale with purpose, and shape the future of banking before it shapes you.
