Financial services didn’t discover AI in 2022. Banks and fintechs had been using it long before that pivotal moment in November 2022, when ChatGPT captured the world’s attention.
Chatbots inside mobile apps. Fraud detection systems that were able to catch the obvious. Automated onboarding that sped up account creation.
Narrow in scope. Mostly reactive. That was AI then.
GenAI and what’s come since is a radical shift for financial services. It promises a complete reconfiguration of how money is conceived, delivered, and experienced, fundamentally reshaping how institutions operate, compete, and create value.
And the industry knows it.
According to a joint report by Money20/20 and Acrew Capital, 76% of the world’s 221 leading financial institutions publicly launched at least one AI initiative between January 2023 and October 2024. Even more telling: nearly half (46%) of those companies are actively deploying Generative AI in their core, customer-facing products.
Compare that to the slow arc of traditional banking technology. Online banking took more than a decade to hit 50% adoption. GenAI is transforming finance at a pace the industry has never seen before.
This isn’t incremental change. It’s the beginning of an entirely new operating system for money. One that’s intelligent, contextual, and increasingly autonomous.
A New Operating System For Money
GenAI models didn’t just improve on previous AI systems, they fundamentally reimagined them. Traditional models, which processed data through narrow, predefined pathways, were useful but limited. Today’s sophisticated architectures with hundreds of billions of parameters can understand nuanced context, generate creative solutions, and reason through complex problems with human-like flexibility.
The evolution hasn’t stopped there. We’re already entering the next frontier: agentic AI systems. These models build on generative capabilities by adding autonomous decision-making and multi-step planning.
In doing so, these systems evolve from passive query responders to autonomous agents, able to take action, learn from outcomes, and adapt continuously.
For financial services, the implications are unprecedented. It ushers in a horizontal intelligence layer that cuts across previously siloed operations. Rather than deploying isolated AI tools for fraud detection here and customer service there, banks and financial institutions can start implementing cognitive systems that understand the across the entire operation, from risk to customer experience and operational efficiency. All simultaneously.
This shift from vertical to horizontal deployment of AI transforms how financial institutions conceive their operations. From discrete, compartmentalised processes to an integrated, intelligence-driven ecosystem that breaks traditional silos and boundaries.
The implications extend far beyond efficiency gains. These systems are already enabling entirely new business models.
Embedded Intelligence
What does this new mode of financial services look like? For one, it moves financial services from reactive tools that require users to initiate every action, to a proactive system that understands needs, handles routine actions autonomously, and engages users only for meaningful decisions.
Consider Morgan Stanley’s AI assistant, developed using OpenAI’s GPT – 4. The tool enables financial advisors to query across the firm’s expansive library of research and documents. More than a basic search function however, it also generating “personalized investment recommendations aligned with each client’s portfolio”.
The tool is also proactive, alerting financial advisors about market changes, investment opportunities, and potential investment risks tailored to specific client’s situations. Since integrating AI, Morgan Stanley has improved client engagement by 35%.
At Klarna, poised to make its public market debut this year, a fully autonomous GenAI agent replaced 700 human agents. In recent months, the buy-now-pay-later pioneer’s AI assistant has handled close to 2.5 million conversations in over 35 languages, dramatically reducing resolution times and delivering millions in cost savings and productivity gains.
It doesn’t just respond to queries. It initiates refunds and returns, understands nuanced customer issues, and integrates with backend systems (orders, payments, logistics), creating a comprehensive end-to-end agentic service.
Yet, this is only the start.
Soon, instead of navigating apps or websites, consumers will be able to interact with their finances through natural conversation. Instead of figuring out their budget, they can simply ask “can I afford this?” and receive context-relevant responses that consider their complete financial situation.
Seen this way, many of the financial services we have come to expect will fade into the background entirely. Bill payments and account transfers would happen automatically, only requiring user attention for decisions that truly need input.
Financial capabilities will shift from requiring dedicated apps to embedded intelligence, deeply integrated into everyday tools.
The Future of Money
Financial services, like every other industry, is undergoing a profound AI-driven transformation. As this technology evolves from reactive assistant to a proactive, autonomous collaborator, success for financial institutions will require more than technology capability.
The companies and operators that will win in this new landscape will not just be those with the biggest AI budgets or first-movers who are quick to rethink the architecture of financial interactions.
AI is changing the nature of technology itself. As we’ve seen already the cost for training these models has dramatically dropped. In this dynamic trust becomes a significant and possibly long-lasting moat. Those that can master the delicate balance of innovation with trust, deploying powerful financial AI while maintaining robust governance frameworks that protect privacy, ensure transparency, and address algorithmic biases, will be at the forefront.
The competitive landscape is already being reshaped. Traditional financial boundaries between banking, payments, wealth management and insurance will continue to blur as AI creates new ways to deliver value across previously disconnected services. The question isn’t whether AI will transform finance, but how quickly institutions can adapt to this new reality.
The future of money isn’t just an app or a platform. It’s AI-driven, increasingly autonomous, and it’s arriving faster than anyone expected.
