Agentic AI and the future of financial services

Customers will let an AI agent run their shopping and plan their travel. But they will not let one near their money.

In a 2025 Braze survey, financial services was the category where the fewest consumers said they were comfortable with AI by a wide margin. For finserv marketers, that gap isn’t a reason to wait out the technology. It’s the opening.

The decline of banking primacy, invisibility at checkout, and shifting customer profiles are making direct relationships harder to build and keep—and agentic AI, used to earn trust rather than simply automate, is how the brands that lead will close it.

The evolution of AI in financial services

In the beginning, AI largely supported financial services organizations from the sidelines, driving critical but largely invisible efficiencies. These traditional machine learning models operated on long development cycles and were restricted to highly specific backend use cases such as identifying complex fraud patterns or calculating risk profiles behind the scenes.

Today that barrier has dissolved. AI has moved out of the backend and is now being deployed rapidly across multiple marketing operations. Teams now utilize AI to build, audit, and report on campaigns and customer journeys in real time, allowing them to respond to market shifts with unprecedented agility.

As organizations grow more comfortable with this technology, the application of AI is extending directly into the customer experience itself. Supported by robust safeguards, autonomous AI can now safely play a more proactive role. Rather than waiting around for a customer to log in and ask a question, AI works in the background to anticipate needs before they arise and safely deliver real-time, personalized financial guidance right when it matters most.

Agentic AI has arrived at the ideal time

The timing couldn’t be more impactful. Financial services brands are navigating a period of profound disruption.

Banking brand primacy, the concept of a customer relying on one institution as their primary financial hub, is in decline. Payments brands are invisible at checkout. Younger investors are throwing out the relationship rule book. And digital-first challenger brands are ‘moving fast and breaking stuff,’ while established players wrestle with legacy systems.

The result is two pressures squeezing a sector in flux: The need to innovate quickly versus the need to operate safely.

Finserv brands can’t afford to fail or to fall behind, which is why agentic AI and multi-agent ecosystems represent such a golden opportunity.

Here are examples of AI in action:

• In banking, agentic AI could enable a banking app to move from reactive alerts to proactive financial guidance, identifying upcoming cashflow pressure before it becomes a problem and suggesting tailored actions in real time.
• In wealth management, AI agents could continuously tailor engagement based on investor behavior, risk appetite, and life events—adapting both advice and tone to match each individual’s context and confidence level.
• In payments, autonomous systems could recognize intent at the point of transaction and deliver personalized incentives, support, or financial nudges within embedded checkout journeys—even when the brand itself is not directly visible.

But these use cases are only successful if customers trust your brand.

Maintaining trust in the age of AI

Trust remains the financial service industry’s most valuable asset and once it is lost, it is hard to rebuild. So assigning greater autonomy to AI agents introduces understandable new concerns around governance, transparency, bias, accountability, and control.

While AI-driven financial services continue to advance, consumer confidence remains a significant barrier. A 2025 OnePoll survey for Braze shows that consumers remain especially wary of AI in financial decision-making, more so than in any other industry.

This means one of the priorities for financial service brands is how to use AI to strengthen trust, rather than weaken it. That’s where approaches like human-in-the-loop oversight and multi-agent ecosystems become important—ensuring AI decisions are monitored, challenged, and escalated where needed.

Agentic AI for financial services customer engagement

Beyond governance structures, trust has to be built from the ground up.

The rules of financial services customer engagement are changing. Customers expect to be understood—to get communication that reflects their real needs and respects how their data is used. Experience and trust increasingly define loyalty and that means sweating the ‘small stuff’ that is actually the big stuff. Like how customer data is used to understand their needs, and whether it clearly creates relevance and value.

Fortunately, agentic AI isn’t just capable of transforming financial services behind-the-scenes; it’s also changing what’s possible in customer-facing activities like engagement and advice.

• Early AI-enabled customer engagement helped marketers move from batch-and-blast communications to more personalized journeys. While these were designed to feel one-to-one for users, they were still one-to-many journeys—using predefined rules, branching logic, and behavioral triggers to deliver the ‘right message at the right time’.
• Today’s agentic AI moves this forward to truly one-to-one personalization. Instead of user behavior triggering predefined journeys designed by marketers, AI continuously interprets live customer signals and independently adapts communication in real-time—within guardrails, of course. This agentic approach unlocks new levels of relevance, timeliness, and efficiency.

By using agentic AI, financial service brands position themselves to deliver more relevant, more responsive customer service. Every customer can receive highly-relevant support that builds engagement and, most importantly, builds trust.

Final thoughts: From invisible to indispensable

The rise of agentic AI isn’t just about ‘more automation’. It’s about achieving the true transformation that AI advocates have been promising.

The brands that lead in the next era of financial services will likely be those that use AI to strengthen customer relationships, particularly in a landscape where brands are often invisible in moments that matter and have to battle for awareness, choice, and loyalty.