Cashing in on AI

The historically conservative banking sector is facing a reckoning. 

Confronting new compliance demands, finding a balance between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, and developing sustainable technology solutions to drive ESG goals are just a few of the many challenges the sector is facing.

Some banks are meeting this moment by using AI to accelerate innovation so they can realize significant improvements for people, planet, and profits. New findings by ServiceNow, in collaboration with longtime research partner ThoughtLab, capture banking leaders’ top concerns. 

We found that their top regulatory concern over the next three to five years is the impact of AI and other innovative technologies on the market. For all banks, the pressure to leverage AI to gain a market edge is intense, as is the need to figure out a responsible way to stay on the right side of looming regulatory and compliance audits. Despite that, only 32% of those surveyed report their current digital transformation efforts are helping improve their ability to manage such risk and compliance responsibilities.

A challenge for bankers is their customers’ expectation that banking should be seamless and available wherever and whenever needed and desired. Seventy-one percent of those surveyed think banking customers expect well-designed, highly intuitive experiences on par with the most popular apps, and over half think banks will need to significantly adjust their strategies due to new, disruptive competition from a wide array of nontraditional financial services companies. 

If they hope to survive, banks must adopt innovative solutions quickly to face accelerating AI advancements, rising consumer expectations, and an increasing number of rivals siphoning off customers and eroding legacy banks’ competitive advantage.