Banking’s moment of lift-off

Gavin Allen
Executive Editor-in-Chief
Huawei Technologies

Digital technology put a bank in your pocket. Agentic AI puts an intelligent financial assistant by your side.

Instead of simply giving you access to services, AI agents can understand context, anticipate your needs, and complete tasks on your behalf.

As the futurist and bestselling author Brett King put it to me for this Intelligent Finance edition of Transform magazine: “In future, you won't have to make decisions. The bank will become an invisible layer of technology infrastructure.”

That shift is already underway, changing how banks will operate, compete, and – dare I say it? – think.

“You can’t be a bank and frame technology as just the tech stuff,” warns King. “Does tech fundamentally change who you are as a traditional bank? Yes – it has to!”

For years, banks focused on moving customers from branches to apps. Now, AI agents are taking on tasks once handled by customers, ushering in a new era of bot-to-bot banking.

It’s a constant race to adapt. Huawei Digital Finance CEO Jason Cao says AI will not decide the winner. Execution will. Banking systems will launch in weeks. Credit approvals will drop from 10 minutes to 20 seconds.

Regulation will also shape the race. Around the world, new AI rules are demanding systems that are transparent, accountable, and subject to human oversight. Rather than slowing innovation, these standards could reward banks that build trust into AI from the outset.

Publisher and podcast host Jim Marous says banks can turn deeper understanding into stronger relationships. “I want my bank to show me it knows me,” he says. “The consumer is now steering the ship. Bankers are just passengers.”

The Finanser CEO Chris Skinner describes the challenge as Herculean but unavoidable. “The whole infrastructure has to be founded on an AI-native platform,” he says, allowing banks to understand and anticipate customer needs.

Robin Speculand of Bridges Consultancy argues that technology is rarely the main obstacle. Transformation fails when leaders underinvest in people, tolerate organizational silos, and treat execution as an afterthought.

Author and consultant David Birch looks beyond the bank’s own AI systems to the agents acting for its customers. As those agents begin choosing products and providers, banks will have to compete for their attention and establish new forms of identity and trust.

Meanwhile, author and adviser Emmanuel Daniel examines the question of governance. As autonomous systems take on more financial decisions, banks will need new ways to assign authority and intervene when something goes wrong.