Wall Street banks ramp up digital assistants in bid to win productivity race

At BNY, digital employees are treated as teammates which are assigned for specific tasks, and can talk to each other. They have been given login IDs and nicknames to join the team and work alongside colleagues, CEO Robin Vince said on a Wall Street Journal podcast earlier this year. "The digital employee has a login, it can actually operate in the systems, and it actually has a ... human manager that's responsible for training it, making sure that it actually is doing all the right things, like a performance review, if you will, quality control, and it has tasks every day," said Vince on the podcast, explaining the role of its digital assistant named Payment Pete. BNY did not respond to requests for comment. At UBS, financial advisors have agents which send thousands of alerts daily about the need for action, for example if a client has an annuity maturing and needs to reinvest. "They gather all internal information from meetings, accounts and e-mail communications," said Richard James, head of AI product at UBS. Once a financial advisor makes a decision about a transaction with the client, AI agents can trade and complete money transfers, according to James. The bank says AI is allowing advisors to use 70% of their time talking to clients instead of doing routine tasks. Goldman Sachs teamed up earlier this year with Anthropic to develop agents that will do tasks such as trading and transaction accounting, client vetting and onboarding while JPMorgan sees areas such as corporate treasury as ripe to be transformed by agentic AI. Meanwhile, Citi is preparing to roll out an AI-enabled virtual wealth management “team member.” "Banks are increasingly using agentic AI and figuring out more ways to use it because it has a lot of potential," said Bhavi Mehta, global lead for advanced analytics in financial services at Bain & Company. Bank investors have been asking about the return on investment on technology spends as AI investments continue to scale up. “Investors are asking, where should we be looking for ROI on these tech spends and that’s why banks are likely to focus on certain areas of AI spends where the returns are much more evident and can be scaled up,” said Torrente. The growing use of agentic AI is, however, prompting regulators and bank executives to focus on the risks that come with broader adoption of the technology. When organizations employ these digital agents, they are giving them access to internal systems but with guardrails. Morgan Stanley's Maranca said that there will always be human oversight and the agents will not have autonomy to make decisions on portfolios. "They are still primarily using it for internal purposes and are being extremely cautious when it touches the customer and are making sure that there is a human involved for any critical functions," said Mehta. Major banks are ramping up how they incorporate digital assistants in their daily operations, determining how such agents interact with human colleagues and clients as they race to get ahead. Banks are competing in the adoption of agentic AI - artificial intelligence that can accomplish tasks with minimal human supervision - in functions from wealth to client vetting, trading and treasury, in an effort to increase productivity. They are now increasingly pushing to incorporate agents that can autonomously take actions on behalf of users into their operations and have them work alongside humans. "We are working with banks in particular on agents and human employees ... to help the banks look at all the roles end to end, and then determine which ones are hybrid roles, which ones are agentic employees, which ones are only human employees," said Peter Torrente, U.S. sector leader for banking at KPMG. A June KPMG survey showed that 51% of banks were piloting AI agents. Large banks are embedding or planning the use of agentic AI on daily work in a multitude of functions. Koren Maranca, head of Artificial Intelligence for Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley, said the bank will start testing digital assistants later this summer that will interact with clients at any time of the day. The bank already uses agents to help financial advisors do all kinds of tasks. "We are now preparing these agents to start pushing reminders or recommendations to the financial advisors regarding their clients," said Maranca. Such assistants can analyze investments, suggest strategies and assist in building portfolios.

Wall Street banks ramp up digital assistants in bid to win productivity race

Examples at Morgan Stanley, BNY, UBS and peers

Oversight and return-on-investment questions remain

Banks expand use of agentic AI across daily operations

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