Agentic AI in Retail Banking: Redefining Customer Service and Financial Decision-Making

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most dominant enablers of digital transformation across a significant number of industries in recent years. With the application of AI technology including natural language processing (NLP), creating human-like chat bots has become easier. Today, a greater portion of India banks have switched over to Chat Bot technology for their customer on-boarding, queries, complaints, fund transfers, etc., due their proficiency in handling numerous queries with high response time and round the clock service. This case study is based on the virtual assistant of State Bank of India (SBI) – State Bank Intelligent Assistant (SIA), which is engaged in providing personalized service to users based on their historical preferences, search frequency etc., via analyzing the data with the assistance of AI techniques. The recent developments and emergence of Virtual Banking in India and the current trends in the modern banking systems are explained along with the features of SBI-SIA virtual assistant. As banking is reshaped by technology, financial stability is a key priority for the Bank of England. The Bank is engaging with FinTech companies to gather information and understanding on the financial stability risks that might emerge from FinTech developments. Such risks are expected from the explosion of technology-enabled financial services. It has now become common for many banks to integrate FinTech, machine learning and AI into their services because customers want more choices, flexibility and control over their banking. AI is a branch of FinTech but not every FinTech is AI. AI is machine intelligence. Machine learning and AI are often treated as synonyms. AI in retail banking is at its nascent stage in the UK, though the potential is extraordinary. In the UK, some banks have launched banking applications using voice recognition. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has decided to roll out its “Luvo” AI customer service assistant, powered by its partner firm, RBS Group, wider in its branches. Bank of America, Capital One, Société Générale and Swedbank are some of the banks that have experimented with chatbots.