Banking's next evolution isn't about efficiency—it's about delight

The Current State of Banking Customer Experience

Despite significant investments in customer experience over the past 10-15 years, banks still face a fundamental challenge: delivering truly engaging digital experiences. When we compare digital banking platforms to consumer favourites like Netflix, Uber, or Amazon, the gap becomes apparent. While banks have successfully reduced friction in everyday transactions and streamlined everyday tasks, their digital offerings often feel impersonal and lack the magnetic appeal of leading consumer platforms. Moments that genuinely delight are few and far between.

This disconnect is compounded by the erosion of personal relationships. In the UK alone, bank and building society branches have declined by more than 60%. The human touchpoints that remain are often memorable for all the wrong reasons—a stark contrast to the delightful experiences we might have during a well-planned holiday or seamless ride-sharing journey.

Finally, whilst the emergence of Neobank’s may not have delivered the competitive landscape predicted when they first hit the Digital Highstreet, we have seen a significant shift in Customer expectation which can be directly attributed to the features and capability of Digital-first offerings like Starling and Monzo.

The AI Opportunity: Three Transformative Approaches

Banks can leverage artificial intelligence to fundamentally reimagine customer experience across three key dimensions:

1. Accelerating Full-Service Digital Banking

AI can dramatically speed up the development and enhancement of comprehensive mobile banking platforms. Assets like IBM's Digital Experience Builder demonstrate how banks can deliver "brilliant basics"—core banking services that are not just functional, but genuinely intuitive and efficient. At Nationwide Building Society, we are using such AI assets to rapidly progress from a figma protype to production ready app in days what would have earlier taken weeks to design and build. By using AI in the development process itself, banks can build and iterate on their apps at unprecedented pace, ensuring they keep up with rapidly evolving customer expectations.

2. Creating Intelligent, Personalized Customer Journeys

The next generation of banking apps will move beyond one size fits all user interfaces to provide truly personalized, AI-driven experiences. Consider how a simple task transforms when infused with intelligence:

Traditional Approach: Monthly Statement Review

• Customer manually reviews transactions
• Patterns and anomalies go unnoticed
• No actionable insights provided

AI-Enhanced Experience: nudges, notifications and in app messages that are tailored to you that advise "You spent 12% more than last month. Largest increases in dining (+£80) and streaming (+£25). You also had a new charge: Apple Storage Pro (£9.99/mo)"

At another UK bank, we are working to build this feature that allows customers to engage more intuitively with the spend data to create better financial outcomes.

Drawing insights from multiple data sources (product holdings, channel behaviour, transactions, demographics, social media) across the enterprise becomes a key competitive advantage to being personable. Delivering on the moment that matters then becomes an equation of deducing “what to promote” and most crucially “when for maximum effect”. This transformation turns passive data consumption into active financial awareness, helping customers understand their spending patterns and make informed decisions.

3. Embedding Intelligent Agents for proactive value-added service

The most advanced evolution involves integrating AI agents that don't just respond to customer requests—they anticipate needs and take initiative. These agents can identify opportunities and problems before customers even notice them:

Proactive Dispute Management: Instead of customers discovering duplicate charges weeks later, the app might prompt: "Looks like this duplicate Uber charge wasn't refunded—want me to dispute it?"

Intelligent Savings Optimization: Rather than customers manually managing multiple accounts, the system could suggest: "You spent £150 less than budgeted on groceries—shall I move that to your 'Holiday Fund'?". Thinking further into the future, and operating within security and data privacy guardrails, agentic AI could in the future act on behalf of customers to optimise in which account their savings is held, with the goal of maximising savings interest and minimising tax implications, even opening new accounts on your behalf.

We are building an agentic banking asset and an architecture framework, that will enable embedding AI agents across the critical banking customer journeys as well as ensure banks can communicate and transact with external Agents operating on behalf of prospect customers.

The Path Forward

The banking industry stands at a pivotal moment. While digital transformation has solved many operational challenges, the next frontier is creating experiences that customers genuinely value and enjoy. AI offers the tools to make banking not just more efficient, but more human—paradoxically using technology to restore the personal touch that physical branch closures have eroded.

Banks that successfully implement these AI-driven approaches won't just improve customer satisfaction metrics; they'll create the kind of sticky, engaging experiences that turn routine banking into a valued part of customers' digital lives. The question isn't whether AI will transform banking customer experience, but how quickly banks will embrace this transformation to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.