This week Celent held a GenAI Symposium for financial services in the heart of the BigApple – the Westin at Times Square.

If you missed the event, I’m sorry to say you missed informative and engaging discussions about not only GenAI aspirations, but also the reality of how institutions are already adopting this technology. We had keynote sessions from Celent (of course), AWS, Georgia Tech, and panel discussions that included many panelists from top tier banks, insurance companies, and hyperscalers. This wasn’t just about the potential – but people sharing about what they have achieved. Stuff is happening!

However, it is also worth looking further ahead too.

I hosted a panel discussion with two luminaries of financial services innovation and solutions engineering: Milton Santiago, Head of Digital Solutions at Silicon Valley Bank, and Suresh Ramamurthi, Chairman of CBW Bank, and Chairman of NetXD. This was an incredibly interactive discussion (with a good dose of banter and humor) about how GenAI is now and will continue to transform customer engagement for bank employees on the front lines (especially the contact center). However, the impact is not limited to employees. GenAI (not necessarily LLMs – but that’s a different story), can and will transform the banking interface for interactive banking experiences.

The discussion began with looking backward to see what we can learn from early virtual assistants before we look forward. Early virtual assistants were heavily rule-based with a limited set of skills – even in the consumer banking space, never mind for the complexity of corporate transactions. As AI developments from IBM (Watson), Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana), and Google (Hey Google) evolved, banks were able to implement next generation virtual assistants that were more conversational. That’s typically the generation of solutions we see today.

Now of course, GenAI has risen to the fore in the past 18 months (as has the stock price of the GenAI tech giants). This brings new opportunities for enhancing the digital conversational interactions between banks and their clients.

Finally, we talked about how smart devices, GenAI agents, APIs, and Zero Trust security will transform customer engagement in banking – as it will the treasury and financial application experiences for corporate banking clients. The banking world will become more interconnected with social and business activities, challenges, and expectations.

One of the challenges of enterprise cultures is that products and technologies are often viewed in vertical silos, or through a narrow focus. However, transforming banking experiences requires the integration and embedding of multiple technologies and capabilities. None of these technologies bring change in isolation. They all contribute to the development of new experiences. The technology to change is here – the solution lies in plugging the pieces together (at industrial strength).

Hope to see you next time.