FIs are tapping into individual brilliance, collective genius, and data implementations to deliver real innovation in financial services. The theme of the June 18 Innovation & Insight Day 2025, The Human-AI Partnership: From Vision to Value, highlighted the inventive work taking place today.

In the 19 years of Celent’s annual Innovation & Insight events, we’ve seen inspiring changes in the financial services sector. The scope of projects tackled with the advent and implementation of artificial intelligence is truly impressive. Two years ago, there was plenty of hype around AI. Last year, we addressed how financial institutions were embracing AI and generative AI. Now we’re witnessing how firms are utilizing AI and technology to empower their workforces, enhance customer interactions, and create lasting impact. GenAI is proving to be able to enhance the human experience, rather than replace it.

I’m always inspired by the innovation taking place in financial services—and I’m grateful that the team at Celent was again able to recognize excellence in the field through the announcement of this year’s Celent Model Award winners. Thank you to all of the award nominees and winners, event attendees, and speakers who helped make I&I Day 2025 a success. If you missed any part of our live event or want to revisit it, you can access sessions and supporting materials on-demand here.

How Ready Are We for AI?

My colleague Monica Summerville joined me for the plenary kick-off session, where we looked at how ready the industry is for AI initiatives. Drawing on findings from our insurance team’s third annual GenAI in insurance survey for life insurance and property & casualty insurance (which are in keeping with overall trends across other sub-verticals in financial services about AI adoption), 44% of survey respondents are in production with AI, 24% expect to move into production within 6 months, 14% expect to move into production within 12 months, and 18% are currently exploring use cases.

Technology solution providers are also investing in AI capabilities. They report that AI is helpful across a range of uses. Of note is the role of GenAI in legacy modernization. AI is valuable for unpicking old code, rules-based automation, and self -healing integrations (which allow legacy and modern systems to co-exist), for example. We’re seeing a huge boost in modernization initiatives, through processes like using AI to add comments to undocumented code, which can cut down time to refactor.

Using AI to integrate old and new technologies, we’re anticipating that more FIs will transition their initiatives from internal and employee use cases to customer facing initiatives in the near term. The end product will help improve the customer experience, as well.

AI’s Role in Empowering Employees & Transforming Engagement

AI is being democratized, delivering productivity and intelligence tools to all levels of employees and customers. Few financial institutions, though, have successfully crossed the chasm between proof-of-concept and production. Aditya Birla Capital (ABC) is one of those FIs in the vanguard.

In a compelling fireside chat, Celent’s Alenka Grealish spoke with Pankaj Gadgil, MD & CEO, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Limited, and Head, Digital Platforms and Payments Strategy, Aditya Birla Capital. Pankaj detailed ABC’s path to success, also offering advice for other FIs on their own AI journeys.

With its implementation of AI in the past year and a half, Aditya Birla Capital embraced a culture of spotting opportunities. ABC looked at all lines of business: five large businesses (mutual fund, life insurance, health insurance, non-banking financial company, housing finance) and also a sixth organization, Aditya Birla Capital Digital, which is an omnichannel platform, built for the direct digital acquisition of customers at scale.

ABC approached the GenAI exercise from the bottom up, encouraging leaders within each of these organizations to look at the use cases that could be solved through GenAI. They then bucketed the use cases into the customer lifecycle. To maximize the impact, they created a center of excellence and an enterprise-wide GenAI platform that would serve functions including sales, service, auditing, and marketing.

ABC achieved early success with copilots and is now deep diving into more intrinsic agentic AI use cases. Successful use cases that have helped enhance the human experience include:

• Staff job satisfaction: Better call center scripts and GenAI-enabled speech analytics that help analyze the quality of conversations are among AI examples that help reduce attrition rates of new hires, improve staff retention, and improve the net promoter score.
• Improved customer satisfaction: Customer-facing initiatives, including GenAI-driven improvements to their app, have helped contribute to the personalized engagements that customers want, improving in-app click rates by more than 15%.
• Better sales engagements: Sales teams, supported by a GenAI-enabled sales co-pilot, can turn to relevant talking points, making them more empowered when meeting a partner or customer.

Pankaj offered important takeaways for others to focus on at the beginning of their own journeys. First and foremost: focus on the quality of content to make the use cases successful. In order for an AI assistant to be effective, documentation and processes must be neatly laid out. Next, having an agentic orchestration layer present early in the process can help digital onboarding journeys. Finally, to ensure the efficacy of an agentic AI or generative AI model, track both the accuracy of responses and the sufficiency of response; these manual efforts are crucial for assessing the accuracy and governance of AI.

Congratulations! Celent’s 2025 Model Award Winners

As in past years, Celent’s Model Awards again set out to answer a crucial question: What would it look like for a firm to do everything right with today’s technology?

Entries to this awards program—which recognizes excellence in technology in the financial services industry—were, again, quite strong this year. Celent received submissions for 285 initiatives from 198 FIs in 40 countries. These represented a variety of value propositions: 46% focused on the business driver of efficiency, 21% on risk and resilience, 20% on market innovation and growth, and 13% on customer experience and retention. The submissions also highlighted how the adoption of new technology is accelerating; perhaps not surprisingly, 22% of this year’s submissions report using LLMs and GPT models.

View the Model Award Overview Sessions on-demand to see how 53 winners at leading institutions are using innovation to drive real business impact. Registration for these sessions also provides you with access to snapshot videos and downloadable takeaways that highlight key insights from each winning initiative. Celent clients can also view full-length case study reports for deeper insights. I hope you’ll explore these, share key takeaways with your team, and find insights that support your own initiatives.

Access model award materials in each category through the links below.

• Model Bank 2025 Awards: People, Vision, and a Modernized Technology Estate: The Formula for Banking Innovation
• Model Buy Side & Sell Side 2025 Awards: Thriving Through Uncertainty: How AI and Innovation are Reshaping Capital Markets
• Model Insurer 2025 Awards: Model Insurer Trailblazers: Forging the Future of Insurance
• Model Risk Manager 2025 Awards: How AI, Automation, and Collaboration are Shaping the Future of Risk
• Model Wealth Manager 2025 Awards: From AI Impact to Cloud Transformation: Discover Best-In-Class Tech Innovation

Today’s Innovation

Today’s data-driven world is tapping into new technologies for varied applications. The following provide just a taste of the exciting AI-driven initiatives taking place today:

• The 2025 Model Bank Award for AI-Augmented Business Lending went to a bank that evolved its lending to actively use data and machine learning (ML) decisioning models across all stages of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer lifecycle, such as customer acquisition, credit underwriting, cross-sell, upsell, and portfolio risk management. Data is taken directly from the verified source by leveraging digital public infrastructure instead of from customers, improving operational efficiency.
• One of the winners of the Model Risk Manager Award for AI and GenAI went to a fast-growing bank that prioritizes an AI-first strategy to support risk management, as well as the business, through the use of ML models. The result is comprehensive model validation that protects intellectual property and ensures regulatory compliance. The bank’s risk management-as-a-service initiative is instructive for other FIs seeking to navigate the complexities of AI-driven decisioning in a regulated environment.
• The 2025 Model Wealth Manager for AI-Driven Wealth Management Solutions was awarded to a specialized FI that embraced GenAI technology within its asset management division. It utilizes GenAI to produce accurate, up-to-date, and personalized portfolio performance reports for private banking clients, explaining market conditions, the portfolio manager’s investment decisions, and more. Portfolio managers’ efficiency has improved; the client experience is strengthened through more regular, personalized performance insights.

Winning submissions for Celent’s Model Awards are too numerous to detail here. I hope you’ll explore them.

Let’s Celebrate Together in 2026!

In 2026, Celent will mark the 20th anniversary of its flagship Innovation & Insight events. We want to know how your organization is using technology to demonstrate extraordinary results. Watch for Celent’s 2026 Model Awards program to open in October 2025, with winners announced in summer 2026.

Until then, please feel free to contact Celent regarding anything presented as part of I&I Day. To set up a meeting with one of Celent’s analysts, please message us or connect with us on X (@Celent_Research) or LinkedIn. Thank you for being part of the conversation!