By 2029, AI agents will autonomously resolve 80% of customer service issues without human intervention – that’s an instantaneous, 24/7, personalised customer experience – are you ready to compete with organisations who can offer that level of service?
As you’ll see below, the financial giants are moving fast, and that is only set to rise, surging to $300 billion of investment by 2030. The window to earn and keep customer loyalty is shrinking. AI strategies are no longer a nice to have, they are essential to stay relevant, unlock new revenue streams, boost loyalty, and keep customers.
As someone who’s spent over a decade crafting powerful narratives, meaningful interactions and embedding human-centred design across various financial services clients, I can see the transformative benefits AI could bring to financial customers and how it could drive meaningful content engagement.
So let’s look at some of the most critical examples from financial services leaders blazing the trail.
The human side of AI integration
Royal Bank of Canada’s, AI NOMI (or Know Me)
A digital assistant that’s been redefining customer interaction since 2017. NOMI isn’t just a chatbot; it offers hyper-personalised insights, nudges users toward smarter saving behaviours, and provides predictive cash flow projections.
Key Features:
- NOMI Insights: NOMI analyses your monthly cash flow, categories your spending, and more, to show you exactly what your money is up to and what it’s going to do next.
- NOMI Find & Save: finding the customer ways to save by learning transactional patterns and putting aside money automatically.
- NOMI Budgets: calculates budget recommendations based on unique spending habits and then helps keep customers stay on track with updates and reminders.
Standout Metrics:
- Increases In Usage: More than 900,000 RBC clients use NOMI Forecast since 2021 launch
- Increased App Engagement: Client engagement with RBC mobile banking app increased 20%
- Millions of Interactions: NOMI forecast leading to more than 10 million interactions since 2021
Bank of America’s, AI Erica
A similarly powerful story comes from one of the most widely used financial AI assistants globally. Erica uses conversational AI to offer spending insights, flag unusual activity, and coach customers on financial health. Erica communicates financial information in natural language while maintaining the bank’s tone of reliability.
Key Features:
- Virtual Financial Assistants: Has a variety of time saving and advisory functionality that you can access through AI chat. Providing account activity alerts and notifications, monthly spending updates, and offering ways to improve your credit score.
- Account Management & Payments: Allowing you quick access and management of multiple accounts, account information and Zelle payments.
- Manage Investments: Currently only available on Merrill investment accounts, but here you can access quotes, track performance, place trades and connect with an advisor.
Standout Metrics:
- Increased Traffic: 42 million users since its launch
- Improved User Experience: 98% of clients get answers they need from Erica within 44 seconds
- Habitual Usage: 800 million personalised inquiries since launch, with over 2 million per day
NatWest, Ai Cora+
One of the first UK banks to roll out AI across their network. Cora & Cora+ are digital assistants that handle customer queries online and in its mobile app. Cora has evolved from a basic text chatbot to a more advanced AI assistant.
Key Features:
- 24/7 self-service: Giving user access to natural language AI customer service out of hours – improving customer service.
- Cost Saving Query Handling: Can address over 150 common banking questions (from card activation to balance queries) helping deflect routine inquiries from call centres.
- Piloting: In 2024 Natwest began piloting “Cora+”, a generative AI-enhanced version of the assistant developed with IBM, aimed at answering more complex questions in a proactive, intuitive way. Illustrating how financial institutions are now continuously improving their approach to Artificial Intelligence.
Standout Metrics:
- Better query handling: In 2023 alone, Cora handled 10.8 million customer queries
- Customer Usage Up: 94% of customers use digital banking
- Satisfaction Boost: ~150% uplift in satisfaction for some answers
Beyond technology: A customer-centred redesign of UX
Successfully integrating AI into financial services UX isn’t a plug-and-play operation. It requires a systemic rethink of how you engage with your customers; from reactive support to guidance that anticipate user needs. Traditional transactional messaging is not just ineffective; it can sometimes even actively erode trust.
Instead, effective AI deployment begins with understanding customer context:
- Invest in qualitative user research.
- Co-design with diverse customer segments.
- Conduct ongoing usability and A/B tests to refine the end-to-end experience.
Using those techniques, AI becomes a service layer, not just a tool; one that surfaces insights with empathy, makes decisions feel easier, and supports clients in navigating complexity.
Where we see AI driving the most UX value in the next few years:
- Predictive analytics: Anticipate spending patterns, life events, or financial stress before the user even realises it.
- Automation of low-value tasks: Enabling user to perform tasks effortlessly, freeing up mental space for customers and strategic space for staff.
- Intelligent personalisation: Deliver relevant insights in the right tone, at the right moment, through the right channel.
Four phases of a game-changing AI-driven UX strategy
To embed AI as a meaningful part of your UX strategy, follow a structured, iterative framework:
- Assess: Start with experience mapping. Where are users making unnecessary decisions or encountering avoidable complexity? Look for frictions AI can resolve, but only where it adds clarity—not opacity.
- Develop: Pair AI engineers with UX researchers. Co-create interfaces where machine intelligence complements human intuition. Avoid the trap of “AI for AI’s sake”—every feature must solve a validated user need.
- Pilot: Test with real users, in real contexts. Don’t just optimise for success metrics—also measure comprehension, confidence, and perceived helpfulness. What do users say after they interact with the AI?
- Scale: Roll out successful features incrementally, ensuring continuous feedback loops. Keep recalibrating. Great AI UX isn’t static—it learns, it adapts, and crucially, it earns user trust.
Key Takeaways for Senior Financial Services Professionals
- Assess immediate friction points: Identify where AI can free up resources, improve customer service and eliminate customer frustrations.
- Test & iterate rapidly: Start small with user segments, gather feedback, and improve.
- Measure & scale: Evaluate both financial KPIs and engagement metrics; then expand what works.
A call to action for financial services leaders
AI isn’t just another channel; it’s a foundational shift in how we serve, support, and connect with our customers. Done well, AI-driven UX doesn’t replace humans; it amplifies their ability to deliver transformative experiences.
It extends your brand’s voice into the micro-moments where users need clarity, confidence, and calm—whether it’s RBC’s NOMI forecasting your spending, Erica nudging you to save, or NatWest’s AI guiding you at 2 a.m.
These agents are already setting new benchmarks in financial engagement. Now is the time to learn from these large organisations and develop their insights and benefits and see how they can help you and your customers.
So the question is not if you should integrate AI into your UX strategy, but why you haven’t done it already.
Ready to supercharge your customer engagement and ROI?
Book a consultation now by filling in the form below; our team has helped leading financial companies go from insight to impact ethically, scalably, and with measurable user value.
Sources: Gartner, Statista, RBC, Personetics, The Financial Brand, Bank of America, BoA News Room, IBM, NatWest
