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First Look at Oracle AI Agent Studio.
A Platform-Level Development in Enterprise AI for Banking and Insurance. AI agents — once primarily a research concept — are now being integrated...
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PJ
Feb 28, 2025 6:34:34 PM
The global banking industry is poised for a profound transformation, driven by the adoption of Agentic AI—autonomous software agents capable of handling complex workflows, learning from data, and adapting to changing conditions. As the financial landscape becomes increasingly competitive, the ability to leverage AI Agents is becoming a critical differentiator for banks seeking to enhance efficiency, manage risks, and deliver superior customer experiences.
This blog outlines how Agentic AI offers a compelling opportunity for banks to improve operational efficiency and financial performance. By automating complex finance, risk, compliance, and internal reporting processes, banks can achieve significant cost savings and improve key financial metrics such as the Cost-to-Income Ratio (CIR) and Return on Equity (RoE).
Disclosure: This blog was created based on a conversation (or series of prompts) with Revvy, a ChatGPT developed by Revvence and trained on finance transformation and systems change-related content.
According to McKinsey, Agentic AI and related technologies, such as generative AI, could add between $200 billion and $340 billion annually to the banking sector.
This value stems from dramatic improvements in:
Accenture emphasises that banks embracing Agentic AI are better positioned to meet the demands of the modern financial ecosystem. These institutions can scale their operations without proportional increases in cost, allowing them to compete more effectively in a challenging market. Moreover, Agentic AI enables banks to pivot from reactive problem-solving to proactive, predictive decision-making, fundamentally altering their operations.
The banking sector is under immense pressure to improve its cost-to-income ratio, enhance customer experiences, and mitigate risks in an increasingly volatile environment. Agentic AI addresses these challenges head-on:
For example, a global retail bank that deployed AI Agents to handle customer inquiries and fraud detection saw a 50% reduction in response times and a 30% drop in operational costs within the first year. These results underscore the transformative potential of this technology.
AI Agents are intelligent software entities designed to execute tasks, solve problems, and make decisions autonomously. Unlike static, rule-based programs, AI Agents are dynamic and adaptive. They can analyse data, understand context, and interact with users or other systems to achieve specific goals. AI agents excel in environments where workflows are complex and multifaceted and require continuous learning or decision-making.
AI Agents go beyond simple task automation by autonomously managing workflows. This approach involves:
In a loan approval scenario, a set of AI Agents might collaborate as follows:
Each agent focuses on its domain expertise, working together to complete the end-to-end process autonomously, accurately, and efficiently.
In scenarios where workflows are highly complex or span multiple domains, multiple AI Agents collaborate to achieve shared objectives. This collaboration is critical to how AI Agents scale efficiently and operate dynamically in real-world environments.
In anti-money laundering (AML) operations, a multi-agent system might work as follows:
This collaborative process ensures that the bank addresses the issue quickly and comprehensively, with each agent contributing its specialised expertise.
The way users engage with AI Agents depends on their purpose and context. In banking, interactions are tailored to specific use cases and can occur in multiple ways:
Users provide specific instructions or queries in natural language, which the agent interprets and acts upon. Prompting is ideal for situations requiring detailed or customised outputs.
Example: A treasury manager prompts an agent:
👱 “Generate a liquidity forecast for the next quarter, considering current market conditions and projected inflows.”
The agent analyses cash flow data, applies predictive models, and delivers a detailed forecast with actionable recommendations.
Conversational AI tools, such as chatbots or voice assistants, often serve as the interaction layer for AI Agents, enabling users to access agent capabilities in a familiar, user-friendly manner.
However, unlike standalone chatbots, conversational interfaces connected to AI Agents:
Example: AI Agent-Powered Customer Interaction
A customer asks via the bank’s app:
👱 “Can I afford a £50,000 loan over five years?”
The agent performs the following tasks autonomously:
🤖 “You can afford a £50,000 loan at 4.5% APR. Monthly repayments would be £931. Would you like to proceed or explore other options?”
The conversational interface makes the interaction seamless, but the AI Agent executes the complex analysis behind the scenes.
While conversational interfaces resemble chatbots like ChatGPT, the underlying technology and scope of AI Agents are far more advanced:
A bank might use a chatbot for quick compliance queries from a finance team member, such as:
👱 “What’s the current status of our CSRD reporting submission?”
For more complex tasks, the chatbot can escalate the interaction to an AI Agent:
👱 “Can you generate a draft CSRD report for Scope 3 financed emissions, including insights on data gaps and compliance with EU Taxonomy?”
Here, the AI Agent takes over, aggregating data from various systems, applying sustainability metrics, and generating a detailed draft report. The agent can identify areas where data quality or completeness may impact compliance and offer recommendations to address gaps. The chatbot then presents the draft report and actionable insights to the finance team, streamlining the reporting process and enhancing compliance readiness.
AI Agents combine advanced technologies to execute complex workflows, make decisions, and adapt dynamically to achieve predefined outcomes. While the underlying technology is sophisticated, modern tools like Oracle's Generative AI Agents have made designing and managing AI Agents significantly more user-friendly, ensuring banking executives and teams can achieve their goals without deep technical expertise.
The power of AI Agents lies in their ability to be custom-designed for specific banking functions. Users collaborate with technology teams to define objectives, design workflows, and configure the agent’s decision-making logic, leveraging intuitive tools provided by modern AI platforms.
Designing effective AI Agents requires close collaboration between business teams and their technical colleagues.
An AI Agent’s effectiveness depends on its architecture, which includes the following critical components:
Modern AI Agents can also learn by observing user behaviour, such as mouse movements, keyboard actions, or workflow patterns. This technique, known as imitation learning, enables agents to replicate human workflows and automate repetitive tasks.
OpenAI refers to this type of agent as a Computer-Using Agent (CUA) and has released a product called Operator, which can perform tasks on the web after being trained by humans.
Observation Phase: The agent monitors and records user actions as they interact with software systems, such as navigating banking applications, processing customer applications, or completing regulatory reporting tasks.
Pattern Recognition: Using AI and machine learning algorithms, the agent analyses recorded actions to identify patterns, workflows, and dependencies within the user’s behaviour. It learns which inputs, sequences, and decision points drive specific outcomes.
Automation: Once trained, the agent autonomously replicates these tasks, executing them consistently and efficiently. Over time, it can refine its approach, optimising processes to improve speed, accuracy, and resource utilisation.
Scenario: A bank's finance team needs to prepare a monthly impairments report for regulatory compliance, incorporating data from multiple systems, including loan management, risk analytics, and external economic indicators.
How the Computer-Using Agent Works:
Agentic AI represents a paradigm shift in how banks operate, interact with customers, and manage risks. We believe the core business case for adoption is built on three pillars: cost efficiency, revenue growth, and capital optimisation.
Banking operations are traditionally labour-intensive, with high costs associated with repetitive tasks, manual processes, heavy use of spreadsheets, and human error. Agentic AI reduces these inefficiencies by automating workflows end-to-end.
Challenge: Banks' internal reporting teams spend significant time and resources preparing management reports, often requiring manual data extraction, analysis, and presentation from multiple systems. This process is labour-intensive and prone to delays, impacting decision-making and operational efficiency.
Agentic AI enables banks to generate new revenue streams by delivering hyper-personalised customer experiences and identifying untapped opportunities.
Challenge: Traditional banking services often rely on standardised product offerings that fail to account for individual customer needs.
AI Agents analyse customer behaviour, spending patterns, and life events to recommend tailored financial products, such as retirement plans, insurance policies, or investments.
Data Aggregation: The AI Agent collects data from various sources, including transaction histories, spending patterns, financial goals, and external data such as market trends or life events (e.g., a change of address or a new job).
Behavioural Analysis: Using machine learning algorithms, the agent identifies patterns in customer behaviour, such as regular spending habits, savings patterns, or responses to previous offers.
Predictive Modelling: The agent applies predictive analytics to anticipate future financial needs, such as planning for retirement, managing risk through insurance, or optimising investment strategies.
Product Matching: The AI Agent cross-references customer profiles with available financial products to identify the most suitable offerings. This includes customising products based on risk tolerance, financial goals, and personal circumstances.
Proactive Engagement: Through conversational interfaces (e.g., chatbots, banking apps), the agent initiates personalised interactions, such as:
Continuous Learning: The agent learns from customer responses and outcomes, refining its recommendations to improve accuracy and relevance over time.
Compliance and Personalisation: All suggestions comply with regulatory requirements and are personalised to ensure relevance and timeliness, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.
This approach boosts cross-selling and upselling opportunities and strengthens customer loyalty by offering genuinely valuable financial advice.
Proactive risk management is a critical priority in a volatile financial landscape. Agentic AI enhances banks’ ability to detect, predict, and respond to real-time risks.
Challenge: Banks must optimise Risk-Weighted Assets (RWAs) to comply with regulatory requirements (e.g., Basel III/IV) while ensuring efficient capital allocation. Traditional methods for managing RWAs are often manual and reactive and lack the agility needed to respond to market changes or portfolio dynamics in real-time. Inefficient RWA management can lead to excessive capital buffers, reducing Return on Equity (RoE) and limiting growth opportunities.
While comprehensive longitudinal studies on Agentic AI are still emerging, there is evidence from related AI and automation technologies that demonstrates significant benefits:
Agentic AI offers a compelling opportunity for major UK banks to improve operational efficiency and financial performance. By automating complex finance, risk, compliance, and internal reporting processes, banks can achieve significant cost savings and improve key financial metrics such as the Cost-to-Income Ratio (CIR) and Return on Equity (RoE).
The current CIRs of major UK banks, sourced from Statista (2024), are as follows:
To quantify the business case for Agentic AI, we modelled the impact of a 3% reduction in operating expenses for these banks. The table below illustrates the potential savings and the resulting improvement in CIR.
Bank |
Current CIR (%) |
Current Operating Expenses (£bn) |
Savings (£bn) |
New Operating Expenses (£bn) |
New CIR (%) |
HSBC Holdings |
48.5 |
65.43 |
1.96 |
63.46 |
47.0 |
Barclays |
67.0 |
42.75 |
1.28 |
41.46 |
65.0 |
Lloyds Banking Group |
54.7 |
36.47 |
1.09 |
35.37 |
53.1 |
NatWest Group |
51.8 |
17.46 |
0.52 |
16.93 |
50.2 |
Operating Expenses = Revenue × (CIR/100)
New CIR = (New Operating Expenses / Revenue) × 100
Implementing Agentic AI presents substantial financial and operational advantages for major UK banks. The potential to enhance the CIR by 1-2% through cost savings alone positions early adopters to secure a significant competitive advantage.
The competitive landscape in banking is evolving rapidly, and early adopters of Agentic AI can achieve tangible financial and operational benefits. These include reducing full-time equivalent (FTE) costs, optimising cost-to-income ratios, and enhancing Return on Equity (RoE) through improved decision-making and strategic agility. Delaying adoption risks falling behind competitors leveraging AI to transform efficiency and profitability.
The Bottom Line: By adopting Agentic AI now, banks can transform their cost structures, boost profitability, and enhance strategic decision-making. Early adopters are improving operational efficiency and fundamentally reshaping their business models to drive sustained growth and competitiveness.
At Revvence, we specialise in implementing Oracle’s leading-edge Agentic AI solutions for banks. With our expertise in risk, finance, and treasury, we help you deploy AI Agents tailored to your specific challenges and goals. From pilot projects to full-scale deployments, we ensure that your journey with Agentic AI delivers measurable business impact.
Revvence can help in several valuable ways:
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