Artificial intelligence tools are at the heart of large banks’ innovation strategies, according to remarks made at the Clearing House’s annual conference in New York City.
Through BNY’s enterprise AI platform, known as Eliza, the global custody bank has “more than over 100 digital employees [that are] doing real things,” said chairman and CEO Robin Vince. These “employees” operate as autonomous agents, he said, although their work is reviewed by human employees. Two key examples in production are code remediation and payment remediation, when payment instructions are missing key details. “Figuring out what’s wrong with it and the remediation is now done by a cohort of digital employees,” Vince said.
Meanwhile, U.S. Bancorp is using AI tools to “do uniquely defined activities” in areas like treasury management, said CEO Gunjan Kedia. She remarked that “things like AI are real equalizers over time,” enabling banks to reach greater scale than they otherwise might.
Moreover, larger institutions are seeing improved market performance, said Betsy Graseck, global head of banks and diversified financial research at Morgan Stanley. “Scale players are getting a multiple advantage across the S&P 500, banks included,” she said, due to the huge data sets needed to make the most of large language models.
The rapid advancement in AI tools is also enabling banks to do more with fewer employees, commented Wells Fargo chairman and CEO Charlie Scharf. The bank has continued efficiency-driven layoffs this fall, and Scharf said “it’s likely we’ll have less headcount as we look forward,” adding that “we’d like to do much of it through attrition as possible. . . . The worst thing you can do is rehire someone and then have to terminate them because you find you can do the job with fewer people,” he said.
Speaking of adoption, at BNY, employees are working regularly with Eliza. The technology is so sophisticated, Vince added, that it can be hard for employees to break out of traditional workflows. “Culture and adoption is probably the weak link in the chain for employees,” he said. “The weak link isn’t the tech, it’s the adoption of the tech.”
