For years, banks have invested heavily in digital channels to help customers access information, complete transactions, and manage their finances. But consumers are increasingly seeking financial guidance from AI assistants, and many are doing so outside their bank’s ecosystem.

Banks Are No Longer Just Competing With Other Banks

Historically, banks competed within channels they controlled, including branches, contact centers, websites, and mobile apps. That assumption is starting to break down.

Forrester’s latest research, Consumers Use AI For Personal Finance, But Not Necessarily From Their Bank, found that nearly one-third of consumers in the US, UK, and Canada now use conversational AI for personal finance questions. They use AI to understand financial concepts, compare products, evaluate options, and monitor their finances, making AI a new gateway for financial decision-making.

Banks are not the only beneficiaries. While 25% of consumers have used their bank’s AI assistant in the past year, 24% have turned to third-party AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Siri for personal finance questions. Increasingly, consumers begin financial journeys outside bank-owned channels, relying on AI assistants to compare providers, model scenarios, and summarize recommendations. More concerning for banks, consumers find third-party assistants more helpful than bank-provided ones.

As AI assistants become more capable, they will exert greater influence over how consumers discover, evaluate, and choose financial products. Banks are no longer competing only for business. They are competing for influence over the guidance that customers receive before making a decision.

Adoption Is Growing Faster Than Trust

The research highlights an important tension: Consumers are becoming more comfortable using AI to research, learn, compare options, and monitor their finances. But trust declines when AI moves beyond information and into recommendations, decisions, or autonomous actions. Many consumers still prefer human support and remain concerned about privacy, security, and accuracy.

Consumers want help navigating their financial lives, but most are not yet ready to hand over control and fully delegate financial decisions or actions to autonomous agents. For banks, the immediate opportunity is therefore not autonomous finance but trusted financial guidance.

Trust Will Become The Competitive Differentiator

Our previous research on conversational banking shows that customers already use bank-provided AI assistants for a wide range of tasks, from service inquiries and payments to product discovery and financial guidance.

The next challenge for banks is not just deploying conversational AI but trust. Banks must create conversational experiences that customers trust enough to use repeatedly and rely on for increasingly important decisions. That means demonstrating:

  • Accuracy and reliability.
  • Transparency about how recommendations are generated.
  • Strong privacy and security protections.
  • Clear human oversight and escalation paths.
  • Personalization based on customer context and goals.

Banks that successfully combine the convenience of AI with the reassurance of human expertise will be best positioned to earn long-term adoption.

The Strategic Question That Banks Must Answer

The most important question raised by this research is not whether consumers will use AI for personal finance. They already are. The question is whether banks will remain the primary source of financial guidance as AI becomes a new interface for discovering, understanding, and acting on financial opportunities.

As conversational, proactive, and eventually agentic experiences mature, control of the customer interaction layer will increasingly shift toward whoever helps customers achieve better outcomes, not necessarily whoever owns the underlying financial product.

Banks that build trusted AI assistants capable of educating, guiding, and supporting customers will strengthen their role in customers’ financial lives. Those that treat AI merely as a self-service automation tool risk becoming increasingly invisible as customers turn elsewhere for advice.

Please feel free to schedule a guidance session or inquiry call if you would like to request data or discuss your conversational banking strategy.

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