By 2027, financial services will enter the era of intelligent finance. AI assistants will increasingly mediate customer relationships. AI-native competitors will challenge traditional operating models. At the same time, technology providers will compete to become the orchestration layer. The result? Competition will shift away from products and channels and toward intelligence. The winners will be the organizations that combine proprietary data, decisioning, orchestration, and trust to help customers achieve better financial outcomes. Here are three of our 2027 predictions that will shape the future of banking and investing.

Forty percent of banks will launch AI assistants, but most won’t orchestrate customers’ financial lives.

Banks are rushing to launch AI assistants, but simply having one is not a strategy. Customers increasingly expect personalized financial guidance that spans accounts, providers, and life events. Already, 31% of consumers in the US, Canada, and the UK use conversational AI for personal finance questions, and nearly one-quarter already use third-party AI tools to educate themselves, compare products, and seek financial guidance. Some want even more personalized insights powered by secure access to financial data across providers.

This shift is happening faster than many banks realize. As AI assistants become a primary entry point for financial services, competition will move from owning the interface to owning the intelligence behind it. Customers will gravitate toward experiences that deliver relevant guidance, actionable recommendations, and seamless execution, regardless of who owns the front end. Banks that fail to differentiate risk losing the advisory relationship to AI intermediaries and becoming providers of commoditized financial products. Meanwhile, the window to secure a meaningful role in customers’ financial lives is narrowing. To remain relevant, banks must use proprietary data, decisioning capabilities, and specialist expertise to help customers navigate increasingly complex financial lives and achieve better outcomes.

One-third of banks will announce AI transformation programs, but only 5% will succeed.

We’ve seen this movie before. Just as many organizations once declared themselves digital-first without fundamentally changing how they operated, many will rebrand existing initiatives as AI transformations without addressing the deeper changes required to become AI-native. Meanwhile, fintechs and digital-native competitors will continue investing in platforms built for real-time decisioning, continuous learning, and autonomous orchestration, and the gap between AI-enabled and AI-native organizations will widen.

Banks that focus primarily on deploying AI experiences will struggle to unlock productivity gains, innovate at speed, and compete with AI-native operating models. In fact, the challenge in 2027 is not deploying AI. It’s redesigning the organization around intelligence. Success will require modern technology architectures, enterprise orchestration layers, redesigned processes that blend human and agent work, and governance frameworks that allow AI to scale safely and responsibly. Ultimately, organizations that reinvent how they operate will create durable advantages. Those that delay risk falling permanently behind more adaptive competitors.

AI banking technology M&A will increase by 50%.

The battle to own the intelligent finance stack has already begun. Market consolidation accelerated in 2026, and the pace will intensify in 2027 as acquirers pursue scale, proprietary data assets, governance capabilities, and AI-native orchestration. Increasingly, buyers will favor platforms that can coordinate customer intent, policy controls, real-time data, and transaction execution over standalone chatbots, copilots, and niche workflow tools. As a result, expect consolidation around customer engagement platforms, bank-controlled intelligence, agent orchestration and governance, data and model infrastructure, and clean-core banking platforms. For technology providers, this is a race to become the orchestration layer at the center of intelligent financial experiences. For financial services firms, it is a race to ensure that intelligence remains a source of strategic differentiation rather than a capability controlled by external platforms.

Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2027: Banking And Investing report to explore all five predictions and their implications for the future of financial services. Schedule a guidance session to discuss what these predictions mean for your organization and join our live webinar for additional insights and practical recommendations.

If you aren’t yet a Forrester client, download one of our complimentary Predictions guides and access additional resources on the Predictions 2027 hub.

Share