31-07-2025
How AI Agents Are Helping Financial Institutions Become Truly Customer-Centric
Zehra Cataltepe is the CEO of providing explainable growth solutions for marketing teams. She has over 100 AI papers and patents.
RIAs, bank and credit union executives are tasked with providing value to their clients and members. For these organizations, whether the client/member (i.e., customer) receives value or not, and how much, determines whether the relationship continues or not. In this article, I'll outline the usage of AI and AI agents to truly be customer-centric by understanding what customers really need based on customer feedback and transactions.
At TAZI AI, we use customer transactions and what customers (and competition) say to determine what customers do and say to understand customers' context and needs. We then use AI agents to connect these pieces of AI-generated insights to create the most relevant, hyper-personalized offers for the customers.
Instead of a product-centric approach, this customer-centric approach allows the FI (financial institution) to truly understand the evolving customer needs and be there with the product offers the customer needs, as opposed to product offers that the FI wants to push. Providing high value to customers when they need it connects the customer to the FI and helps build long-term relationships.
Customer Transactions: Determine What Customers Need
As humans, our spending behavior signals a lot about what we need. Where we spend or don't spend our money, how frequently, changes in our spending patterns and more tell a lot. If you are visiting the car repair shop too often, maybe it is time for you to buy a new car. If you are spending a lot of time on home repairs, maybe you should search for some discounts on insurance for installing new monitoring products around your home or getting a new roof. If you have stopped paying college tuition, you may need help with a new auto loan. If you have stopped receiving your salary or rent payments, you need to do something about your future non-discretionary payments. If you are making more money than you usually do, it could be the right time to increase your investment in wealth management products with the best tax advantages.
Using AI, it is possible for an FI to determine transaction types based on basic transaction information and also the sequence of transactions a customer has had. In addition, it is also possible to analyze the transactions of all customers and determine what they need and how they'll behave based on external dynamic market conditions.
Understand What Customer Feedback Really Means
Customers give feedback all the time and use a variety of mediums (app, web, social media) to do so. Your competitors' customers also leave feedback. You can use AI to predict the sentiment and complaints in communications. You can also quite easily determine the topics and subtopics of communications. Carefully selected subtopics allow a true understanding of the needs of the customer and also understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your FI and those of your competition.
Utilizing Feedback To Determine The Best Products And Transactions To Offer The Most Relevant
AI can predict positive and negative subtopics in your customer feedback. This can allow you to continuously evaluate your products to determine if they are relevant to your customers. It also allows you to remove the irrelevant ones to reduce the noise for your customers and the workload for your teams.
AI can help you understand your customers' transactions and what they need at this time in their lives.
AI agents can help you get these two pieces of important and dynamic information and create hyper-personalized offers for your customers based on their own current needs and what all the other customers in the market say.
Value
It's an unbelievable time to be a customer, where you see your FI—instead of pushing products that you don't need, through channels that you don't want to look at—offering you a product that can make a change in how much you save. And as an FI, it's possible to do this—even if you don't have 10 years of data or a bunch of data scientists with Ph.D.s.
This is possible thanks to the new advancements in AI and agents. What took an extensive natural language processing project now only takes the right prompt with the right LLM (preferably on-prem, so that your data doesn't train someone else's LLM). What once required a lot of software now takes a lot less with new AI-based software and agent creation tools. This is a great opportunity to support your customers and help them have a better experience and trust in their FI.
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