Gone are the days that Artificial intelligence (AI) comprised simple chatbots; today, there are beyond sophisticated AI agents that are as adept at using computers as humans are.
They don’t just provide answers, but rather act proactively and execute tasks with human-like reasoning. This new frontier, which is being called “agentic AI,” a system that portrays goal-directed behaviour and is capable of autonomous decision-making. It promises transformative impacts when it comes to the ever-evolving fintech (financial technology) space, proving to be more than just a catchword.
It’s not surprising, given digital solutions provider Fenergo’s 2025 research in collaboration with Chartis Research. When they surveyed 90 tech, compliance, and risk professionals across commercial, investment, and corporate banks and asset managers across the United Kingdom and the United States, they found 93% of financial institutions planning to implement agentic AI in the next 2 years, with 6% already employing it. What’s making agentic AI tick in the fintech space?
Agentic AI: The Hype
Agentic AI sits at the top of the list of Gartner’s 2025 tech trends, and it’s not difficult to see why: it can independently reason, comprehend, learn, and act, and all without constant human guidance. Agentic AI models and systems can act autonomously, understanding the user’s goals and objectives as well as the context of the problem they’ve been assigned to solve.
Using the sophisticated creative and reasoning abilities of GenAI, this self- learning system is like a team of multiple agents, solving multi-step complex problems. Take OpenAI’s Operator, for instance, which can not only browse websites but also confirm user details for completing transactions and filling forms. Anthropic’s Claude is quite similar, interacting with desktop environments via cursor and visual recognition.
The Fintech x AI Revolution
Agentic AI fits into the fintech space more than we already know. We’re just halfway through 2025, and stories about financial enterprises leveraging agentic AI to power the future of fintech. It has the potential to disrupt the finance sector by optimising how customer interactions are managed, how accurate decisions are made, and how data is processed. For instance, JPMorgan Chase saw annual savings of nearly 360,000 hours due to AI agents reducing manual labour by as much as 48%.
It’s not surprising that NVIDIA’s latest State of AI in Financial Services report states that more than 90% respondents reported that their business revenue had seen a positive impact from AI. Over 2024, customer service-related use of generative AI, including AI assistants and chatbots, has risen from 25% to 60% in the fintech space. Enterprises are deploying AI for automating time-intensive tasks like report generation and document processing, driving operational efficiency and significant cost savings.
Imagine having an automated financial assistant – AI agents are just that. They act as personalised bankers, helping users manage their financial lives by helping them automatically track expenses, manage budgets, optimise subscriptions, negotiate bill payments, and even periodically rebalance investment and savings portfolios based on real-time market conditions and personalised goals. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce, for instance, has integrated its global payment network with next-gen AI agents with the aim to redefine how consumers shop and pay.
Their AI agents will be able to deliver personalised and tailored recommendations within seconds, whether it’s finding the perfect outfit, securing impossible concert tickets, or organising a family holiday. It isn’t sci-fi; it’s AI helping people make purchasing decisions.
Agentic AI can help enhance employee experiences and customer interactions, like Google Cloud working with Deloitte to launch a suite of 100 ready-to-deploy agents facilitated by Agentspace and Gemini.
That’s not all; where there’s finance, there’s fraud. Nearly 45% of compliance and risk fintechs now deploy agentic AI, benefitting from dynamic credit assessments and real-time fraud detection. It can even help in loan processing and approval by autonomously performing detailed financial analyses, reviewing customer credit histories, validating compliance against regulatory criteria, and even make initial approvals or recommendations, accelerating the loan application process significantly.
Proactive bill payments are perhaps poised to be one of the biggest advancements for agentic AI in finance. AI agents can detect upcoming bills and recurring payments, thus autonomously optimising payment timings to manage any overdraft risks. In this arena, Mastercard took the stage when it rolled out Agent Pay in April 2025.
The Agentic Payments Program aims to offer more personalised and secure payment experiences to issuers, merchants, and consumers. Even ticket resolution and customer support have found immense uses with Agentic AI, with agents autonomously handling common customer issues like basic inquiries, password resets, and account lockouts.
Adoption and Governance Concerns
There are no gains without risks, and agentic AI in fintech is no different. Using AI in financial transactions raises serious concerns about security and data privacy. Fintech organisations integrating AI agents will need to strengthen their security frameworks to prevent malicious attacks, hacks, and other unauthorised actions.
Human in-the-loop validations aside, they’ll also need rigorous access controls, and frequent audits to harness the tech safely. It also raises significant regulatory challenges, where ensuring auditability and transparency will be paramount, as will establishing clear guidelines around using AI agents in the financial process.
Reinventing The Financial Future
Agentic AI in fintech might have its challenges, but adoption is only upward, and the momentum is rising, with Dutch IT firm Wolters Kluwer’s study finding that agentic AI adoption will reach 44% by 2026. On the retail consumer level, the changes will be even more monumental. Just as we saw smartphones revolutionising our personal banking space, agentic AI promises to be another huge leap forward, reshaping how we’ll manage our financial lives.