As someone living in Sydney in their mid-thirties it has taken me years to save a deposit for an investment property. With interest rates at a 15 year high and a declining property market, I am faced with a challenge: do I buy now and risk not being able to cover the mortgage, or wait, continue to grow my deposit, and hope interest rates and property prices move in my favour?
This is a life-altering decision I don’t have the time or space to think about each week, let alone research.
Enter my personal AI agent. It breaks down the true costs and benefits of my options, summarises the best mortgage products on the market by weekly repayment, and alerts me whenever a better option becomes available. All interactions occur conveniently over text message.
No bank helped frame my decision. No broker guided the research. No adviser shaped the recommendation. No bank-owned channel was ever visited.
The rise of the agentic customer challenges two measures retail banks have long used as proxies for loyalty, relationship depth and revenue potential; Main Financial Institution (MFI) and Share of Wallet (SOW). Many of the barriers that have historically slowed switching, including time, attention and financial complexity, begin to fall away when a customer has an intelligent agent continuously searching, comparing and acting on their preferences.
This is not simply another channel shift. It changes who, or what, banks must persuade. Deloitte Digital research found that 40% of Australians had already used an AI agent, 50% would trust one to search, compare and transact on their behalf, and 79% would delegate to an agent if it saved them money. The research estimates that nearly $1 trillion in annual Australian spending is at stake.
For banks, the strategic question is becoming harder and more immediate: how will they acquire, serve and retain customers when an agent increasingly mediates the decision?
For years, hyper-personalisation has been the ambition of digital, brand and marketing teams. The premise being, the more relevant the journey, the more likely a customer is to stay engaged, deepen their relationship and advocate for the bank.
In an agentic world, personalisation matters more, not less. But its centre of gravity shifts. Banks will still need to create experiences that feel useful, timely and human. They will also need to design propositions, offers, journeys and loyalty programs that are attractive to both agents and humans as every customer now has two personas, their human self and the agent operating on their behalf. When agents compare and select providers, they may do so and never visit a bank owned channel. Therefore, best-in-class digital app experiences and the most seamless digital acquisition journeys designed for humans are no longer enough.
The emerging gold standard will be true one-to-one value exchange: propositions, journeys and offers that are relevant to the human customer and interpretable, verifiable and actionable by their agent.
1. Design customer journeys for both the human and agent persona
Banks have invested heavily in customer journeys to identify unmet needs, reduce friction and improve commercial outcomes. The next step is to redesign priority journeys for a new participant, the customer’s agent. Overlay an agentic customer persona across the journeys that create the greatest customer and commercial value and ask where the agent will search, what evidence it will require, which decisions it may make autonomously and where the human customer will expect visibility or control. This reveals the implications for propositions, offers, channels, consent and service design before investment is made in delivering experiences for human customers alone which will no longer suffice.
Trust will be paramount to value. Banks that clearly explain how data is collected, used and shared, and demonstrate a tangible benefit in return, will be better placed to earn permission for richer and more useful interactions. Transparency cannot be a disclosure added at the end. It needs to become a core design principle for every journey intended to serve both humans and agents.
In September 2026 ASB Bank, Bank of America, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ING Group and NatWest Group jointly published a shared set of principles to support the development of agentic commerce. The five principles include transparency, safety, privacy, data, and interoperability and are intended to lay the foundation for the development of an agentic commerce ecosystem.
2. Make AI-powered content a core banking capability
Agentic engagement will increase the volume, speed and variability of content a bank must produce. Static campaign cycles and fragmented production models will struggle to keep pace with interactions that are increasingly contextual, continuous and assembled in real time. Leading banks will build AI-powered content supply chains that connect customer data, decisioning, design systems, brand standards, compliance rules and generative AI into a governed orchestration layer. Just as digital transformation required banks to rethink software delivery, AI-powered engagement will require a rethink of content delivery.
The objective is not more content. It is the ability to continuously create trusted, relevant and recognisably human experiences at scale whilst preserving the governance, traceability and accountability expected of a regulated institution.
Standard Chartered Bank shifted from campaign led and channel specific engagement to micro journeys enabled by a real time AI-driven decision engine delivering contextual customer experiences and next best actions across lifecycle moments. Additionally, Standard Chartered established a central enterprise AI platform in 2025, ‘AI Factory’ to unify the development, deployment and governance of AI solutions across the bank providing teams with access to a hub of reusable AI components, and machine learning model training and development.
3. Build the intelligence layer for agentic banking
To deliver value to both human and agentic customers, banks will need to move from isolated next best action models to a connected decisioning capability that can interpret context, select the right intervention and coordinate it across channels in real time. That requires trusted and accessible data, clear consent and usage rules, machine readable product and pricing information, and decision logic that can be explained, monitored and improved. The challenge will be to orchestrate the full decision loop, from intent recognition, eligibility assessment, value assessment, action selection and content generation to delivery through the right channel, with the right feedback loops in place to ensure continuous improvement. As embedded finance continues to rise and agents begin to act across providers, banks will also need to expose reliable data and verifiable claims beyond their own interfaces. In that environment, data quality, lineage and governance become part of the customer proposition, not just the concern of technology.
Intelligent orchestration must be designed with controls from the outset. Decisions should be traceable, policy aligned and subject to human oversight where the consequence, ambiguity or vulnerability warrants it. Banks that can combine speed with evidence and control will be better positioned to scale agentic engagement without compromising trust.
DBS Bank has more than 2,500 AI models deployed across 430 use cases enabling AI-powered personalisation, nudges and next best actions. These models are embedded into business processes, as opposed to on top of them, and are enabled by a unified data lake that brings together customer, behavioural and operational data in real time to support decision making. DBS invested in modernising its architecture, building cloud-enabled platforms and API-driven systems over a period of years before scaling AI across their organisation.
4. Transform Digital and Marketing into a Customer Value Engine
To compete in a world of always on agents, banks will need to fundamentally rethink how customer, marketing, digital, product, technology and risk teams work together to create and deliver value. Banks that today launch campaigns and optimise journeys over weeks or months will need the ability to sense, decide and respond within hours, or increasingly, in real time.
This requires a shift from managing products and campaigns to operating an always on customer value engine. Marketing and digital teams will need significant capability uplift, a re-engineering of content supply chains, approval processes and experimentation practices to dramatically increase speed to market. Activities that today require weeks of coordination across teams will increasingly need to happen through AI-enabled workflows, automated controls, and clearly defined decision rights.
Institutions that succeed will not necessarily be those with the most data or the most advanced AI models. They will be the institutions that can most effectively translate intelligence into action.
BBVA’s ‘The Eight’ vision and roadmap establishes AI as the bank’s core operating system, reimagining banking end-to-end. ‘The Eight’ is comprised of six ‘ai robots’ aimed at transforming customer relationships and ways of working including Advisor (Blue), AI Banker, Risks, Operations & Processes, Software Development and Connected (a personalised agent for each employee), and two pillars that enable transformation at scale, data, and AI architecture8. BBVA recorded the highest profit in its history at €10.5bn for 2025 with Advisor (Blue) successfully integrated into the bank’s app, and a strategic partnership with OpenAI driving progress across the rest of ‘The Eight’ roadmap.
The emergence of the agentic customer signals a shift from a world where customers make decisions periodically to one where AI agents continuously evaluate alternatives on their behalf. This challenges the concept of customer value from something that is communicated through static MFI and SOW metrics to something that is fluid and must be adapted to in real-time.
For banking leaders, this creates a new strategic imperative. The future of Share of Wallet will increasingly be determined by Share of Decision. Success will belong to institutions that can combine trusted data, intelligent decisioning, AI-powered content and adaptive operating models to influence both human and agentic choice. The opportunity is significant, but so is the urgency.
The time to prepare for the age of the agentic customer is before agents become the primary gateway to financial decisions. The banks that act now will be best positioned not only to participate in those decisions, but to shape them.
Brittney Graham is a Director in Deloitte Digital’s Customer Strategy and Design practice, specialising in digital and AI-led transformation across financial services. With over 11 years’ experience across Australia, the UK and Asia Pacific she helps organisations harness emerging technology and changing customer expectations to drive growth and develop market leading products and propositions.
Christie Percival is a Partner at Deloitte Digital, specialised in Digital Banking, with breadth across Consumer Business and other industries. She leads delivery of complex business and technology transformation programs, including global and cross service line teams as well as complex commercial models with contingent fees based on business outcomes. Christie has a unique combination of business acumen and deep technical skills, allowing her to deliver solutions that drive outcomes, rather than technology for technology’s sake. She has a strong understanding of the team culture, SDLC and agile methods needed for large digital teams to deliver quickly, while maintaining quality and platform stability. She has demonstrated ability to lead 100 people teams. Christie brings energy and positivity to her teams with a flexible style and a passion for continually developing herself and others. Christie most recently led the team building Australia’s latest digital bank.
