How Financial Services can win Customer Loyalty with AI

According to findings from the latest Connected Financial Services Report, the greatest opportunity for financial services providers is in being able to prove to their customers that they understand their needs and know how to meet them. 

The Connected Financial Services Report – which surveyed 9,500 customers across 22 countries in late 2024, including nearly 1,000 in Australia and New Zealand, found that by using agentic AI to adopt a more customer-centric approach, banks, insurance companies and brokers can attract new consumers and drive loyalty. 

Agentic AI makes this possible by helping businesses to better anticipate customer needs and eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves during routine interactions by using smarter first-time data capture and integration across the suite of financial services products. 

While Australians are among the world’s top users of digital payments – and the Australian fintech industry ranks sixth globally – the survey also revealed that only 1 in 4 Australians currently trust AI to be involved in their financial matters.

This presents a clear opportunity: while AI adoption is key to creating customer-centric experiences, banks and financial institutions have a vital role to play in educating customers and showcasing the ability for AI to be both effective and trustworthy, helping to drive both adoption and confidence.

Customers want providers that work for them

Now in its second edition, the report found that less than 1 in 3 Australian and New Zealand customers reported being fully satisfied with the performance of their banks, insurance companies and wealth managers.

56% of respondents stated their financial institutions didn’t proactively anticipate their financial needs, and pointed to their institutions’ failure to provide personalised communications, recommend the right products or services at the right time, or share actionable insights and tips that could improve customers’ financial health.

As a direct result, many customers voted with their feet, with up to 41% of respondents stating they had switched financial services institutions in the past year because customer service wasn’t meeting their expectations. 

Just 32% and 31% of Australian and New Zealand respondents, respectively, said they were fully satisfied with the effectiveness of their banks’ customer services. And just 37% of Australian respondents – and 41% of New Zealanders – said they were fully satisfied with their banks’ overall digital experience.

This was identified as the key reason for nearly a third of survey respondents having left their banks in the past year, while nearly two-thirds said they had done so due to issues with pricing, fees or rates.

Clearly, to retain customers banks need to be proactive. Yet rather than anticipating customer needs, the survey found that most banks responded only after issues arose – with 41% of surveyed customers describing their banks as “apathetic” toward their financial well-being.

At a time when customers need banks on their side more than ever, the report confirmed that despite this need, customers are not willing to tolerate situations where getting answers to their questions is harder than it should be. 

Consumers are eager for institutions to help them by proactively identifying relevant financial products, engaging with them in the most accessible and efficient ways possible and offering new options to improve customer service. 

Agentic AI solutions offer an ideal way to meet these expectations by delivering a ‘digital workforce’ that is well-versed in the nuances of financial services products and capable of providing them in a highly personalised way through a detailed analysis of customer behaviour and preferences.

Customers have already identified AI as a solution

The current economic climate is adding to the challenge for financial services providers, with 26% of Australians and 24% of New Zealanders reporting they feel less financially secure than they did a year ago.

Today, many customers are more focused on goals like paying down debt, planning for retirement and making the most of shifting interest rates. To keep pace with these changing priorities, there’s growing interest in using technologies like agentic AI to better understand customer needs and respond more proactively.

Agentforce for Financial Services allows institutions to better support their customers, building on the capabilities of the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud platform with AI agent templates that help employees work faster, improve efficiency, and leverage sophisticated analytical models to deliver products and services that better meet – and exceed – customers’ expectations.

The survey confirmed that customers expect banks to be on top of current technologies – with two-thirds of Australia and New Zealand respondents saying they prefer to engage digitally with their financial services providers, and 59% of Gen Z and 55% of Millennial customers confident that AI will affect the way they interact with financial services companies.

Indeed, half of the respondents believe AI agents will have a bigger impact on financial services than in any other industry, and 60% say that they expect financial services tasks to be fully automated in ways that AI makes uniquely possible.

Delivering these capabilities is a significant opportunity for financial services providers, with customers willing to pay for that enhanced experience: almost half of survey respondents said they would stay with an institution that was providing an excellent customer experience, even if it raised its rates or fees.

Protecting customer data to strengthen consumer confidence

Study findings suggest that improving customer service isn’t only about using AI to develop new products and services – but tapping their capabilities to streamline customer interactions.

47% of Australia and New Zealand customers reported they regularly had to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives within the same company. 

AI agents help to solve this by maintaining consistent visibility no matter which part of the company’s digital experience the customer is interacting with. They can tap into centralised Salesforce data to gain a clear picture of a customer’s current demographics, product portfolio and past interactions.

Better data management will not only improve customer service, but also convince customers to share the kind of data that is most valuable for personalisation because it helps banks understand more about their behaviour, what services help them and where AI agents can help them achieve their financial goals sooner.

Your AI future is built on a layer of customer trust

Trust remains a key issue as banks increase their use of customer data to drive personalisation: fewer than half of the surveyed customers understood how financial services institutions protect data, control who accesses that data or even how institutions used it – and 79% said they are still unsure about trusting AI. 84% of respondents said they would switch providers if they felt their information was mishandled (up from 78% a year earlier).

High earners – a key demographic for financial services institutions’ success – are twice as likely to switch providers in such a situation as low earners, and more likely to stay if their bank is providing an excellent customer experience. There is a tremendous opportunity for financial institutions to use the right agentic AI strategy to win that trust and build long-term relationships.

Such technologies are expected to rapidly become ubiquitous: by 2029, for example, Gartner predicts that AI agents will autonomously resolve 80% of customer service issues without human intervention.

“Organisations will need to rethink their approach to managing inbound service interactions,” Gartner senior director analyst Daniel O’Sullivan says, “preparing for a future where AI-driven requests become the norm [and] automation becomes the dominant strategy for all service teams.”

There is no turning back: AI is the cornerstone of the future of financial services and a non-negotiable for financial services institutions that want to be relevant for customers who believe it will speed financial transactions, act as a financial coach, increase their financial literacy, help them make money and save them money.

By adopting the right agentic AI platform now, financial services firms will be best positioned to give customers the proactive financial services they expect, backed by the personalisation and privacy they deserve.