Australia’s Banking and Finance Leaders Share Their Stories of Digital Transformation at Agentforce Financial Services Summit
The banking and financial services industry in Australia is seeking new methods to enhance both the employee and customer experience, and its members are actively exploring the potential of AI and agentic AI to achieve this goal.
More than 600 trailblazers attended this week’s Agentforce Financial Services Summit in Sydney to learn more about how agentic AI, grounded in industry expertise, is helping everyone from loan brokers to financial advisors drive innovation and improve business productivity, all while empowering them to spend more time with their clients.
Salesforce customers including ANZ Bank, Bendigo Bank and Zurich shared their insights on how they’re approaching business-wide digital transformations, and the importance of keeping the customer experience at the heart of this work.
Why it matters: In an industry built on trust, delivering personal and meaningful experiences is everything. But the day-to-day financial services journey often feels impersonal and frustrating. Customers often wait on hold, repeat their information, and navigate confusing forms and disclosures.
Behind the scenes, advisors, bankers, and insurance brokers spend just 39% of their time on direct client engagement, with the rest lost to administrative work. That means fewer moments to connect, fewer opportunities to build loyalty, and more friction in the very relationships that should feel human and trusted.
Customers at Australian banks and financial institutions increasingly believe AI should be helping to make their lives easier — for example, one in two Australians now expect AI agents to speed up financial transactions.
With agentic AI, we have a great opportunity to address business challenges with agents working alongside human employees, scaling capacity and productivity together beyond what has been possible.
Eran Agrios, GM and SVP of Financial Services, Salesforce
The recently announced Agentforce for Financial Services is another step forward in meeting these expectations, providing prebuilt AI agent templates for banking, wealth management and insurance. These agents will help automate tasks like investment reviews and credit card replacements, ultimately freeing up time for financial pros to focus on clients and build stronger relationships.
The financial services industry is clearly at an inflection point regarding technology, with Salesforce GM and SVP of Financial Services Eran Agrios telling the Keynote audience that they face unique challenges. “You’re being asked to innovate quickly and deliver results faster than ever before. At the same time, you need to protect your existing businesses, even as you look for new products and customers.”
“AI is brought up in every single meeting; what are you doing, what is the strategy, and how will AI change your business? With agentic AI, we have a great opportunity to address business challenges with agents working alongside human employees, scaling capacity and productivity together beyond what has been possible.”
Speaking at the keynote, Gerard Florian, Group Executive, Technology and Group Services for ANZ Bank said that it was important for AI to be considered in context. “You need to first understand the end-to-end process, be it loan approval or customer onboarding, and then you need to break that down into tasks and the data required for each.”
“With that established, you can ask where does AI fit in this? Is there an opportunity for Agentforce, for example, to help our bankers from a productivity perspective, to help them prepare for their customer meetings, making up for lost time and overcoming inefficiencies.”
For Zurich, AI is forming part of a digital transformation project that started three years ago, with customer needs at the heart. “We’ve been focused on how do we go faster – and stay closer to the customer – while delivering more value to our customers, quickly,” said Jacqui Lennon, Chief of Technology and Transformation at Zurich.
“We’re looking at new ways of doing things, but we’re doing it together. The AI journey can’t just be driven by a digital team, it has to be embedded across the business, with teams all aligned on the same metrics, whether that’s sales, NPS or efficiency measures.”
Steve Van Wyk, Chairman of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) Board, remarked that standardisation is the future of speed when it comes to digital transformation. “Banks are beginning to reevaluate how they modernise and transform their legacy tech, which is getting in the way of being able to move quickly and respond to customer needs. AI has helped shed light on how we can look at transformation in a different way.”
“This is not about static change, it’s about continuous innovation. In the future it will be not just about the platform you use, but the standard that you move to.”
More information:
- Catch up on the full details from the Agentforce for Financial Services announcement
- See the latest ANZ data from the Connected Financial Services 2025 Report
- Find out more about Agentforce
