Agentic UX in Banking: How Finpace Brings Intelligence to Everyday Interactions

1. Overview

Banking apps have always been customer-driven innovations. They didn’t appear because banks were eager to experiment with technology, but because customers demanded new ways to manage money in their increasingly digital lives.

The first generation of digital banking began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when online banking portals emerged. Customers could check balances, transfer money, and pay bills without visiting a branch. These services answered one of the earliest digital-era demands: convenience.

The smartphone era accelerated this trend. By the late 2000s, with the iPhone and Android ecosystems expanding rapidly, banks realized that customers expected to carry their bank in their pocket. This led to the first mobile banking apps, which essentially ported online banking into a mobile interface.

At the time, these apps were revolutionary. Customers could view their balance in seconds, transfer funds instantly, and receive real-time notifications about account activity. For the first time, banking was ubiquitous, on-demand, and independent of branch hours.

“We used to define convenience as the number of branch locations. Today, convenience is measured by how quickly a customer can complete a transaction from their phone.”

But the digital convenience that was groundbreaking in 2010 has become table stakes in 2025. Today’s customers no longer celebrate balance checks or transfers as “innovations.” These features are expected, commoditized, and nearly identical across institutions.

This is where the shift begins. The demand curve has moved from convenience toward intelligence. Customers want apps that understand them, anticipate needs, and reduce friction. They want personalization beyond “Hi, John” in a push notification. They want agents that act on their behalf, helping with onboarding, payments, financial planning, and even day-to-day decision making.

The evolution of banking apps can be summarized in three waves:

1. Access (2000–2010) Online banking and the first mobile apps enabled access to data and basic transactions.

2. Experience (2010–2020) Apps added speed, usability, and convenience, shaping customer experience expectations.

3. Agency (2020–2030) We are now entering the agentic era, where apps no longer just respond to user inputs but proactively assist, suggest, and act.

   
   

This transition parallels broader shifts in technology adoption. Just as voice assistants, recommendation engines, and smart home systems have moved from novelty to daily utility, agentic banking apps will redefine what customers expect from their financial institution.

And the driver remains the same as it was 20 years ago: customer demand.

2. The evidence for intelligent banking

Customers Are Ready for Agents

For years, digital banking was defined by access. Could customers log in from home? Could they check balances on their phones? Could they get a push notification when a transaction cleared? These questions once framed the competitive landscape.

But customers are no longer impressed by access. They want intelligence: apps that don’t just wait for them to act, but step in with guidance, recommendations, and proactive help. And the data is unequivocal:

• Voice adoption: PwC found that 72% of consumers have used a voice assistant, with smartphones the dominant channel (PwC, 2023).

• Chatbot adoption: By the end of 2024, one in three US adults had already interacted with a banking chatbot (Deloitte Digital Banking Survey, 2024).

• Trust in AI agents: A 2023 Accenture survey revealed that 61% of consumers are comfortable with AI making basic financial recommendations, provided transparency is clear.

  
  

This tells us something critical: customers aren’t just curious about AI, they are ready for banks to put it to work.

The Economic Case

The stakes for financial services could hardly be higher.

• McKinsey estimates AI could unlock $340 billion annually in banking productivity gains, much of it flowing from agentic interfaces in customer service, onboarding, and advisory.

• Deloitte forecasts that 25% of enterprises experimenting with generative AI in 2025 will run agentic pilots, with adoption climbing to 50% by 2027.

  
  

The message is clear: banks that hesitate will find themselves overtaken by fintechs and digital-first challengers who see agentic AI not as a “future opportunity” but as today’s competitive advantage.

Lessons from Other Industries

To see the trajectory banking is now entering, look no further than industries that embraced agentic design early:

• Smartphones. Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant field billions of voice queries monthly, creating user habits that make voice-first banking feel natural rather than futuristic.

• E-commerce. Amazon’s recommender engines and conversational bots already power the majority of customer interactions, suggesting products, answering questions, resolving issues.

• Automotive. Cars now arrive pre-loaded with conversational agents, enabling drivers to navigate, call, or adjust settings without taking eyes off the road.

• Smart homes. Alexa and Google Nest don’t just respond, they suggest. “Should I turn off the lights?” or “Do you want me to order more detergent?” has become an expected part of daily life.

  
  

And in 2024 and 2025, a deeper shift began: platforms opened themselves to third-party AI agents.

• Shopify announced support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing merchants to plug AI assistants directly into storefront operations—automating workflows, answering customer queries, and even handling order modifications without human intervention.

• Stripe followed suit, opening its payments infrastructure to MCP, enabling developers to build intelligent financial agents that can handle invoicing, reconciliation, and fraud detection in real time.

  
  

These moves signal something bigger: agentic AI is no longer an experimental feature inside products; it is becoming a shared infrastructure layer. Just as APIs standardized how services talk to each other, MCP is standardizing how AI agents act across domains.

Once customers experience this seamless, proactive assistance in retail, logistics, payments, and commerce, they will expect nothing less from their banking app.

3. UI/UX Considerations

Integrating agentic capabilities requires a user-centered, incremental UX strategy:

A. Progressive interaction model

• Support gradual behavior change; start with optional smart hints rather than forced automation.

• Rephrase commands as suggestions (“Would you like to…?”), enabling control and minimizing cognitive resistance.

B. Affordance & familiarity through metaphor

• Use visual cues rooted in cognitive affordances to guide users.

• Historically, icons resembling real-world items (e.g., notebook for notes, calendar with leather) leveraged skeuomorphic design to reduce learning curve Wikipedia.

C. Reduction of cognitive load

• Minimize user decisions with one-click actions, inline completion hints, and state transparency.

• Avoid overload during transformations; reveal complexity progressively in response to user behavior.

D. Feedback & trust

• Ensure agentic actions are transparent, with undo options and visible audit trails.

• Maintain compliance and control: show when AI acted, offer explanations, safeguard trust.

  
  

4. The art of gradual adoption

Agentic UI doesn’t succeed by overwhelming customers with a radical redesign. It flourishes when it enters gradually, in familiar forms, before evolving into more advanced experiences. History shows us that users need stepping stones, not leaps, when technology reshapes how they interact with the world. A classic example comes from the iPhone’s design evolution:

• Phase 1: Comfort through Skeuomorphism. When the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple faced a challenge: the world had never seen a mass-market, touchscreen-driven phone. To help customers feel at ease, Apple leaned heavily on skeuomorphic design, icons and interfaces that resembled physical objects. The Calendar app looked like stitched leather. Notes resembled yellow pads. Contacts were housed in an address book.This wasn’t accidental. It was a deliberate choice to reduce cognitive load by giving digital novices familiar metaphors. (Justinmind, Wikipedia)

• Phase 2: Transition to Flat Design. As users became fluent in smartphones, Apple stripped away these crutches. With iOS 7 in 2013, the stitched leather, glass reflections, and paper textures disappeared. What replaced them was flat design—clean, minimal, abstract. Users no longer needed visual metaphors to guide them; they had internalized mobile-first interaction. (Big Human, WIRED, LogRocket Blog)

• Phase 3: Toward Liquid Glass. By 2025, Apple introduced Liquid Glass in iOS 26, a dynamic, semi-skeuomorphic language that blends fluid transparency, depth, and motion. Unlike skeuomorphism or flatness, it creates interfaces that feel alive, responsive, and adaptive. It’s not about looking like the physical world anymore—it’s about mirroring how humans expect digital experiences to respond. (Wikipedia)

This design journey, from familiar metaphors to abstract efficiency to dynamic intelligence, offers a blueprint for agentic UI in banking.

5. Finpace’s phased agentic implementation

Adaptive onboarding & authentication

Onboarding is one of the biggest points of churn in digital banking. Lengthy forms, broken sessions, and unclear KYC requirements frustrate customers and drive them away. Finpace solves this with AI-guided onboarding

• Conversational flow. Instead of a rigid form, the user engages in a natural dialogue. Example: “Would you like me to scan your ID or type it in manually?”

• Pause and resume. A student filling out onboarding between classes can stop and continue later without losing progress.

• Adaptive forms. If the system already knows a verified address, it won’t ask again.

• In-house AI verification. Banks can run their own AI-powered KYC at a fraction of the cost, avoiding reliance on third-party vendors charging over $50 per user.

The result is an onboarding journey that feels like personal guidance rather than bureaucracy.

Smart notifications

Traditional notifications like “transaction alert” or “low balance” are blunt instruments. They deliver information, but they don’t help customers act on it. Over time, these alerts become background noise: predictable, impersonal, and easy to ignore.

Finpace reimagines notifications as a two-way dialogue between the bank and the customer. Instead of static alerts, notifications become intelligent, contextual prompts that anticipate needs and offer immediate solutions.

How Finpace transforms notifications

• Contextual insights. For example, instead of “Balance below €100,” the notification might say:“Your rent is due tomorrow. Should I move €200 from savings to cover it?”Here, the alert acknowledges context (an upcoming payment) and proposes a clear next step, reducing customer stress.

• Proactive engagement. If a utility bill spikes, the app doesn’t just note the payment, it asks:“Your electricity bill is 30% higher than usual. Would you like me to analyze the cause?” The bank is no longer just reporting, it’s actively helping.

• Behavioral adaptation. Notifications evolve to reflect customer patterns. A freelancer might get prompts around irregular cash flow, while a salaried worker gets nudges tied to payday. The tone and timing adjust dynamically, making the experience personal, not generic.

  
  

Why this matters

1. Shifts notifications from noise to value. Instead of endless alerts, customers get actionable guidance tied to real needs.

2. Strengthens relationships. Each notification is an opportunity for the bank to demonstrate care and relevance, not just compliance.

3. Drives engagement. Micro-interactions delivered at the right time encourage customers to act in the app, increasing retention and product uptake.

4. Opens a new channel of advice. Notifications become a subtle but powerful way to deliver financial education, personalized offers, and long-term guidance without overwhelming the customer.

   
   

In our system notifications are not a supporting feature, they are a strategic engagement layer. They build trust through relevance, reinforce loyalty through consistency, and create a continuous thread of interaction that keeps the bank present in the customer’s financial life.

Pre-configured workflows & shortcuts

In traditional banking apps, many tasks require a long sequence of taps, form fills, and confirmations. From paying employees to managing monthly bills or setting up recurring transfers, the experience is often manual and repetitive.

Finpace simplifies these processes by turning them into intelligent, one-click workflows. The system observes customer behavior, learns recurring patterns, and anticipates needs. Instead of forcing users through the same steps every time, it offers ready-made shortcuts tailored to context.

For example, instead of navigating through menus to pay a bill, a customer might receive a simple prompt: “You’ve made several transfers to your landlord over the past six months. Should I set this up as a recurring rent payment for you?”

The real power lies in adaptation. A user who invests regularly will be nudged at the right time, while another who pays household bills sporadically will get timely reminders. What once took minutes or hours is now condensed into seconds, with a sense of confidence that the system has already done the heavy lifting.

This is not about saving clicks alone; it’s about reducing cognitive load. Customers no longer have to remember deadlines, amounts, or processes, the app proactively prepares the task, leaving only a moment of confirmation.

Customer support

Customer service has traditionally been the weak spot of digital banking. Long wait times, call queues, and the frustration of having to repeat the same story multiple times frustrate customers and increase costs for banks.

One of the most common scenarios is when a support ticket or chat begins with a specialist asking: “What happened? What did you try to do?” The customer then spends valuable minutes re-explaining actions they already took.

With Finpace, this friction disappears. Information about what the customer did, what they wanted to achieve, and what went wrong is automatically collected and analyzed in advance. When a human agent steps in, or when an AI agent takes over, the relevant context is already there. This means no repetition, no wasted effort, and faster resolution.

Finpace reimagines support as an agentic capability built directly into the app:

• Instant help for simple needs. Password resets, card locks, or transaction queries are resolved in real time without escalation.

• Contextual problem-solving. If a suspicious charge appears, the agent not only flags it but also explains the context, offers to block the card, and initiates the dispute process if needed.

• Seamless human handover. When an issue does require a human agent, the conversation, complete with history, actions taken, and diagnostic context transfers automatically, sparing the customer from starting over.

  
  

The experience shifts from waiting and repeating to assistance and reassurance. Customers feel supported around the clock, and institutions reduce strain on their call centers while maintaining compliance and quality of service.

Final words

The rise of agentic capabilities marks more than just a user experience improvement. It signals a fundamental shift in how financial institutions will operate. What began with chatbots and notifications is only the first chapter.

In the next decade, artificial intelligence has the potential to replace most of the fragmented systems that banks rely on today. Core banking engines, customer relationship management platforms, identity verification modules, fraud detection layers, and even advisory tools may all be consolidated into a single intelligent layer that understands customers, adapts in real time, and manages complexity invisibly.

Just as the smartphone combined the camera, the calendar, the phone, the GPS, and the music player into one device, agentic AI will unify banking infrastructure into a cohesive, adaptive, and continuously learning system. The bank of the future may not look like an app at all but rather a living agent that customers trust with their financial lives.

The true potential of this transformation is still largely uncovered. We are only beginning to see what agentic AI can achieve once it is embedded not only in banking applications but also in the operating core of financial institutions.

Finpace is committed to guiding banks on this journey. The goal is to introduce intelligence in ways that feel natural today while preparing for a future where AI does not simply assist but becomes the very foundation of banking itself.

The coming decade will determine which institutions adapt and thrive and which remain tied to legacy systems that can no longer keep pace. One reality is already clear. Agentic AI is the future of banking.