Financial services firms are navigating a volatile economic picture, but have no plans to scrimp on their transformation and AI efforts.

Big banks are among the more experienced enterprises working with AI and many of them are in the second or third phases of transformation projects. Quarter-by-quarter these financial services giants are laying out the blueprint for other companies to follow even as the economic picture looks dicey at best.

Where we are now:

Here's a quick tour of what financial services CxOs are saying about their AI plans economy be damned.

Citigroup

Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, has been talking about technology transformation, AI and culling its legacy infrastructure for years. The results are starting to show up. In October, Citigroup laid out a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to leverage Vertex AI, the provider's high performance computing infrastructure and analytics stack. 

Citigroup CTO David Griffiths was a speaker at Google Cloud Next. He outlined how Citigroup was working on horizontal use cases for AI models and then going with vertical specialized scenarios. Citigroup is embracing AI as "a universal enabler" across its businesses.

Fraser said: "Our transformation investments continue to modernize our infrastructure, simplify our processes, and reduce manual touchpoints. During the quarter, we retired legacy applications and automated reconciliations, to name but a few accomplishments."

Get the Insights newsletter

She added that Citigroup is "integrating AI directly into our business operations to improve the client experience." The bank is working on Agent Assist, a genAI tool for customer service in US Personal Banking. It is also being piloted in credit cards.

Fraser noted that the economy is volatile, but is "protecting necessary investments in our businesses as well as our transformation." "We shall not allow the uncertainty to distract us from executing our strategy and improving our returns," she said.

Citigroup’s journey

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon also highlighted the company's AI investments while riffing on the economic picture that's uncertain.

Solomon said the priority is to "serve clients with excellence" while improving efficiency via technology and automation.

He said: "We are leveraging AI solutions to scale and transform our engineering capabilities as well as to simplify and modernize our technology stack. Today, many of our people have access to Generative AI powered tools to help them serve clients more efficiently and increase productivity. These include a developer co-pilot coding assistant and a natural language GS AI assistant. We continue to believe an acceleration in AI adoption will allow for further efficiencies for our own business and for companies large and small. As it is utilized more broadly, productivity gains for the economy will be significant."

Goldman’s journey:

 

A diagram of a company's efficiency AI-generated content may be incorrect.

JPMorgan Chase

Yes, the economy may be a challenge for JPMorgan Chase. And yes, JPMorgan Chase will continue to invest in technology and AI, said CEO Jamie Dimon.

On the first quarter earnings call, JPMorgan Chase's Dimon was blunt as usual: "The investment that we do in banks, branches, technology, AI is going to continue regardless of the environment."

And Dimon will invest more if needed with JPMorgan Chase's fortress balance sheet. "Based upon the environment, the turbulence issues, I like having excess capital," said Dimon. "We are prepared for any environment and that's so we can serve clients. We have plenty of capital and plenty of liquidity to get through whatever the stormy seas are."

JPMorgan Chase outlines its technology and AI strategy annually at its investor day. The next update is May 19 at its investor day.

JPMorgan Chase's journey:

A close-up of a web page AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The Bank of New York Mellon

The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) has quietly built out an AI-powered operating model and recently announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to drive models for financial services.

Speaking on BNY's first quarter conference call, CEO Robin Vince said: "We've been taking a platform-based approach to AI capabilities, building and deploying solutions at scale with resilient, responsible guardrails throughout. We believe that our AI platform is going to be an important advantage for us as a large language model agnostic design, leveraging frontier models from multiple leading providers."

Vince added that the deal with OpenAI will give BNY access to cutting edge models and technology and advance use cases.

So far, Vince said that more than 80% of employees have created training to access its AI platform called Eliza. He added that 8,000 employees are experimenting with personal AI agents.

"We have deployed more than 40 AI solutions into production with a significant additional number at various stages of building and testing," said Vince. "Collectively, we expect these to drive productivity gains, improved risk management and to provide meaningful leverage to our people in the future."

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

BNY's journey:

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Future of Work, Innovation and Product-led Growth, Next-Generation Customer Experience

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

#AI #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #ML #generativeAI, #transformation