FinTechs Lag Credit Unions on the Next AI Banking Test

Source Domain: www.pymnts.com

For at least a decade, financial technology companies have promised to offer what most banks and credit unions can’t: technology that allows financial services companies to give millions of customers better, faster and more convenient products and services for the digital age, from deposits and payments to loans and budgeting apps. Now that pledge is bumping up against the proliferation of artificial intelligence.

New data from PYMNTS Intelligence found that only 1 in 3 FinTech executives say they currently offer AI-led chat support for customers of the firms they work with, in any industry.

In an era where DeepMind’s AlphaFold can map the structure of essentially every known protein and Anthropic’s Claude Code can generate what a non-computer programmer “vibe codes” in ordinary language, chat support for a bank customer or credit union member wanting to see if they qualify for a personal loan wouldn’t seem like rocket science.

After all, other industries have gone all-in. Amazon rolled out its generative-AI conversational shopping assistant, Rufus, in 2024, to help people track packages, after using earlier iterations of chat support for years. Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, airlines have routinely use AI-driven chatbots to help customers book flights and locate lost luggage. Ditto insurers, for quotes and policy information, claims status and customer-service requests.

But those companies and industries have the dollars to build things internally, spend big on third-party solutions or acquire startups that specialize in AI. By contrast, unless it’s a multi-billion dollar institution like Boeing Employees Credit Union ($29 billion), most credit unions don’t have the assets or expertise to build the customer-facing AI solutions that traditional banks have embraced.