Will AI become the financial advisor, and the bank the infrastructure?

Not quite. Banks will not disappear just because financial accounts can be connected to AI systems. But OpenAI's new test in the US shows where the customer interface could move next.

Source: https://openai.com/index/personal-finance-chatgpt/

The banking app shows account balances, transactions, portfolios, and loan payments. AI can derive relationships from that: why is there so little money left at the end of the month? Which loan is affordable? Which savings rate fits the actual spending pattern? Are the interest rates market-standard? How should money be invested?

Whoever answers those questions is closer to the customer than the app that only shows the account balance.

Demand for this is already visible in Germany as well. According to a current Bitkom study, one in four people has already asked chatbots for financial advice.

For banks, this shift is uncomfortable. If financial advice and explanation increasingly happen outside the bank, the bank does not immediately lose its business. But it loses further proximity to the customer. Online banking weakened the branch. AI could now pull the explanation layer out of the bank as well.

Even a strong bank-owned AI does not solve the problem completely. Whoever sells an account, a loan, or a fund will never appear fully neutral when giving advice. For many customers, an external AI will therefore become a second view: not immediately a replacement for the bank, but a way to check its offers.

There is a second point. Bank products will have to be described in a way AI can evaluate. If conditions, fees, exclusions, and suitability criteria are not cleanly machine-readable, a product may not show up in an AI recommendation at all. Or it may show up incorrectly.

Banks therefore do not only need to bring better AI into their own apps. They need to expect that customers will increasingly cross-check their financial questions outside the bank. And that the next product recommendation may not begin in a branch or in online banking, but in an AI answer.