Quick answer: Because banks are looking at a different problem. At Money20/20 on 19 October, PNC CEO Bill Demchak said no bank will let people transact inside accounts without a human in the loop, and several major US banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citi among them, are blocking AI agents from customer accounts. In Australia, Commonwealth Bank told authorities in March that around A$1 billion in home loans may have been obtained illegitimately, some with AI-doctored paperwork. Meanwhile almost every booth at the Dubai FinTech Summit pitched an agent that will transform your bank. The gap is rarely the model. It’s the data underneath. The same customer lives in three systems under three slightly different names. A loan file is part PDF, part scan, part free text. A “date” column holds four formats. So what would your agent actually be reading?
The shallow lesson: banks are slow; they’ll come around
They aren’t slow. They’ve seen what a confident system does with a messy record, and they’re the ones who answer for it.
The real lesson: map the data, clean it, and only then add AI
A pilot works on a clean sample. Then it meets duplicate customers, mixed formats and a core nobody has a full map of, because the people who built it left years ago. It stalls there, every time. There’s no shortcut around that order.
The sobering part
The best questions at the summit weren’t about what an AI can do. They were about how you’d prove to a regulator why a document was flagged. If you can’t trace the answer back through your data, the answer is unusable in a bank.
Full disclosure: Azati’s banking work is engineering inside existing systems: legacy data integration, OCR and document processing. We don’t claim AI agents running a bank’s core, and we’d be wary of anyone who does. See our banking and fintech work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Sergei Ivanov, CEO, Custom Software & AI Solutions in GCC – read the original, written at the Dubai FinTech Summit, 2–3 November 2026. Sources: Banking Dive, 21 October 2026; Australian Financial Review reporting via Yahoo Finance Australia.
