Wall Street banks ramp up digital assistants in bid to win productivity race

FE Team | Published: July 13, 2026 23:08:57

NEW YORK, July 13 (Reuters): Major banks are ramping up how they incorporate digital assistants in their daily operations, determining how such agents interact with human colleagues and clients as they race to get ahead.
Banks are competing in the adoption of agentic AI - artificial intelligence that can accomplish tasks with minimal human supervision - in functions from wealth to client vetting, trading and treasury, in an effort to increase productivity. They are now increasingly pushing to incorporate agents that can autonomously take actions on behalf of users into their operations and have them work alongside humans.
"We are working with banks in particular on agents and human employees ... to help the banks look at all the roles end to end, and then determine which ones are hybrid roles, which ones are agentic employees, which ones are only human employees," said Peter Torrente, US sector leader for banking at KPMG. A June KPMG survey, opens new tab showed that 51 per cent of banks were piloting AI agents.
Large banks are embedding or planning the use of agentic AI on daily work in a multitude of functions.
Koren Maranca, head of Artificial Intelligence for Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley, said the bank will start testing digital assistants later this summer that will interact with clients at any time of the day. The bank already uses agents to help financial advisors do all kinds of tasks.
"We are now preparing these agents to start pushing reminders or recommendations to the financial advisors regarding their clients," said Maranca. Such assistants can analyze investments, suggest strategies and assist in building portfolios.
At BNY, digital employees are treated as teammates which are assigned for specific tasks, and can talk to each other. They have been given login IDs and nicknames to join the team and work alongside colleagues, CEO Robin Vince said on a Wall Street Journal podcast earlier this year.
"The digital employee has a login, it can actually operate in the systems, and it actually has a ... human manager that's responsible for training it, making sure that it actually is doing all the right things, like a performance review, if you will, quality control, and it has tasks every day," said Vince on the podcast, explaining the role of its digital assistant named Payment Pete.