How GenAI Is Redefining What Makes Your Bankers Valuable

The first installment in this series made the case that your customers and members already have access to a new kind of financial capability which exceeds the in-person and online or mobile tools and advice you can provide. This development creates an uncomfortable question for every bank and credit union:

If a consumer can get superior analysis and insight in two minutes at 10 p.m., what is the job of a personal banker, loan officer, or anyone acting as a trusted advisor?

Key insight: Bankers aren’t obsolete, but specific financial advice about accounts and activity does not need to go through a financial institution. That eliminates part of the job we’ve spent decades training for and leaves the part we’ve never successfully defined.

This evolution requires institutions to take a deeper look at their competitive position and redefine their future value proposition to customers and members.

The Trusted Advisor Job Needs to Be Rebuilt

The title “trusted financial advisor” has always promised more than the operating model delivered. After a few weeks of learning the products and services, the banker is expected to identify needs, recommend the right solutions, provide guidance, and build trust. In reality, the industry has never equipped most bankers with the training and resources to be a trusted financial advisor.

It’s a structural problem because it’s impossible to remember every detail of every relationship, keep up with every product, recognize every financial product and topic, and provide comprehensive advice in the limited time available. GenAI can improve the banker’s ability to do much of that work.

That does not make the banker less important, but it does change your conversation about how you want to service customers or members.

Consider two paths, the first being the traditional path and one being fully AI-assisted.

• Key question: What financial guidance and/or relationship support should my customers or member facing employees provide, and how do I equip them to deliver it?

GenAI is reducing the value of work bankers perform today. As we saw in part 1, everyday GenAI tools can provide analysis, insights, and next steps faster and in many cases more comprehensively than a banker can. Leaders need to take inventory of what that means and how they want to position their institution and banker roles.

• Key question: What will make a consumer want to talk to your banker after they have already worked through their questions with GenAI?

If you’re not thinking critically about how customers and members will use your institution and the value you provide, you will struggle to define what makes your bankers valuable. That starts with accepting that easy-to-use GenAI tools can already perform much of the information and analysis work associated with being a trusted financial advisor. The percentage of consumers using them in this way may be small today, but with such a low barrier to entry it will only increase.

The second path is to fully enable your bankers with GenAI. Give them the training, guidance, approved tools, and responsible access to customer or member data to do the same work consumers can do themselves.

• Key question: Can my bankers do the same work, but better, with GenAI that my customer or member can do at home?

Bankers have an advantage because of their experience, financial knowledge, and institutional perspective. They can strengthen the questions they ask, read body language, and evaluate an answer with greater context. GenAI enhances your ability to serve customers or members.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Banks and credit unions are not known for being quick to change and overvalue their perception of the value they provide. Consumers simply don’t value bankers as much as the industry values bankers.

• “Our bankers give real advice.” They do, but much of the information and analysis is foundational and readily accessible across the internet and with GenAI. And access to bankers is limited by open hours and technology.
• “Our bankers know which product fits.” They do, but when the choices are a few checking accounts and a handful of savings products slotted by balance or transaction count you don’t need experienced bankers helping make decisions. And many loan solutions are straightforward and tightly governed.
• “Our people have the relationships.” They do, but when you do the math to uncover how many relationships they can actually know, relative to how many are assigned, it’s impossible to keep up. And many consumers are clearly using online and mobile tools to bank.

These objections bring us back to truly deciding what you mean when you say you want your team to be trusted financial advisors or focused on deep relationship building. If this means knowing the customer’s or member’s balances, spending patterns, product holdings, and recommending likely needs, GenAI is taking that job.

Key insight: If relationship means answering when the customer or member calls, understanding what went wrong, advocating inside the institution, and staying involved until the issue is resolved, then the human role becomes more important. That is the opportunity to reimagine how to approach relationship building and being a trusted advisor.

Empower Your Team to Be Better Decision Makers

Making larger changes to how you culturally build relationships will take time, but there are small steps you can start to take today. One of the biggest value adds a banker can provide is navigating the internal dynamics of your bank or credit union. Bankers need to understand how to access procedures, policies, documents, systems, people, and departments. GenAI creates an opportunity to make that knowledge available to more employees. But you may need to reexamine how you capture it, share it, and give bankers the ability to act on it.

Start by improving the information your bankers already use. You can bring together policies and procedures and create an internal chatbot. That is not a new concept, but many banks and credit unions have not reached that point. There is useful work you can do before you get there. Use GenAI to review many documents at one time to jumpstart greater consistency, and a better customer or member experience:

Prompt: “Review these documents and identify overlapping instructions, conflicting guidance, and missing steps. Show the dates and version information available for each document, and flag where the current guidance is unclear. Recommend how to consolidate and clarify the information. Identify anything a department owner needs to confirm.”

This gives the employees responsible for those documents a starting point for improving them. GenAI can help you find the confusion your bankers are working through every day.

Capture the institutional knowledge that has never been documented. Every bank or credit union has employees who know how things actually get done. Have those experienced employees use a dictation tool to capture their knowledge and write it with GenAI.

Prompt: “Take this dictation about how we handle this issue and rewrite it using our procedure template. Include the steps, required documentation, departments involved, common exceptions, and escalation points. Flag missing information and anything that needs confirmation or conflicts. Do not fill gaps by inventing a procedure.”

The employee reviews and edits the result, and the appropriate owner approves it.

Help bankers understand which decisions they can make. Better information only gets you so far if every decision still passes through several people. A department head and compliance leader can use dictation and GenAI to draft a decision guide based on existing policy and delegated authority.

Prompt: “Using this policy and the dictation from our department and compliance leaders, create a decision guide for bankers. Separate decisions they are authorized to make, decisions that require approval, and situations where the guidance is unclear. Include three questions the banker should answer before using the guide. For unclear situations, provide follow-up questions and identify who should be consulted. Flag any gaps or conflicts for review. Include a rubric.”

Confirm the guide reflects the authority you intend to give and empower your team to make better decisions with better guidance. The goal is to help the banker make an appropriate decision while the customer or member is still in front of them or get the issue to the right person faster.

These are easy prompts that improve your opportunity to provide a better customer experience. GenAI is still an untapped tool to reaching these goals.

A 90-Day Reset

Part 1 showed what consumers can already do with GenAI. The next step is deciding how your bank or credit union will respond. What will make someone want to talk to your banker after they have already used GenAI? And what value does your team provide to your customers or members?

Use the next 90 days to take three actions.

1. Define where your bankers should create value. How artificial intelligence will transform your institution is still an unanswered question in the long run, but you can see trends. Think through your brand, culture, and strategy to reexamine how you can evolve with consumers.
2. Give a group the tools and support to test and demonstrate that value. Give participating bankers approved GenAI tools, appropriate data access, and time to practice. Your customers or members may have greater access that you allow, get your bankers on the same playing field. Have them use GenAI to prepare better questions, evaluate alternatives, or work through an issue.
3. Focus on internal barriers that keep bankers from acting. Use what you learn to improve procedures, capture undocumented knowledge, and clarify decision authority. Solve these barriers with an explicit focus on using GenAI which gives you a learning opportunity that is transferable.

At the end of 90 days, you should have a clearer definition of the banker’s role, practical examples of how GenAI improves it, and specific changes to help your team deliver. Calling your institution a relationship business carries an expectation, to you and your customers and members. Their needs are evolving and you need to evolve with them.