Banks Risk AI Burnout by Chasing Speed Over Strategy
By Justin Estes, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Executive Summary
- In a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast with Jim Marous, BNP Paribas CPBS’ Chief Transformation Officer Sophie Heller warns that rushing AI adoption without strategic reflection leads to underperformance, while taking time to analyze challenges and test solutions drives better results and learning.
- Heller emphasizes involving employees in AI projects to reduce fear, foster collaboration, and build trust, using insights from behavioral science and organizational sociology to guide leadership and teams through transformation.
- She predicts that AI will reshape customer interactions through conversational banking, requiring banks to redesign digital experiences and provide higher-quality, more personalized advice to stay competitive.
Strategic Pause Before Digital Progress
Q: What are the most common mistakes organizations make when they skip the reflection phase in transformation?
Heller: More than a mistake, it’s underperformance and under learning. Because if you take the time to formulate your business challenge with an exact objective, for example, a behavior that you want to change, such as customer behavior or employee behavior, then you dig into all the reasons why people are not doing it.
You explore vast areas of potential actions, you test them and then you are more likely to pick up the most efficient solution. If you jump into the solution, you might have the right intuition and it will work — but you could have also found a cheaper or more efficient solution.
Q: How does taking time to understand problems lead to better performance and learning outcomes?
Heller: Underperformance and also under-learning, of course, because if you do all that process with the testing, you understand what works, but also why that works. That’s a great opportunity to achieve more performance and learning.
Addressing Employee Fears in AI Transformation
Q: How do you train teams for AI rollouts while ensuring they feel part of the process rather than replaced by it?
Heller: First of all, the project that I’m talking about — and this is the same for all the projects that we do — we do it with the people who are responsible for the activity. So, for example, you go to the product owner who is responsible for the mortgage process.
And you say, “Okay, you know what? We could simplify your process, we could decrease your cost by doing that.” And of course, because this is part of his objective, he will be very interested in doing.
It’s also about building solutions, such as another example where we included the frontline, for instance, to automate a solution that addresses their IT support needs.
We worked with them to say, “Okay, what should it look like to be useful for you?”
Q: What approaches work best for getting employees to embrace AI solutions?
Heller: What works — this is a little similar to digital — is we need to sit with the people, understand what their concerns are and then show them how AI can solve the problem.
But we could go back to that later, because, of course, this is only the beginning. It’s like digital in the 2000s. First of all, you start to adapt your existing processes by copying them into the digital world.
And then, more years later, you realize that new business models are emerging, new competitors and the changes are much more drastic and profound. So, we will observe the same thing with AI.
Dig Deeper:
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Behavioral Sciences in Banking Transformation
Q: What have behavioral sciences and organizational sociology taught you that can be deployed in banking?
Heller: Yes. If I start with the organizational sociology, you realize that when you’re doing transformation, a lot of the topics that we handle are by definition very complex, because if they were simple, all the banks would handle them by themselves, no?
And when you have a complex topic, you need cooperation. Now, we are always talking about that cooperation and collaboration. However, this is very challenging because, as sociology teaches, people tend to resist cooperation.
They don’t want to be held back, not because they’re bad, but because they want to move forward. They want to feel independent; they want to feel in control. When you are cooperating, you need to let go of a certain power; you abandon part of your power. And so, for many people, that is complex.
Sometimes, they also have a lot of different tasks that are very short-term oriented and maybe they don’t find the time. So, it’s important to consider the difficulty of cooperation and the challenge of changing people in a non-naive way.
Q: How do you work with executive management to change mindsets and embrace new approaches?
Heller: Yeah, another hard question. We also touched upon that last time, but first, you need to create confidence with those people. So, I’m a member of the executive team, but I have a boss and he’s part of the programmers.
It’s also about building confidence by delivering on the promises you’ve made. So, the confidence is there. Once the confidence is there, you can start. It’s bringing a lamp and putting the light on things that they normally would not look at.
Normally, you look at that and it’s perfect, but look here, something is interesting as well. So, you put the light on something and then you need to always come up with, oh, if we were able to do that, that would bring that benefit.
So, you need to change, not a lot of people are interested, but if you say, “Okay, we are great, we are doing great, but look at that. If we do this on top, that would be interesting. And this is the small steps that I propose so that we can check quite rapidly if that works.”
Balancing Customer Value with Operational Efficiency
Q: How do you ensure transformation creates genuine customer value rather than just operational efficiency?
Heller: What you say is right and you cannot skip that part. You need to deliver projects that bring operational efficiency.
Even when we were focusing on the customer experience, my AI team was already working on efficiency, specifically on risk-scoring efficiency and marketing campaigns with measurable ROI. This allowed us to demonstrate the pricing we could achieve through AB testing, showing the additional revenue or decreased cost of risk.
So, you need to have in your portfolio at least 70% or 80% of the initiatives that are bringing tangible financial results. But then you need to keep the 20% that are more bets on the future, more complex and more long-term. But you need to have both.
The Future of Conversational Banking
Q: What excites you most about the future of financial services?
Heller: It’s going to be not very original, but of course, AI. The rhythm of adoption from customers makes you think that it is already driving the way that customers access digital services. So, this becomes the norm. I don’t know about you, but I don’t do Google searches anymore; I ask GPT.
And now, we have all these e-commerce websites that are thinking, “Well, you know what?”
Our website is useless because we just need to have a conversation and we have all the data products well-ordered behind with the inventory, the characteristics of the products and then we will have a conversation.
And, of course, in banking, you are always influenced by what happens in society — and usually it doesn’t start with banking.
Q: How will AI transform the way customers interact with banks and access financial advice?
Heller: Well, now it’s the same thing. If everybody is accessing information and digital content through voice and conversation, this represents a more drastic change. Because the digital world was new, it required some education for people. Many found it challenging to navigate the internet and learn how to use a browser, which can be quite complex.
But with AI, you have a conversation. It’s mimicking a human conversation, so there’s no entry cost. So, of course, everybody’s going to adapt to it much quicker than the digital.
And that will set the bar also for financial services; the way you want to access your data, question your account and so on, you will want to ask questions like, “How much did I spend last month? What would you advise me to do in that situation?” etc.
So, the first implication is how to rethink your mobile application to be conversational, as this is how people will interact with you initially.
Second, it raises the bar of advice because if people already have a lot of advice, which is precise and relevant, if you describe well the situation through a normal generic assistant, it means that as a bank, the Virtual Assistant of your bank or the advice that your frontline is giving needs to be above that.
