The Agentic Shift: Why Banks Can’t Afford to Be Ghosted by AI

Technology advancements implemented by big banks and international financial corporations are impacting the entire global banking system and the wider online economy. Large banks and financial firms are stepping into AI hard, writing their own code, and investing in the expansion of their digital teams, as agentic AI changes the way consumers spend and borrow money online. The challenge isn’t just building the tech; it’s the orchestration of these new protocols within existing regulatory frameworks.

While the ‘Big Four’ are throwing billions at proprietary AI code, the real movement is happening in the protocols. The technology is already here, but as the data from Accenture shows, 82% of banks are still scrambling to figure out how to govern it.

For banks, the threat isn’t just a change in tech, it’s total disintermediation. When an AI agent handles the search, the selection, and the checkout, the bank risks being relegated to a ‘bystander’: invisible, commoditized, and disconnected from the consumer.

Agentic Banking is Real and Moving into Unexpected New Waters

Accenture’s new Banking IT Executives Survey found that big banks are investing heavily in AI agent technology. They are expanding their tech teams, developing their own code, and testing open source AI to own their agentic operations. Governance is still slowing them down, with only 18% of banks surveyed recognizing that they have a formal AI agent lifecycle management model in place today.

From Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, launched in January 2026, to OpenAI’s. Agentic Commerce Protocol, leading AI companies have already developed the tools that banks, financial institutions, and retailers are using to drive AI agent sales.

AI agents are now being used by consumers from start to finish. They search products, compare features and prices, and finalize checkouts. These agents are designed to pass payment credentials, leaving traditional banking credit channels completely out of the funnel. Those being left out can already count their losses. Salesforce’s 2025 holiday report found that AI agents influenced $262 billion in U.S. sales alone.

How Banks and Fintechs Can Keep Pace with AI Agentic Commerce Innovation

The same Accenture survey found that 76% of banks will expand their tech teams because of agentic AI, and 44% of them are spending up to half of their IT budgets on solving for technical orchestration. You don’t need a ‘Big Tech’ budget to stay in the game. You need an optimization strategy. The goal isn’t to build your own LLM; it’s to ensure your banking services are ‘agent-ready’ through the right tools and partnerships.

Having a solid Agentic Framework can help banks and lenders position themselves where today’s customers actually engage. The framework must include three main points: AI visibility, agentic readiness, and accessibility of data.

Recently, at the KPMG RiskTech Conference, Pedro Machado, Member of the Supervisory Board – European Central Bank (ECB) representative, said that one of the challenges that keeps emerging in the banking industry is fragmented ownership of AI, with responsibilities split across IT, data science teams, business lines, and control functions. Machado stressed the importance of ensuring clear accountability for AI-driven decisions, the need for effective senior management oversight and robust challenge mechanisms across risk management, compliance, and internal audits.

To bridge these risks and gaps, AI digital transformation frameworks must clearly assign responsibilities and roles across departments and teams.

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Visibility Comes First: Making Your Data AI-Accessible

Salesforce found that consumers are increasingly starting their product search on AI bots and moving to AI agents for final payouts, without interacting with banks or retailers’ main pages as they did before.

Whether it be by partnering up with proven technology orchestration partners, or doing these integrations in-house with a small tech team, banks need to renew their digital customer-facing public surfaces to become AI visible. This means structuring for discoverability and formatting online data in ways that AI tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT, and other agentic bots, are able to consider, understand and recommend to customers.

Your data is your storefront, and in the agentic era, ‘cleaning your data’ is the equivalent of turning the lights on in a retail store. If your loan terms and credit products aren’t structured for machine readability, the agents will simply bypass you for a competitor.

Agentic AI Integrations and Protocols 

Once data is prepared for AI, banks must evaluate different choices to integrate with AI agents. Choices range from partnering up with third-party AI integration providers, doing it in-house, or going down a hybrid road. Cost, fees, visibility, and compliance must be evaluated.

Because agentic commerce has only just begun, and will continue to evolve, leaders can run short-term test runs to compare how different agentic commerce protocols or integration providers operate. Short-term frameworks allow banks and lenders to stay on the edge of market trends while gaining data on which protocol or integration service is a better fit. These short-term test runs can also give leaders some breathing room to better understand the technology and consider mid and long-term consolidation of partnership and agentic protocols, depending on market conditions.

As mentioned, as of today, the top agentic protocols are Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol. Others are likely to rise. Through heavy competition, protocols will become better and more efficient, as they battle for dominion over the agentic commerce flow.

The Gold of Agentic Commerce is Customer Data 

Besides the ones listed above, banks must also evaluate whether the integration options they plan to use offer customer data ownership. Customer data is vital for banks to run analytics, develop new services and products, and build trust and loyalty programs.

Who owns, stores, and leverages customer data is key in agentic commerce, because the traditional funnel is being bypassed, and users in great numbers will no longer interact directly with the online infrastructure of banks.

While protocols and third-party integration providers offer the opportunity for banks to access customer data, these are not default options or guaranteed features. In the rush to integrate, many banks are making a dangerous trade-off: visibility for data. If you use a third-party protocol that masks the end-user, you’ve lost the ‘gold.’ Any agentic strategy must have data ownership as a non-negotiable pillar. If you don’t own the data, you don’t own the customer; you’re just renting them from an AI provider.

A New Battleground for Banks and Fintech Businesses

Breaking into the agentic landscape is not just a strategic move for big banks and big tech. Every financial institution, big and small, can develop a solid agentic framework, assign in-house resources, partner with third-party providers, and gain visibility into the new online AI funnels.

The agentic shift isn’t a 2030 problem; it’s a 2025 reality. Banks that act now to make their products and services agent-discoverable, while fiercely protecting their customer data, will thrive. The rest? They’ll just become a relic of the past.

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