There is no shortage of discussion about what artificial intelligence will do to banking. Most of it is about the machines themselves: the models, the roadmaps, the efficiency gains. Very little of it is about the person who currently sits at the desk, and whether, once the machines take the routine, that person still wants the job that is left.
AI has come to take the tedious parts of the relationship manager's day: the checks, the research, the endless gathering. It has left behind the one part that ever really mattered, the conversation with the client, the part worth wanting and worth protecting.
Branson said it first, and it has aged well
"Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."
It carries the sound of a founding father's maxim, but it reads today like a balance-sheet truth. There are companies run as if it were true, and there are the others; the gap between them is usually visible from the front office.
The routine is leaving, in every kind of bank
AI, in any case, is no longer the technology of challengers. It is in the water of every institution, neobank and private bank, local and international alike:
- KYC and onboarding with agentic AI: lead time down by as much as 80%
- Research with agentic AI: lead time down 30–50%
- Adoption: the provider matters less than the model of adoption and the strategy behind it
Meanwhile Revolut keeps scaling across Europe, hyper-digital and resolutely new. That sharpens the point. The more routine the machines absorb, the more valuable the relationship manager becomes, provided the bank is ready to build a workplace people still want.
A week at Handelsblatt's "AI in Banking" summit
We were in Frankfurt this week, speaking at Handelsblatt's "AI in Banking" summit. The programme brought together a savings marketplace, a private bank founded 349 years ago, and a Berlin infrastructure startup building decision engines for lenders, three businesses with little in common and almost identical agendas.
The incumbents: embedding AI, reshaping the RM's day
Deutsche Bank Private Bank's Global COO, Yiping Li, walked through an AI-driven KYC case study in wealth management that compresses onboarding timelines from weeks into days. Commerzbank's Oliver Dörler, head of Big Data & Advanced Analytics, described what scaling AI actually means once a pilot has left the lab. The through-line was modest and persuasive: AI reassembles the working day around the parts that need a human, rather than replacing the person doing it.
The challengers: infrastructure and stickiness
Metzler's Marco Di Sazio, of the Digital Assets & AI Innovation Lab, joined a panel with bunq's Joe Wilson and our chief data officer, Dr. Sina Wulfmeyer. Their shared argument was that adoption lives on real data and a trusted partner for daily banking, and with the right quality and context it rewards clients and employees in equal measure. MIT's State of AI in Business 2025 reports your chances of success double when you involve external partners. Get that right, and it pays off for both customers and employees.
Both agree: redesign the RM workplace
Put the programme together and the distinction that matters stops being old banks versus new ones. Both sides are converging on the same problem from opposite directions. The institutions that should be worried are not the ones with the oldest systems. They are the ones whose people, and by extension whose clients, are being quietly courted elsewhere.
Re-route the routine and make the banker's role attractive again. Keep the human for the conversations that are genuinely hard. The moat was never the product list or the legacy branch network. It was always the relationship, and relationships are kept by people who are glad to be there.
The future is bright if you take care of your people's workplace
The real question is what your people think about working at your bank, and whether you are equipping them to meet their clients' goals. Get that right, and the technology tends to take care of itself. This was never just sentiment; it was the whole game all along.
We believe the workplace of banking should stay attractive. We would be glad to help you keep it that way.
Notes from Handelsblatt's AI in Banking Summit
There is no shortage of discussion about what artificial intelligence will do to banking. Most of it is about the machines themselves: the models, the roadmaps, the efficiency gains. Very little of it is about the person who currently sits at the desk, and whether, once the machines take the routine, that person still wants the job that is left.
AI has come to take the tedious parts of the relationship manager's day: the checks, the research, the endless gathering. It has left behind the one part that ever really mattered, the conversation with the client, the part worth wanting and worth protecting.
Branson said it first, and it has aged well
"Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."
It carries the sound of a founding father's maxim, but it reads today like a balance-sheet truth. There are companies run as if it were true, and there are the others; the gap between them is usually visible from the front office.
The routine is leaving, in every kind of bank
AI, in any case, is no longer the technology of challengers. It is in the water of every institution, neobank and private bank, local and international alike:
Meanwhile Revolut keeps scaling across Europe, hyper-digital and resolutely new. That sharpens the point. The more routine the machines absorb, the more valuable the relationship manager becomes, provided the bank is ready to build a workplace people still want.
A week at Handelsblatt's "AI in Banking" summit
We were in Frankfurt this week, speaking at Handelsblatt's "AI in Banking" summit. The programme brought together a savings marketplace, a private bank founded 349 years ago, and a Berlin infrastructure startup building decision engines for lenders, three businesses with little in common and almost identical agendas.
The incumbents: embedding AI, reshaping the RM's day
Deutsche Bank Private Bank's Global COO, Yiping Li, walked through an AI-driven KYC case study in wealth management that compresses onboarding timelines from weeks into days. Commerzbank's Oliver Dörler, head of Big Data & Advanced Analytics, described what scaling AI actually means once a pilot has left the lab. The through-line was modest and persuasive: AI reassembles the working day around the parts that need a human, rather than replacing the person doing it.
The challengers: infrastructure and stickiness
Metzler's Marco Di Sazio, of the Digital Assets & AI Innovation Lab, joined a panel with bunq's Joe Wilson and our chief data officer, Dr. Sina Wulfmeyer. Their shared argument was that adoption lives on real data and a trusted partner for daily banking, and with the right quality and context it rewards clients and employees in equal measure. MIT's State of AI in Business 2025 reports your chances of success double when you involve external partners. Get that right, and it pays off for both customers and employees.
Both agree: redesign the RM workplace
Put the programme together and the distinction that matters stops being old banks versus new ones. Both sides are converging on the same problem from opposite directions. The institutions that should be worried are not the ones with the oldest systems. They are the ones whose people, and by extension whose clients, are being quietly courted elsewhere.
Re-route the routine and make the banker's role attractive again. Keep the human for the conversations that are genuinely hard. The moat was never the product list or the legacy branch network. It was always the relationship, and relationships are kept by people who are glad to be there.
The future is bright if you take care of your people's workplace
The real question is what your people think about working at your bank, and whether you are equipping them to meet their clients' goals. Get that right, and the technology tends to take care of itself. This was never just sentiment; it was the whole game all along.
We believe the workplace of banking should stay attractive. We would be glad to help you keep it that way.