Could US frontier AI labs dominate banking?

Financial services have become one of the
hottest battlegrounds in AI. Financial services is Anthropic’s second- biggest
industry by enterprise revenue, while OpenAI has hired investment banking
experts to train its models on Wall Street workflows.

But as the AI labs push into different sectors,
could they become banking providers and dominate the industry?
The subject came up for discussion at the
recent Fintech for Inclusion Global Summit, organised by Accion Ventures.

Monica Engel, co-founder and managing partner,
Quona Capital, says: “They’ll get close to banking without becoming banks.
Banking is slow, capital-intensive and built on credit risk — it sits awkwardly
next to a research lab, and labs won’t want to go there.
That doesn’t mean they won’t create and
capture value in financial services. They will. The future of banking is
agentic: autopilot money that moves, pays and rebalances for you, and commerce
and payments are where that starts. They’ll get there by partnering with
regulated entities rather than replacing them.”

Adrian Congiu, VP, product, Mambu, said: “The frontier labs win where raw model capability is
the product: reasoning, text, code and images. Every training dollar improves
quality, and they own the distribution. Competing with them on models is a
losing strategy.
Banking is different. Value comes less from
the model and more from what surrounds it: process knowledge, regulatory
compliance, auditability and workflows woven through legacy systems. No
frontier lab will build loan compliance for every geography globally. That
requires focus, and the labs structurally cannot be everywhere and go deep at
once.”

Alexia Yannopoulos, partner, Apis Partners, said: “I think within financial services, having the vertical
ownership is still very important. So the licensing, the distribution, as well
as the data, so that still sits within financial services. So we see a big
advantage there. I would expect that to stay.”
 

Ameya Upadhyay, general partner,
Flourish Ventures, said:
“I remember 2017, 2018, when everybody
was scared that Amazon would be the next big bank. We were all worried that the
big platforms would start fintechs. It’s just too much of a headache to do
financial services. And these guys have such big fish to fry. Anthropic doing
banking might add what $10bn to $ 1.8 trillion; it is meaningless.”
            

Rahil Rangwala, Accion Ventures managing
partner, said: “Frontier models are focused on driving usage of tokens at
a global scale and are pursuing opportunities to enable usage of their models
in large markets. While the banking sector is one such large market and a
priority for these frontier models, it is very difficult for them to operate as
regulated entities. Regulations and local compliance are strong moats for
industries such as banking. Instead, what we tend to see in our
markets is these models partnering with and enabling regulated entities in
the financial sector.”

Image: ChatGPT