How AI is disrupting financial services and how companies can respond — with Publicis Sapient CEO, Nigel Vaz

As advances in artificial intelligence impact the financial services landscape, banks and financial institutions face a critical inflection point. AI has been a part of banking operations for years, but the emergence of generative AI is creating unprecedented opportunities — and challenges — for innovation and business transformation.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the Tearsheet Podcast, Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, discusses how AI is fundamentally changing the financial services industry. Nigel shares his deep insights on how financial institutions can navigate this technological disruption, from enabling broader access to wealth management to AI-driven credit models in mortgage lending, and on why some banks are better positioned than others to capitalize on AI’s potential.

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company, focused on helping companies survive and thrive in a world that is increasingly digital. With expertise spanning Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data & AI (SPEED capabilities), Publicis Sapient helps businesses sustain relevance by adapting to change and capturing value through digital.

In more than two decades with the company, Nigel has acted as a strategic advisor on complex transformation initiatives across industries and geographies, including AI advances in the context of clients’ broader transformation requirements. Nigel is also author of the bestselling business title ‘Digital Business Transformation – How Established Companies Sustain Competitive Advantage from Now to Next’, based on years of partnering with clients to harness the power of digital.

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A New Era of AI in Banking

The financial services industry is experiencing a shift from predictive AI to generative AI, which is creating original content and handling specific tasks to enhance the traditional workforce and accelerate business. As Vaz explains: “We’ve gone from AI in the context of machine learning models to predictive AI to what is now, essentially, creation. Gen AI has brought to financial services the creation of original content, an understanding of natural language and adaptation to tasks that were otherwise considered the purview of people, not machines.”

Data Quality as Foundation

For financial institutions looking to implement AI, having the right data infrastructure is crucial. Vaz emphasizes this point: “Start with ‘What is the state of your data?’ Banks who’ve invested in connecting different data sets and organizations that have leveraged their data infrastructure to build an AI strategy are in a very different place to organizations who’ve simply started with AI implementation.”

Real-World Impact

AI implementations are moving beyond experimentation to delivering tangible business value – through cost-out innovation or growth-oriented value creation. One striking example Vaz shares demonstrates this impact: “In one case, a migration that was scheduled to take 10 years is now being done in three years, and this is from legacy COBOL to Java. These kinds of implementations are creating significant value, not only in the context of time to market but also in how they’re able to take costs out of their business.”

Workforce Evolution

Rather than replacing workers, AI is transforming how financial institutions approach talent and skills development. Vaz believes that upskilling and reskilling initiatives empower employees and ensure organizations remain agile in the face of change: “We often use this frame of learn, unlearn and relearn. More and more in organizations today, the shift in roles is going to need the creation of new roles focused on optimizing AI systems, analyzing data and insights and developing algorithms.”

Future of Financial Services

Looking ahead, Vaz envisions a fundamental reimagining of financial services and how the industry positively impacts people’s lives. He describes a future of democratized financial services: “Rather than an organization essentially trying to sell you a series of products, they will start to provide personalized financial services, where the organization understands that what I’m interested in talking about is not a mortgage rate, but that I’m interested in buying a home. As you start to get that personalized, unique perspective about the person that you’re advising and serving, you create a whole new opportunity to democratize the traditional definition of what it means to be a financial services institution.”