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

Nigel Vaz, Publicis Sapient

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.

Listen to the full episode

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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.”

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The Quarterly Review: Citizen’s Rachel Mattes Greenberg on how her team is sprinting to success in order to meet the bank’s $50 billion Sustainable Finance target

Notes from the desk: Hello and welcome to The Quarterly Review, where I dive into what executives from some of the best brands in financial services are focusing on in this quarter. In the last year, we have surveyed executives from both banks and fintechs about their intentions and goals for the year.
With the new year, I am excited to bring you another “review” in this series. It’s where we compare the exec’s goals with results and see how well her plans stood the test of time.

Our review articles in this series are an exclusive offering for our TS PRO subscribers. If you want to dive into the juicy stuff and read the details of their labors and fruits —beyond the executive summary below— please consider becoming a TS PRO subscriber.

In this edition we will check back in with SVP and Head of Sustainability, Rachel Mattes Greenberg.

Executive Summary: 

When I last spoke to Citizen’s Senior Vice President and Head of Sustainability, Rachel Mattes Greenberg in April, she was laser focused on ensuring that the firm meets the objectives it set in its $50 billion Sustainable Finance target. 

Greenberg and her team had two broad goals for the previous quarters:

i) Ensure transparency and accountability by reporting on the firm’s progress. Greenberg’s team was preparing to launch the bank’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report and Climate Report.

ii) Training employees to help them engage with the bank’s high-emitting clients on topics of sustainability. 

Seven months later, Greenberg is here to share what work went into putting the reports together, how Citizens’ hit 100% success on client engagement efforts, and her plans to push both goals even further in the future.

The Full Review: How Greenberg is helping Citizens move closer to its $50 billion Sustainable target – one report and client engagement at a time

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Creators need more than views—they need better financial tools

Banks have generally steered clear of influencer marketing even as some fintechs like Current and Chime have used it to connect more widely to their audiences. And this reluctance to use creators in their marketing is also emblematic of how little traditional FIs understand about this sector. This lack of understanding also seeps into capturing the creator economy as customers  and results in financial products that focus on making creators’ lives easier, being few and far in between. It’s a missed opportunity to connect to a customer base that is grossly underserved, growing rapidly – especially due to the low barrier to entry–, and strongly financially motivated. 78% of people report that being a creator helps them establish financial stability, according to research. And there are loads of issues that a so-inclined FI could potentially solve. Like any other SMB, creators need tools that help run their businesses, as well as ease the process of getting paid. While most big banks now have a healthy suite of products directed at SMBs, the nuances of the creator economy like unpredictability of payment and diversified income streams, warrant a dedicated strategy.

Source: Mastercard

Why FIs have been reticent

It won’t be wrong to say that what makes creators different from normal SMBs is also what makes them harder to build products for.

Influencers don’t fit existing molds: “Traditional banks are not engaged in building products for creators due to the instability of creators’ income streams. Banking business models are generally built around servicing “stable” customers, such as salaried employees or established businesses. They may view creators as higher-risk clients because it is difficult to apply traditional financial models like credit scoring, lending, and financial planning to them,” said Tachat Igityan, CFO and Founder of destream, a financial platform for content creators.

Tachat Igityan, CFO and founder,  destream

They have varying needs: Veteran Youtuber Hank Green, author and founder of Subbable, a crowd sourcing platform that was sold to Patreon, has expressed how hard it is to build products for this segment, having considered to build one himself during the years when VC funding was at its highest:

“Creators are so diverse in their needs that, to create a product that is scalable — and that doesn’t cost a ton of money trying to individualize itself for each individual creator — you end up creating a bad product,” said Green. Powerful platforms: Apart from the diversity inherent to this segment, building products for influencers is made more complicated by the power social media platforms hold in the lives of content creators. Even for Youtubers as skilled, famous, and experienced as Green, the exact amount of money they make on a particular platform can sometimes be unclear. “It’d be nice if I knew how much money I made. I have no idea, it hasn’t updated since January. It’s broken. It thinks I’m British. It’s paying me in pounds,” he said earlier this year.

Hank Green, Youtuber, Founder of Subbable

Why creators need FIs to act

Given that financial motivations are a top driver for most people to enter the creator economy, the lack of financial products keeps them from enjoying the fruits of their labor. Payments are at the heart of it all.

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