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, oragnied 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