Michael Ellison
• 3rd+
CEO, Corporate Insight | 30+ Years Helping Financial Services & Healthcare Win on Digital Customer Experience
The Wall Street Journal had a good piece this week on AI agents and bank deposits. Apollo economist Torsten Slok raised the idea of bots automatically moving household cash into higher-rate accounts, essentially doing for a checking balance what institutional treasury desks already do with corporate cash. Whatever you call it, it points to something bigger than banking.
From a customer experience standpoint, less friction is almost always a good thing. A customer who can move money without hassle, login without having to retrieve a two-factor code from an unused device, or compare rates without digging through fine print is a customer who gets served better. Firms that strip out friction tend to earn trust, and eventually business, because of it.
But a fair amount of financial services runs on that same friction holding steady.
Banks have long priced checking and savings products on the assumption that most balances won’t move. About $7.12 trillion sits in U.S. checking accounts today, according to Federal Reserve data cited in the article, much of it earning little or nothing. The spread banks earn on that money depends on depositors staying put.
Life insurers make a similar bet. Premiums are priced in part on the expectation that some share of policyholders will let coverage lapse before the carrier ever pays a claim, whether through a missed payment, deciding they no longer want the insurance, or simply losing track. Take the forgetting out of the equation and the math behind the premium starts to shift.
An AI agent that flags a better savings rate or reminds a policyholder before a lapse doesn’t just improve the experience. It quietly removes the exact behavior some of these products were priced around.
We’ve spent more than 30 years at Corporate Insight studying digital experience in financial services and healthcare, logging into these sites every week the way an actual customer would rather than reading about them secondhand. That history is what makes this one worth watching closely. A lot of pricing in this industry has never really had to survive contact with a frictionless customer. We’re curious to see what happens to these products once it does.
Where do you expect this to show up first: bank deposits, insurance lapse rates, or somewhere else entirely?
#AI #CustomerExperience #Banking #Insurance