Meeting digital expectations in financial services with AI and cloud
September 23, 2025
Key takeaways
- The demand for seamless digital experiences is reshaping financial services, pushing firms to modernize systems, improve user interfaces and meet rising expectations driven by digital-savvy users.
- AI and machine learning are key to personalizing digital experiences, enhancing fraud prevention and enabling data-driven decisions, with over 50% of financial firms planning to increase investments in these technologies.
- Cloud platforms are essential for innovation, agility and scalability, allowing financial institutions to integrate advanced technologies like AI while addressing operational inefficiencies caused by legacy systems.
Like it or not, we’re all living and working in a digital world. As retail banking consumers, we expect seamless experiences 24/7 from technology and will accept nothing less when we need to move money. But what if you’re a business that puts money to work: an investment bank, an asset manager or a fund servicer? Don’t you and your corporate customers deserve the same benefits at your fingertips, too?
Digital demands are rising and spreading
Banks, of course, are far from the only purveyors of around-the-clock digital experiences. Consumers of almost every type of product or service now rely on being able to purchase from or interact with providers at any time on any device.
On the financial services side, insurance companies have done a great job of using innovative technology to connect with customers and meet their new digital expectations. But it has not been easy. As with banks, insurers have had to invest considerably in the transformation and consolidation of their systems to increase their consumer appeal and their growth potential.
Pressure has mounted on retail banks and insurers to provide ever slicker and more engaging digital experiences. Their customers want, if not demand, to move at lightning speed between accounts or products to see all their finances in one place or slice and dice information at the click of a button.
Until now, the “consumers” of trading, investment and fund administration systems, either business users or institutional investors, have been less needy. But as they become accustomed to speed and agility in their daily digital lives, they are coming to expect it from all their digital interactions.
If you’re a business user working in the office of the CFO, you’re going to want to be able to pull up and analyze cash flow forecasts on your phone and get a dynamic, visualized view of current positions and projections. Who has the time to sift through and consolidate multiple disparate spreadsheets and computations?
Plus, with digital natives now entering the workforce and the global financial ecosystem, slow manual processes and legacy systems will soon become less acceptable to a growing proportion of employees and customers. That gives you even higher digital expectations to meet right across your operations.
User experiences should take priority
Beyond retail banks and fintechs, how committed are financial services organizations to meeting digital expectations and improving experiences for their technology users?
In the FIS® Harmony Gap survey of more than 500 C-suite executives and fintech decision-makers across the U.S., the U.K. and Singapore, nonfinancial firms place slightly more emphasis on the digital experience, with 16% of these organizations saying customer experience enhancements are their top criterion when purchasing financial technology solutions, versus 14% of financial organizations.1
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I’d argue, however, that when it comes to modernizing their operations, the playing field isn’t quite level between the two types of firms.
Although large nonfinancial corporations have historically run multiple aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in their middle office, as many as 20 ERPs in the largest enterprises, financial services firms typically deal with a lot more legacy technology in their back office.
And it is these complex, antiquated back-end environments that often stand in the way of an optimal digital experience and the competitive edge it can bring to your business.
Digital advantages begin in the back office
The more streamlined, consolidated and integrated your back office, the easier it is to deliver the kind of digital experiences that modern customers and business users expect.
A lot of it comes down to data, which fragmented technology environments make especially difficult to access. Easy-to-navigate, state-of-the-art screens are all well and good, but can you populate them with the real-time data you need for insight and analysis?
Data is your crown jewel. But when it is siloed in disparate back-office systems, it loses its shine. So, seamlessly connected systems that help create a single flow of data and complete real-time visibility of positions are vital. Harmony Gap survey respondents agree, with 54% of financial services firms saying they’re increasing investment in APIs – a higher percentage than any other technology.1
Going back to the office of the CFO, the advantages of integration soon become clear. Your balance sheet and cash flows are much easier to manage with an integrated ecosystem of solutions for payables, receivables, billing and supply chain finance. With modern interfaces that improve visibility and control, and automation solutions increasing the efficiency of your processes, your business users can make more effective data-driven decisions.
Here, technology is doing the grunt work and making it simpler and quicker for the end-user of the data to do their job. What more could an employee need from their digital experience? Except, perhaps, even faster and deeper insights, which is where advanced technologies like AI and machine learning come in.
AI is transforming the digital experience
According to FIS’ Harmony Gap research, more than 50% of financial services firms plan to increase their investment in AI and machine learning over the next two years.1 So, how will that investment help them meet digital expectations?
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For organizations that serve retail consumers, AI technologies enhance the ability to analyze customer behavior and preferences and personalize their offerings – and therefore their digital experiences – more easily. Indeed, 82% of financial services firms and 74% of nonfinancial companies in the FIS survey say that AI and machine learning have provided opportunities to personalize customer offerings.1
But there are many more ways firms can harness the power of AI to improve the digital experience for your customers and your business.
For example, as incidents of fraud continue to increase, advanced software tools with AI or machine learning training algorithms can make the experience safer. More than 50% of FIS survey respondents in the U.S. and the U.K. say they use these tools to identify and prevent fraud, and 76% of all financial institutions in the survey say they are satisfied with their performance.1
However, for business users, it is more about what AI can do for and with your data. AI’s real superpower is its ability to capture, process and reveal patterns in vast amounts of information at speed. That makes it an important technology for delivering real-time insight and predicting cash flows and risks to support decision-making.
Technology providers like FIS are also incorporating AI agents into treasury, finance and other middle- and back-office systems to make them easier and more effective to use. With these tools, you can now call up documentation on a system’s functionality and get answers on how to complete a task in seconds, rather than searching through a manual or calling a service representative. That’s another AI-driven win for the user experience and a next-generation way to meet our own clients’ digital expectations.
The cloud is critical to keeping up and getting ahead
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before you can think about building advanced tech like AI into your operations, you need to ensure you have the right foundations in place. And what I really mean by that is being able to run your technology in the public cloud.
It is a strategy that has worked well for FIS. Moving our own platforms to the cloud has been critical to taking full advantage of the latest technologies, from AI and APIs to blockchain and predictive analytics.
Cloud-based platforms give us the agility we need to drive innovation and efficiencies for our clients. And through machine learning, they give clients the flexibility to scale their infrastructure rapidly up and down on demand to reduce costs.
In a public cloud environment, applications are more open, and you can integrate with innovative third-party solutions more easily than with on-premises legacy tech. You can also fully deploy AI’s potential to deepen insight and analysis. And when your technology is delivered from the cloud on a software-as-a-service basis, regular and timely updates mean you get to use AI and other advanced features more quickly than your competitors.
The public cloud, I believe, serves as the baseline of meeting digital expectations today and tomorrow. The industry we serve reflects this trend, as 78% of financial services firms told FIS that they are either increasing or maintaining their investment in cloud computing in the next two years.1
That is good news for the aforementioned complex back-office operations, which to date have been holding back many multinational companies, especially in the APAC region.
It is probably no coincidence that 26% of FIS survey respondents in Singapore say they aren’t agile enough to adapt to rapid technological changes, compared to just 22% in the U.S. and 20% in the U.K.1 Many firms headquartered in Singapore have subsidiaries across APAC, which historically has led to a fragmented operational environment that is more difficult and costly to transform.
The rise of the cloud, however, provides a way forward. In fact, more firms in Singapore (50%) are increasing their investment in cloud computing than in the U.S (43%) and the U.K (38%)1, putting them in a stronger position to move ahead of their peers in the west.
The cloud makes it simpler to standardize and control operations across multiple entities and regions and meet the digital expectations of corporate customers and business users.
So, no matter how high those expectations rise, you’re in the best place to meet them.
1FIS, The Harmony Gap: Finding the Financial Upside in Uncertainty (with Oxford Economics), May 2025
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