AI intervenes between the customer and their bank. To avoid disintermediation, banks must gain visibility with AI (GEO) and anticipate agentic commerce.
A customer no longer needs to open their bank’s application to make a financial decision. He can call on an artificial intelligence assistant to optimize his cash flow, compare offers or define a savings strategy. At that precise moment, the bank disappears from the equation.
This is not a long-term hypothesis. That’s what’s happening today, as AI assistants become the first point of contact in people’s financial lives.
Historically, banking establishments controlled customer relationships through their channels, their data and their interfaces. The comparators had already opened a breach, but AI introduces a rupture of another nature. It is not limited to aggregating information: it contextualizes, prioritizes and formulates directly actionable recommendations. Gradually, the decision moves to this intermediate layer. And with it, the creation of value. Because whoever directs the choice today could execute the transaction tomorrow. As assistants evolve into agents capable of acting on the customer’s behalf, power gradually shifts from recommendation to action. Whoever controls this interface also controls the relationship, independent of who wears the product.
A silent but structuring disintermediation
The key for banks: increased pressure on margins, a trivialization of offers and a weakening of loyalty logic. This is not a sudden crisis — it is a gradual erosion, all the more dangerous because it is barely visible from the inside.
Banks must adapt their operating methods around four concrete priorities: their visibility in AI-driven pathways, their ability to support decisions, their ability to learn continuously and the diffusion of AI internally. It is no longer a question of projections, but of operational conditions to remain in the value chain.
Exist in new paths
First challenge: being visible. AI is becoming a new distribution layer, just like search engines were twenty years ago. However, many banking offers remain difficult to read by automated systems: heterogeneous nomenclatures, complex pricing, fragmented data. Result: certain banks, well positioned in traditional rankings, simply disappear from the recommendations generated by AI. After SEO, which structured visibility on the web, GEO opens a new battle: that of visibility in the responses of generative AI. Structuring your data, clarifying your offers and strengthening trust signals are becoming strategic imperatives.
Moving from product to decision
Second priority: reclaim high-value decision-making moments — optimization of savings, debt management, asset arbitrage. The challenge is no longer to present products, but to design experiences capable of recommending, arbitrating and triggering action. It’s no longer about selling, but about orchestrating decisions.
Learn faster than others
Third lever: learning speed. Banks must implement rapid feedback loops — test, adjust, refine in real time. The competitive advantage will not lie in the quantity of data available, but in the ability to quickly extract lessons from it. And this capacity cannot be reserved for a few central teams: it must permeate all operational functions.
A new checkpoint
After the transition from physical branches to digital, the point of control of the banking relationship shifts to the interfaces capable of acting on behalf of the customer. This shift is not only technological: it is structural. It questions the place of banks in the decision-making chain and, more broadly, their role in the financial lives of individuals. As we enter the era of agentic commerce, where AI agents will recommend and then execute certain decisions for their users, the competition will no longer be just about product quality, but about the ability to be chosen by these new intermediaries.
Actors who adapt quickly will be able to redefine their position. The others risk becoming simple suppliers of products, relegated behind interfaces that they do not master.
