Extending the frontier of AI-powered Fintech
AI-powered Fintech companies have long thrived by pushing boundaries. From digital payments to robo-advisors, they’ve reimagined what’s possible in financial services.
But in 2025, the frontier is moving again with the rise of generative AI and intelligent agents. This is not just another wave of automation; it’s a fundamental shift in how value is created, delivered and governed.
Today’s “Frontier Firms” show what the next era of AI-powered Fintech looks like. These organisations integrate human-AI collaboration to scale operations, improve efficiency and drive innovation. In doing so, they offer a blueprint for how Fintech companies can lead in an era where growth, compliance and differentiation are increasingly shaped by AI.
On average, Frontier Firms are using AI across seven business functions, with over 70% leveraging AI in customer service, marketing, IT, product development and cybersecurity – and they report outcomes that are four times greater across key business areas than slow AI adopters.
Using the spectrum of AI agents
A key tool for the Frontier Firm is the AI agent. Agents can automate and assist business processes, working alongside or on behalf of people or teams. They range from simple, rule-based tools to more sophisticated adaptive systems:
- Retrieval agents: follow pre-defined rules.
- Task agents: automate workflows and repetitive tasks.
- Autonomous agents: operate independently within set objectives and constraints, updating plans and executing tasks.
As leaders deploy agents across this spectrum, they unlock higher levels of efficiency and intelligence in their operations.
How Frontier Fintechs are driving impact
Pioneering Fintechs showcase their impact in two key ways: by generating customer value and by accelerating internal growth.
Generating customer value
Leading companies generate new value for customers by creating or embedding AI into their product offerings. For example, here’s how several Fintechs are using Microsoft Azure AI and intelligent agents to transform outcomes.
Automating financial operations
AutoRek’s ARIA agent addresses the “capacity gap” that many organisations face – the deficit between business demands and the maximum capacity of humans alone. In particular, ARIA helps reconcilers, managers and developers drive efficiencies in financial operations, automating complex reconciliation tasks.
Auquan has similarly released several purpose-built agents for finance professionals. Its autonomous agents can help eliminate up to 95% of manual effort, saving financial institutions 50,000+ hours and reducing costs by 50%.
Transforming regulatory intelligence
CUBE is a leader in AI-powered regulatory intelligence, using semantic AI, fine-tuned models and agents to transform regulatory analysis for the world’s largest banks. As a result, clients can complete regulatory tasks up to 90% faster. CUBE’s recent acquisitions of Kodex AI and Acin are further strengthening this capability.
Improving wealth management and client onboarding
FNZ research recently found that 73% of wealth management clients expect more personalised services from their advisor in the next two years. Meeting this need is FNZ’s Advisor AI, an embedded generative AI tool that streamlines the entire client meeting process with personalised insights, automated transcription and analysis, and much more.
Grounding agents with contextual data
Quantexa provides a Decision Intelligence Platform that uses contextual data to help organisations deploy domain-specific agents for financial crime, compliance and customer intelligence. This approach helps solve two major AI challenges – data fragmentation and inconsistent context quality.
Meeting users where they are
Companies are also integrating AI and agents directly into the interfaces their customers already use. For example, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and Microsoft have successfully partnered to transform access to AI-ready financial data within Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
Accelerating growth from within
Frontier Fintechs are also reshaping their internal operations by applying AI to strengthen core business functions. In doing so, they accelerate the speed at which they can bring new innovation to market.
Software development
Pokyt, a Fintech startup, has doubled developer productivity using GitHub Copilot as an automated coding assistant. Pokyt can now generate utility classes and unit tests up to one hundred times faster, significantly cutting integration time and allowing developers to focus on more complex problems.
Additionally, coding has been an early AI success story. There are now multiple models to choose from in GitHub Copilot, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
Operations and profitability
ClearBank uses Microsoft Azure AI to automatically interpret complex payment-scheme rules and swiftly validate or reject recovery claims. As a result, payment recovery processing times have been cut by around 80% and clients can now recover funds faster.
Customer service
The use of AI-powered agents has also revolutionised call centres, automating routine tasks, reducing wait times and freeing teams to focus on complex issues. Today’s chatbots are built to deliver fast, consistent and empathetic support across voice and text.
Virgin Money’s award-winning Redi assistant, built with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365, now resolves over 50% of credit card queries through proactive, conversational AI. When Redi pushes out notifications about credit card replacement, it achieves a 97% journey completion rate.
PolyAI, a UK-based conversational AI company, is helping financial institutions achieve a 30% reduction in call volume with voice-first virtual assistants. Voice is an increasingly popular modality for engaging with AI, with Fintech CX ripe for transformation.
The road ahead: become a Frontier Firm
The journey to becoming a Frontier Firm is underway. Every individual will work alongside AI designed for their role. Every team will include AI agents, managed by humans, that complete tasks autonomously. In addition, humans will increasingly set direction for AI agents to run entire teams or departments, checking in as needed.
For Fintech companies, this vision promises to amplify human ambition while unlocking new sources of value.
Fintech Agentic Launchpad: an update
Applications for this year are now closed (deadline: 28 November 2025), but stay tuned for our upcoming blog. We’ll be revealing our new cohort and the innovative Fintech solutions they plan to develop.
Find out more
Read Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Annual Report, 2025: The year the Frontier Firm is born
Read the blog: Accelerating financial services transformation with AI
Explore the Microsoft Cloud for financial services
About the author
As Fintech partner lead for Microsoft UK, George helps B2B software companies innovate with Microsoft’s Cloud and AI platforms, and reach new customers together. He has more than 13 years’ experience working in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem, more recently helping Fintechs drive successful AI and agentic partnerships with Microsoft.
