GFF 2026: Axis Bank, J.P. Morgan see banking move from AI that knows customers to AI that acts

The next wave of disruption in banking may not be about another digital channel or another financial product. It could be about banks using AI to understand customers so deeply that the interaction itself starts changing — from customers asking for a product to banks anticipating what they need.

That is the direction emerging from two very different vantage points: India’s Axis Bank and global banking major J.P. Morgan.

For Axis Bank, the opportunity is being driven by the sheer scale of India’s digital financial ecosystem. Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Amitabh Chaudhry, MD & CEO, Axis Bank, said the bank is already experimenting with using AI and its customer data to move towards highly personalised banking.


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Axis Bank processes about 3,500 UPI transactions a second and has data on 45 crore Indians, Chaudhry noted. The opportunity, he said, is to build “layers of intelligence” around customers and use that understanding to offer the right product or service at the right time.

“The banks of the future have not only to build a relationship of trust, but they have to have a relationship which is deeply embedded into the psyche of the customer,” Chaudhry said.

That could mean a very different banking experience: as a customer carries out a transaction, an AI system could understand the context, identify a need and surface a relevant financial product or service.

But Chaudhry believes the bigger disruption may not just be personalisation. It could also reshape the competitive structure of banking.

Banks with larger customer bases and more transaction data could have an advantage in building these AI systems, he said. If smaller banks cannot match that scale of data and market share, the gap between large and small banks could widen.

“The gap between some of the larger banks and the smaller banks will only increase, not come down,” Chaudhry said.

Axis is already experimenting with this model, he said, and expects AI-led personalisation to become part of the way the bank does business within the next four quarters.

The global picture, however, is moving a step further.

At J.P. Morgan, Christine Tan, Head of Financial Institutions Group Sales, Asia Pacific, Payments, said AI is already moving from experimentation to execution across the bank.

The use cases span trade, customer service, fraud and regulatory compliance. In trade, AI is being used to analyse trade documents and identify potential trade-based money laundering, reducing the man-hours involved from nine to less than one hour, Tan said.

J.P. Morgan is also deploying agentic AI in customer service. "We have agents that actually support customers when they call in from translating, transcribing, sourcing the information, and then responding to the inquiry," she added.

The same principle is being applied to fraud detection and regulatory reporting.

Axis is looking at AI to understand the customer better; J.P. Morgan is increasingly looking at AI to do more of the work.

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Taken together, the two approaches point to the next phase of banking’s AI transformation: intelligence moving across the entire financial journey — from understanding a customer, to recommending a product, to executing the transaction and monitoring what happens next.

Both Chaudhry and Tan flagged governance and guardrails as critical as banks move towards agentic systems. Tan said regulators across jurisdictions are working on policies and frameworks to oversee AI, while Chaudhry said Axis is investing more heavily in governance and talent because a failure in an AI-driven customer journey could have serious consequences.

“If you get this wrong, and if something goes haywire, then all this embracing of this new technology could actually lead to a situation where someone just puts a stop to it,” Chaudhry said.

India's digital rails give banks such as Axis a particularly large pool of transaction data from which to build personalised financial services. Globally, banks such as J.P. Morgan are pushing the technology deeper into operations, payments, fraud and compliance.