There is a growing number of banks on the road to Self-Driving Finance, with more banks all over the world realizing that helping customers manage their money is a critical to keeping the banking relevant. Personalized insights drive engagement and trust: banks that make them part of the customer's everyday digital banking experience are seeing substantial increase in mobile and online engagement and high satisfaction levels with the insights delivered. Bank customers expect and embrace personalized advice and automated functions to help them save more, reduce their debt, and invest towards long-term goals. We're just at the beginning of the road with automation, but early results are promising and the potential for real impact on customers' financial wellbeing is great. Self-Driving Finance is not only for consumers – small businesses have significant needs for simplified day-to-day banking, forward-looking cashflow management, and prescriptive advice to ensure liquidity and support future growth.

Just like self-driving cars, Self-Driving Finance is not an all or nothing proposition but rather a continuum of capabilities. It enables banks to provide retail, small business and wealth management customers with varying degrees of guidance in managing their finances – ranging from real-time insights to personalized recommendations and automated money management.

They may have no choice, if they wish to survive. Consumers, accustomed to experiences with Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks, demand rapid fulfillment of requests, personalized solutions, and constant attention from their financial providers. With the wealth of data possessed by banks and credit unions, consumers not surprisingly expect providers to know them, value them, and reward them for their relationships. Given the rise of digital and challenger banks, traditional banks and credit unions must find new ways to maintain their share-of-wallet and customer trust. Technologies that integrate artificial intelligence and big data analytics provide financial institutions with unprecedented visibility into their customers' financial dynamics, enabling the kind of personalized service which they crave.

They may have no choice, if they wish to survive. Consumers, accustomed to experiences with Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks, demand rapid fulfillment of requests, personalized solutions, and constant attention from their financial providers. With the wealth of data possessed by banks and credit unions, consumers not surprisingly expect providers to know them, value them, and reward them for their relationships. Given the rise of digital and challenger banks, traditional banks and credit unions must find new ways to maintain their share-of-wallet and customer trust. Technologies that integrate artificial intelligence and big data analytics provide financial institutions with unprecedented visibility into their customers' financial dynamics, enabling the kind of personalized service which they crave. This underscores that automation in banking is about far more than generating new cost efficiencies.

AI will fuel'self-driving finance' The combination of open banking and AI will put customers in a "self-directed mindset" going forward, Galaski said. Those that can provide the most AI-based self-help will have a strong competitive advantage. The ability to tap into both financial and nonfinancial data will be important here, McWaters said. "In exactly the same way that you wouldn't expect an adviser to be able to make good financial decisions for you knowing only the contents of your personal balance sheet, an AI requires an understanding of preferences, locations and behaviors that exist well outside the realm of purely payments and deposits," McWaters said. "So if you want to have recommendations that are truly individualized, that's going to require the input of data from outside of the historical data of traditional financial institutions."