Visa Readies AI Financial Assistant for Banking Apps

Visa will soon begin piloting an AI Financial Assistant that financial institutions will be able to add to their banking apps to offer artificial intelligence-powered conversational financial guidance to cardholders.

Visa will make the AI Financial Assistant available to financial institutions in the United States for pilot in August, and it plans to roll the feature out globally after that, according to a Tuesday (July 14) press release.

This new Visa value-added service is designed to operate within secure banking environments and will allow each financial institution to offer the AI Financial Assistant under its own brand, look and feel, the release said.

The AI Financial Assistant will provide cardholders with monthly insights that help them stay on top of their spending, will respond to natural-language questions with answers that are grounded in the cardholder’s financial activity, and will be able to lock a card or set alerts within the conversation, according to the release.

When financial institutions connect their FAQs and documents to the AI Financial Assistant, per the release, the assistant will be able to answer cardholder questions such as “Are there any car loan benefits for existing customers?” or “Do you have high-yield savings accounts to help me save for a car?”

The AI Financial Assistant will enable banks to offer the financial advice consumers are seeking from AI, together with the full financial picture and safeguards provided by banks, Michele Herron, senior vice president and head of North America Value-Added Services at Visa, said in the release.

“AI Financial Assistant brings those strengths together, combining personalized insights based on a consumer’s own data and pairing it with the ability to act, all right within their bank’s app,” Herron said. “By simply turning on this service, banks can strengthen relationships with their customers and transform from a passive ledger to a generative AI-enabled financial hub.”

Herron told PYMNTS in an interview posted in May that AI has already transformed how people gather information and perform tasks.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Digital-First Retention Playbook: Winning Gen Z Loyalty at Credit Unions” found that 62% of Generation Z consumers are open to using AI for “what if” financial planning.

The report also found that after getting instant, personalized answers from generative AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, Gen Z consumers “increasingly expect their financial partners to anticipate their needs and preferences and provide real-time, personalized recommendations.”

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