The chat window will soon be the bank
Linkedin blog written by Bryan Carroll – digital bank builder.
Banks spend months and millions on brand, their logo, their colours and their tone of voice guide. When it comes to the AI agent, the decisions about how it behaves often end up with the technology or product team, mostly because nobody else picked them up.
I remember one incident in particular. A few years ago, at a digital bank I helped found, a customer messaged us through the in-app chat late one night. Her salary had not arrived and her rent was due the next morning. All she got back was an automatic reply promising an answer within 48 hours. She closed her account the following week.
I only found out because, as CEO, I had given every customer the open right to write to me directly, and she did. Nothing in our systems had flagged a problem. Nothing had broken, we had simply never thought about how that moment should feel for our customers.
I have seen the same pattern in every market I have worked in since, from Asia to Africa. Customers rarely judge a bank on our features. They judge it on how we respond when something goes wrong.
Back then it was a chat channel with a few fixed replies. Today’s AI agents answer instantly, in their own words, within whatever guardrails the bank has set. Some are starting to act as well, blocking cards, raising disputes and, before long, moving money.
So who sets those guardrails?
Who decides when the agent should step back and hand a customer to a person? Or whether someone who has just been defrauded gets the same cheerful tone as someone checking their balance?
Banks already know how to do this. We would not put a lending model live without a credit policy, a named owner, approval and regular testing. An agent that speaks and acts for the bank with every customer should be treated the same way, in my view, with a short conduct policy covering how it speaks, what it will not say or do, and when it hands over. Brand and risk own it together, and product and technology build to it.
