AI Horizons: Strategy and Skills
A running briefing on how artificial intelligence is reshaping banking, insurance and asset management — and what each shift means for hiring.
Beyond Asia-Pacific, the most credible research on AI in financial services comes from the major consultancies and their industry surveys. Grouped below by segment — banking overall, retail, investment banking, insurance and asset management — so you can go straight to the part of the market most relevant to your mandate.
Banking — Enterprise-Wide
- 1December 2024McKinsey & Company
Extracting Value from AI in Banking: Rewiring the Enterprise
Anonymised examples of a bank generating personalised investing nudges in retail banking and pinpointing at-risk small-business loans, alongside a regional bank whose gen AI coding tools lifted developer productivity by around 40%. Its central argument — that isolated chatbots and pilots don't unlock material value — has aged well.
Read the article → - 2December 2023McKinsey & Company
Generative AI in Banking and Financial Services
The best single primer on where gen AI bites first: one bank cut the time to produce an investment brief from nine hours to 30 minutes; another built a GPT-based engine for hyper-personalised marketing. A grounded, example-led overview rather than a projection piece.
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Retail Banking
- 1April 2026McKinsey & Company
Agentic AI in Retail Banking: The Customer Effect
A provocative, current read: as customers turn to AI agents rather than bank apps for financial decisions, 49% of consumers surveyed reported using AI-based search, over half specifically for purchase decisions. McKinsey argues retail banks risk disintermediation unless they build their own always-on conversational layer.
Read the article → - 2April 2026McKinsey & Company
The AI-Powered Bank: Rewiring for Excellence in Customer Care
Focused on the retail contact centre, the highest-density AI deployment area in retail banking. One transformation identified a path to cut 45% of contact-centre costs, reaching a 15% reduction in average handling time within 100 days.
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Investment Banking & Credit
- 12025Deloitte
Unleashing a New Era of Productivity in Investment Banking Through Generative AI
The reference piece for this segment. Deloitte projects the top 14 global investment banks could lift front-office productivity by around 27%, equivalent to roughly US$3.5 million of additional revenue per front-office employee — with the largest early gains for junior analysts on research and pitch materials.
Read the report → - 2July 2025McKinsey & Company / IACPM
Banking on Gen AI in the Credit Business: The Route to Value Creation
Based on a survey of 44 institutions spanning megabanks, super-regionals and regionals. Credit memo drafting is among the most-piloted use cases, though full deployment for credit decisioning itself remains rare — a candid look at the gap between enthusiasm and execution.
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Insurance
- 1January 2026Bain & Company
The $100 Billion Opportunity for Generative AI in P&C Claims Handling
Bain estimates gen AI could cut loss-adjusting expenses by 20–25% and claims leakage by 30–50%. A South American insurer's claims pilot delivered productivity gains of up to 50%; an Asia-Pacific insurer saved 10–20 minutes per claim through AI-assisted coverage validation.
Read the article → - 22025Deloitte
Underwriter's Edge: Harnessing Generative AI for Optimal Outcomes
The underwriting counterpart to the Bain claims piece. In P&C, multimodal models analyse satellite and other imagery to reduce manual inspections; in life and annuities, NLP tools extract insight from lengthy medical records to speed risk assessment.
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Wealth & Asset Management
- 1September 2025EY
GenAI in Wealth & Asset Management Survey 2025
A survey of 100 wealth and asset managers: 95% have scaled adoption to multiple use cases and 78% are already exploring agentic AI — yet just over a quarter of executives report substantial business impact so far. A useful, honest counterweight to the more promotional material in this space.
Read the report → - 22025Deloitte
Utilizing AI in Investment Management
A shorter, operations-focused companion piece on how investment management firms are using generative AI to aggregate data, synthesise information and support investment decision-making.
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Excalibur Executive Search is not affiliated with McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, Bain & Company or EY. These reports are shared as independent reading for clients and candidates navigating AI-driven change in financial services.