Bank Digital Adoption Soars to Near 90%
Publicis Sapient was formed in the early 1990s and today operates in 72 countries with more than 20,000 employees. Dave Murphy, Head of Financial Services for EMEA and APAC, joined the firm in 1997 and has watched how technology reshapes the way banks and other businesses engage with customers.
Murphy explains that the real turning point came when companies moved beyond simply having a web presence. “It wasn’t just the introduction of the World Wide Web itself but the moment companies and corporations started to adopt it that fundamentally changed the way they engaged their customers and thought about their operations,” he says, adding that “because you could no longer hide the rest of your company behind a human, especially in the case of banks or similar industries. People wanted direct interaction, all the way to the back office, in order to serve themselves.” By the mid-2010s, digital adoption among high-street banks was only around 35% to 40% of customer interactions; today it sits at roughly 80% to 90%.
Murphy notes that the shift to digital was accelerated by broader socio-economic events, including the pandemic. He quotes the industry’s experience: “[They] have become digital businesses whether they liked it or not – their customers pushed them into that model.” He also reminds that “previously you were protected, because even if there were huge technological shifts happening in the industry, you could still serve your customers through human touch, the branch or the telephone,” but “now that you’re a digital business, as those technologies change, you have to change with them.”
When it comes to AI, Murphy distinguishes between established machine-learning applications and the emerging “agentic” AI. He says, “A number of institutions are only now starting to bring agentic AI into that space, the reason being that with agentic AI generally, you need to put the right controls and guardrails in place before you can introduce it.” He adds that “what matters most in harnessing the power of agentic AI, beyond the large language models themselves, is the context you provide,” and that “if you get the context right, the workflow itself changes fundamentally.”
Publicis Sapient began embedding machine-learning platforms in UK high-street banks around 2016–2017, giving data scientists tools to refine models. Regarding agentic AI, Murphy cautions that “there’s a lot of thinking still needed in the agentic space, because it isn’t always 100% accurate,” and observes that “organizations are starting from the back office and moving toward the front, so they can get comfortable that it’s working before they put it in front of customers.”
