Risk management in banking and financial organizations is becoming increasingly difficult. Recent reports from Reuters and BBC news highlight the growing concerns among investors due to the increase in fraud and poor risk management in U.S. banks. This has drastically hit market stability and customers’ confidence in online finance services.
Trust is a critical operational metric for banks and finance organizations. However, ineffective risk management is affecting this metric, even for established players such as Barclays and Standard Chartered. Recent fraudulent attacks and threats have become more sophisticated.
Considering the growing risks, it is clear that organizations need to adopt smart operational tools such as Agentic AI solutions. These solutions can empower human analysts to develop robust risk management with faster threat detection, proactive controls, and timely responses.
Read the blog to explore how Agentic AI solutions are assisting banks and financial organizations to advance risk management—through real-time risk detection, automation, and well-informed decisions.
Why Financial Organizations Need Agentic AI Solutions
Agentic AIs can make autonomous decisions, learn from user interactions, and act with contextual reasoning. These systems are inherently proactive. As a result, the solutions help banks and financial institutions take immediate action on suspicious activities while identifying potential threats and compliance risks.
Unlike conventional chatbots, Agentic AI can:
- Perceive: This is the initial stage where the AI agent understands its surrounding environment and collects data from multiple resources, including trade logs, APIs, credit scores, KYC data, and transactions. It then translates the data into a structured format to understand the intent, context, and patterns of the task at hand.
- Reason: The AI agent develops its rationale using integrated data from customer profiles, news, and financial activities. Leveraging predictive analytics, the agents assess potential outcomes while adhering to compliance and policies. The Agentic AI solutions assess risk exposure, identify anomalies, and suspicious transaction patterns. For instance, Microsoft agentic capabilities with tools like Copilot Security scrutinize large data sets to identify nuanced trends and correlations and cross-check data across systems to understand unusual activities, such as potential credit stress or money laundering.
- Act: Agentic AI solutions take immediate prevention measures such as freezing of assets or transactions, rescoring customer risks, and notifying, instead of waiting for human intervention.
- Learn: These self-learning solutions further improve their responses and autonomous decisioning capabilities with constant pattern learning and feedback loops.
How Can Agentic AI Solutions Automate and Streamline Risk Management?
Agentic AI solutions are showing promising results in fighting against digital financial crimes and fraud. A report highlights that the US Department of the Treasury collectively prevented and recovered more than $4bn in fraud and improper payments in 2024. With risks expanding at scale, enhancing risk management with intuitive, self-learning capabilities such as Agentic AI solutions has become a critical requirement.
Here is a list of how Agentic AIs can automate the multiple facets of risk management:
- Automates fraud detection and prevention: 80% of organizations have become victims of potential fraud attempts, but many still lack the speed to act. Agentic AI solutions bridge the gap between detection and response action by creating a scalable fraud detection system. These agents constantly monitor real-time transactions and identify unusual activities using contextual, historical, and pattern-matching rationale. They determine the next best steps, such as triggering high-risk alerts, enforcing authentication, short-term blocks, or rerouting cases to fraud analysts.
Tools such as Azure AI Foundry and the AutoGen Framework can help organizations design and deploy AI agents that automate data extraction from diverse sources. Fraud and compliance teams can also feed these agents with feedback to further enhance their detection accuracy. - Enhances KYC/AML risk management: Agentic AI solutions quickly analyze and sift through large data sets and use cases to generate responses. This saves a massive amount of time, often consumed in the manual review of AML/KYC cases, SAR reporting, and compliance updates. These systems autonomously build case narratives, cross-check and validate data accuracy, and interpret transaction patterns for potential AML risks.
Azure AI Anomaly Detector, Microsoft Purview, and Fabric help companies to store, evaluate, and regulate all financial and organizational data on a central platform—making the data audit-ready. This streamlines the AML/KYC compliance operations. - Evaluates credit card risks and underwriting: These smart agents streamline complex credit task processes with quick analysis of financial records such as GST, balance sheets, credit patterns, cash flow, income stability, and spending patterns.
Tools such as Azure AI Document Intelligence, ML risk scoring models, Data Lakehouse, integrated into an Agentic AI workflow, help automate data collection to determine a borrower’s risk metrics. Oracle’s Credit Risk Analytics streamlines data consolidation to get a clear understanding of financial risks and their impact across an organization.
Tasks such as mortgage processing demand a heavy workload, usually taking up to 10-15 hours. Agentic AIs cut the time to minutes while ensuring data accuracy. - Seamless audit, documentation, and reporting: Agentic AI solutions improve audit efficiency. It auto-generates risk reports, summarization, and audit trails. The agents collect and cross-verify data across compliance, ERM, and trading systems. This empowers banks and financial organizations to have a 360-degree understanding of potential risks and vulnerabilities, necessary to develop effective counter-risk measures.
Solutions, including Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Fabric OneLake, offer a unified platform with consolidated audit-ready data. The solutions automate credit risk assessment, report generation, and timely scheduling. - Enhanced Operational risk management: Internal fraud, process failures, and system downtime can cost organizations dearly. A Barclays report has found that organizations suffer internal fraud by 57%. Agentic AIs tackle these challenges by monitoring logs, workflows, and user activities to identify insider threats such as unusual clicks and access. These agents can also predict SLA violations and automatically raise service tickets.
Agents such as Microsoft Sentinel, Copilot Security, and Azure Monitor help in internal threat detection with prompt error analysis.
Benefits of Agentic AI Solutions in Banks and Financial Organizations
Agentic AI solutions possess is shifting the way banks and financial organizations conduct risk management. Some of the major benefits it offers include:
- Prompt fraud detection and response: AI-driven fraud detection solutions can help reduce fraud losses by up to 50% through proactive interventions and pattern detection in real-time.
- Enhanced operational efficiency, reduced manual workload: Agentic AI solutions work around the clock and streamline multistep and complex processes. This reduces manual workload, enabling faster processing and quick handling of high-stake cases. Additionally, teams possess more time to engage in strategic initiatives.
- Improved regulatory compliance: Agentic AI solutions constantly monitor data flows, logs, and transactions. This helps in the timely detection of unusual activities and audit-ready reporting of potential threats. A recent study highlights that Agentic AI can lower the rate of fraudulent transactions by 40%.
- High data accuracy and consistency: These smart AI tools ensure end-to-end data consistency and error-free processing. This eliminates the pain of data arrangement, enabling organizations to focus more on decision-making and develop accurate risk assessments.
- Seamless workflow automation: Agentic AI solutions help companies orchestrate seamless workflow automation with a comprehensive view of all the operations happening across an organization.
- Better risk controls and scalable governance: Unlike manual processing, AI agents can scale their performance as per workload and necessity. Their continuous self-learning capabilities empower organizations to stay updated about the evolving risks and build a more resilient risk control and governance system.
- Customer trust and credibility: These advanced AI agents offer secure and faster transactions. As a result, these agents help organizations improve their credibility and regain customer confidence.
Considering the growing complexity of financial risks and threats, banks and financial organizations need to level up their risk management. It is essential to act fast, be proactive, and stay alert without fail. Agentic AI solutions streamline the process with smart automation and proactive capabilities. It does not only help fight against fraud and threat risks; it also helps organizations stay ahead of impending threats with confidence. And for banks and financial organizations, this is crucial.
Connect with Evoke’s Microsoft experts to learn how our curated Microsoft Agentic AI services can help banks and financial organizations streamline risk management at scale.
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