The Great Refactor – rebuilding banking systems for the age of AI agents
Key takeaways
- This shift is starting to reach the industry and is poised to accelerate rapidly.
- Goldman Sachs is working with Anthropic to develop AI agents to speed up trade and transaction accounting, client due diligence and onboarding.
- The next generation of financial systems will be driven not just by people clicking through static interfaces, but also by AI agents acting on behalf of customers, employees, traders, risk and operations teams.
The Great Refactor – rebuilding banking systems for the age of AI agents Retail Banker International · Looker Studio/shutterstock Global Data Thu, May 21, 2026 at 10:21 PM GMT+7 5 min read Financial institutions have deployed machine learning and automation for years. More recently, generative AI has accelerated that shift, with banks deploying copilots, coding assistants and customer-facing tools across the organisation.Despite this, most banking systems are fundamentally designed around human users: retail customers, traders, relationship managers or portfolio managers, and the engineering teams responsible for the software. The basic assumption remains that a person will log in, navigate a screen, interpret the data, follow a process and decide what happens next.Agentic AI is starting to challenge this. Unlike generative tools that primarily produce answers, agentic AI systems can plan, call tools, execute tasks and work towards a defined goal.
This shift is starting to reach the industry and is poised to accelerate rapidly. According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s 2026 Global AI in Financial Services report, 52% of firms are already piloting or deploying agentic AI, while 81% of respondents expect autonomous agents to be meaningfully achieved by 2030.
Goldman Sachs is working with Anthropic to develop AI agents to speed up trade and transaction accounting, client due diligence and onboarding. These are core areas where banks depend on data, controls, judgement and execution working together.