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AI in Banking: The Agentic Revolution That’s Finally Bridging the Gap

Balakrishnan Narasimhan is a senior domain leader with over 29 years of experience having spent his entire career in the banking domain being both a banker and in the global core banking solutions space.

He is a Business, Technology and Operations leader with an extensive background in envisioning and implementing product strategy, delivery and large-scale transformations for the financial services industry for clients in various geographies across Asia, EMEA and the Americas.

At Intellect iGTB, Bala leads solution-led consulting activities for clients in the Americas across a variety of solutions, which include Digital Banking, Payments, Cash / Treasury Management, Liquidity Management, Virtual Accounts, Escrow Deposits and Cash Flow Forecasting.

Presented by Balakrishnan Narasimhan, SVP and Head of Solutions Consulting (Americas)

On October 15th, I’ll be joining leading minds at the Datos Insights Commercial & Small Business Banking Forum to explore a pivotal question: What does the next era of AI truly look like for financial institutions (FIs) and their customers?

Why the AI Conversation Is Stuck

Today, most banks treat AI as a quick add-on to either catch up with competition or to give an impression that they are not behind in the AI race. They deploy chatbots or automate repetitive processes—yet still depend on outdated architectures that can’t adapt, learn, or scale. The result? Marginal gains, mounting complexity, and limited impact.

The real future of commercial banking isn’t about adding AI—it’s about building on an AI-native foundation

The Evolution: From Automation to Agentic Intelligence

Two outdated approaches continue to hold banks back:

  • Augmented AI – thin layers of intelligence on top of legacy cores. Expensive, brittle, and hard to scale.

  • Point Solutions – a dozen disconnected AI tools that increase Total Cost of Ownership instead of reducing it.

  • The real breakthrough is Agentic AI—an ecosystem of autonomous, self-learning digital experts that can reason, decide, and act across the enterprise.

  • At Intellect, we’ve built this future through our Purple Fabric AI Platform—an open, business-impact AI fabric that embeds intelligence into the very architecture of your bank.

Purple Fabric: Where Agents Come Alive

Unlike reactive AI models, Purple Fabric integrates intelligence through four foundational technology stacks:

  1. Enterprise Knowledge Garden – connects and curates structured and unstructured data across the enterprise, ensuring AI has full context.

  2. Enterprise Digital Experts – configurable AI Agents that can autonomously handle onboarding, payments, compliance, treasury, and insights—each augmenting or automating workflows end-to-end.

  3. LLM Optimization Hub – choose, train, or swap in the best-fit models for each task, avoiding vendor lock-in.

  4. Enterprise Governance – ensures security, auditability, and transparency with zero data leakage and full regulatory traceability.

These four pillars form the purple thread that connects knowledge, action, and governance—turning AI from a support tool into a strategic growth engine.

What Agent AI Looks Like in Action

Across commercial and small business banking, the impact is tangible:

  • Payments Parity: Agents instantly normalize data across FedNow, RTP, and ISO 20022, giving mid-tier banks Tier-1 payment agility overnight.
  • Predictive Cash Management: Multi-agent networks forecast liquidity positions in real time, transforming cash management into a monetizable advisory service.
  • Intelligent Compliance: AI agents continuously interpret regulatory updates and self-adjust workflows—eliminating manual exceptions and risk.
  • Operational Autonomy: From onboarding to reconciliation, agents collaborate and self-orchestrate—reducing manual effort by up to 80% and operational incidents by 60%.

This is AI that learns, reasons, and acts—not just automates.

The Strategic Shift: Bridging Stability and Innovation

For decades, banks have faced a trade-off: stability from trusted enterprise vendors or innovation from agile fintechs. Intellect has solved that paradox – With over 30 years of enterprise-grade expertise and partnerships with 7 of the top 10 North American banks, we deliver Agentic AI innovation on a battle-tested banking foundation.

The result: Fintech agility, enterprise stability, and up to 30% lower TCO—without compromising security or compliance.

Join the Conversation in New York

The question is no longer if AI will transform commercial banking—it’s how quickly your institution can embrace Agent AI as the foundation for the next decade of growth.

If you’re attending the forum, I invite you to visit the Intellect booth to experience the Purple Fabric Agent AI Platform in action—see how real, multi-agent systems are already powering payments, liquidity, and compliance for leading global banks.

Balakrishnan Narasimhan is a senior domain leader with over 29 years of experience having spent his entire career in the banking domain being both a banker and in the global core banking solutions space.

He is a Business, Technology and Operations leader with an extensive background in envisioning and implementing product strategy, delivery and large-scale transformations for the financial services industry for clients in various geographies across Asia, EMEA and the Americas.

At Intellect iGTB, Bala leads solution-led consulting activities for clients in the Americas across a variety of solutions, which include Digital Banking, Payments, Cash / Treasury Management, Liquidity Management, Virtual Accounts, Escrow Deposits and Cash Flow Forecasting.

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