#66 - Agentic AI - The missing link to the next wave of financial service provision

Why a re-think of software architecture from traditional back-ends to Agentic AI could be the key to unlocking the next wave of growth in Digital Financial Services

Illustrated by Mary Mogoi - Website

Hi all - This is the 66th edition of Frontier Fintech and the first of 2025. A big thanks to my regular readers and subscribers. To those who are yet to subscribe, hit the subscribe button below and share with your colleagues and friends. Support Frontier Fintech by becoming a paid subscriber🚀

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Introduction

You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity stats - Robert Solow;

In 1987 one of the most famous economists Robert Solow made this quip. He was referring to the then “hype” around computers and how the intended productivity benefits that would accompany computing were nowhere to be seen in the official statistics. A number of commentators then latched on to this statement to show that probably the computer age lacked substance. Over 37 years later, another famous economist Mario Draghi made a different statement. Lamenting that Europe was falling behind the rest of their developed peers, he put the blame squarely on technology. Europe was not innovating and adopting modern technologies like China and USA and in fact, almost all the delta between Europe and USA’s growth rates were down to factor productivity driven by technology. Many years later, you could see computing everywhere in the productivity stats.

In the long-term, technology is the biggest driver of productivity and thus sustainable economic growth. Nonetheless it’s never linear. I’ve been thinking about this and AI - specifically how AI will drive productivity in the financial services sector. In this regard, it has to be a step change from where we are now to whatever it will look like in the future. The big question is how AI as a General Purpose Technology will affect the financial services sector. Satya Nadella gave a clue in a recent interview in the B2G podcast early in December 2024. In the discussion, he mentions how AI will change Software and this to me was a missing link in my thinking about AI and financial services.

This article explores how General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) diffuse throughout the economy, why AI is the next GPT, and how Satya Nadella’s perspective on AI-driven software development applies to banking. We’ll see why merely layering AI onto existing workflows is insufficient and how a “first principles” approach (like Henry Ford’s assembly line) is needed to unlock AI’s full potential.

General Purpose Technologies, Electricity and Henry Ford

If AI is to have the massive impact that is being predicted, then it needs to be a General Purpose Technology just like electricity, the internet and microprocessors. A general purpose technology is one that has the ability to drastically alter society. Usually, there are four criteria used to analyse whether a piece of technology is a General Purpose Technology. They are;

1. Pervasiveness - Are they used widely across the economy and across industries?

2. Improvement - Do they have the potential for continuous improvement, becoming better and cheaper over time?

3. Innovation enablers - Can they facilitate the development of new products, processes and industries?

4. Complementarity - Do they work well together with other technologies, creating synergistic effects?

When you look at these criteria, it’s obvious that AI will be a General Purpose Technology if it’s not already. It's already pervasive given that we’re seeing utilisation across all industries from media and content creation to logistics and manufacturing. The Scaling Law is becoming an empirical law just like Moore’s law with doubling happening every 6 months thus showing aggressive and consistent improvement. The launch of products like ChatGPT and Replit show that AI is enabling innovation and it's clear that AI requires other core technologies such as microprocessors, the internet and electricity. In fact, it requires significant improvements in all three for its continued scaling.

Despite this, like Solow’s quip, we may be seeing AI everywhere apart from the GDP figures. To understand why and what needs to happen, one has to look at how previous General Purpose Technologies diffused through the economy. The best example is the impact of electricity on manufacturing and factory design.

Late in the 19th century when electricity was invented, factories were designed around steam engines. Steam engines drove machinery through a maze of belts and pulleys. This setup not only limited where machines could be placed but also made factories noisy, inefficient, and prone to frequent breakdowns. With the introduction of electricity, entrepreneurs initially applied electrical power through dynamos onto the existing factory design i.e. they replaced the central steam engine with a dynamo. Barely any productivity improvements materialised and in fact, most entrepreneurs as of the early 20th century preferred the tried and tested steam engine.

Source: TUV Nord

Productivity growth driven by electricity needed a rethink of the entire factory design. To unlock this, entrepreneurs realised that electricity enabled power to be distributed in a precise manner to wherever it was needed within the factory. Machines could now be powered individually, freeing factories from the constraints of centralized power systems. This newfound flexibility allowed manufacturers to redesign factory layouts to optimize workflow, reduce wasted space, and enhance worker productivity. Furthermore, electric lighting enabled round-the-clock production, accelerating output. By unlocking efficiency and adaptability, electricity paved the way for modern mass production, reshaping industries and laying the groundwork for the rapid economic growth of the 20th century.

Ford’s Highland Park Plant

Ford Workers at a Moving Assembly Line at Highland Park

Both Images Sourced from The Collector

The greatest example of this was Henry Ford and the assembly line. With this insight, Henry Ford built a factory around an assembly plant where workers were distributed along a conveyor belt powered by electricity. With such a layout, workers could focus on extremely specific tasks. Moreover given that power was more reliable and there was good lighting then workers could work around a shift system enabling 24 hour production. These innovations in both factory design and production management enabled mass assembly of cars making the car a mass market product rather than an elite product. The surplus enabled by this productivity shift enabled Ford to give his workers a US$ 5 per hour wage, unheard of in the early 20th century. Henry Ford Stated “We believe in making 25,000 men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment multi-millionaires.” Taylorism and other management innovations from the 20th century stemmed from Henry Ford’s early works.

For AI to drive similar productivity gains, we must redesign financial workflows rather than simply layering AI on top of outdated systems. Only then will we see transformative results.

Satya Nadella - AI Replacing Business Logic

Just before Christmas Satya Nadella sat for an interview with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on their BG2 podcast. It was a wide ranging interview covering a number of topics within AI from agents to scaling laws to Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. Satya is one of the foremost thinkers in the world of technology and someone I respect a lot having read his autobiography “Hit Refresh”. I had written about AI before, covering what AI is and why it's expected to continue scaling, what that means for banks and in a discussion with Kamal, how players in the digital banking space should navigate AI. This discussion with Satya unlocked a few things for me and gave me clarity. Simply, like Henry Ford and electricity, Satya proposed a completely new way of working.

Source: B2G Podcast - To be Specific start from the 46th minute

In the interview, Bill Gurley asks;

I have a question about the CoPilot approach and I guess Mark Benioff's been kind of obnoxiously critical on this front and called it Clippy 2 or whatever. Do you worry that someone might think kind of first principles AI from ground up and that some of the infrastructure saying an Excel spreadsheet isn't necessary to know if you did a AI first product and the same thing, by the way could be said about the CRM, right?There's a bunch of, of fields and tasks that that may be able to be obfuscated for the user.

Bill is asking whether Microsoft’s strategy of building an AI powered assistant (CoPilot) on top of Microsoft 365 is necessary. The idea behind this is that if an entrepreneur builds AI from first principles then the whole idea of multiple fields on a CRM or the intense logic within Excel would be unnecessary. Satya responds by saying;

Yeah, I mean it's a very, very, very important question. The SaaS applications or biz apps. So let me just speak of our own Dynamics thing, right? The approach, at least we are taking is I think the notion that business applications exist, that's probably where they'll all collapse, right? In the agent era. Because if you think about it, right? They are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents and these agents are going to be multi repo CRUD, right? So they're not going to discriminate between what the backend is. They're gonna update multiple databases and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the backends, right?... in fact, it's interesting as we speak, I think we are seeing pretty high rates of wins on Dynamics backends and the agent use. And we are going to go pretty aggressively and try and collapse it all right? Whether it's in customer service, whether it is in, you know, by the way, the other fascinating thing that's you are increasing is just not CRM, but even our, what we call finance and operations.

It’s useful to break down what he’s saying into simple English. Business applications today, like CRM or ERP systems, are essentially sophisticated databases with layers of business logic and workflows. These layers of business logic perform CRUD operations where they either Create, Read, Update or Delete information in the database. Satya Nadella envisions a shift where this business logic will move from these individual systems to a centralized AI layer, referred to as the "AI tier." In this model, AI agents will handle operations across multiple systems seamlessly, performing tasks such as updating customer records, managing financial data, or automating workflows without being tied to a specific backend. This approach reduces the need for rigid, siloed applications, as the AI agents integrate data and processes across different platforms.

As the AI tier becomes the hub for business logic, the underlying backend systems will become interchangeable. Companies will no longer feel locked into specific software like Salesforce or Dynamics, as the AI layer will enable a smooth transition between systems. Customers will only interact with the front end and won’t care what’s happening in the back as long as they’re getting results that matter to them.

Technology will move from systems that contain business logic with access to a few databases to AI agents where the logic is embedded that can interact with multiple databases. For instance, instead of having to update all client records on salesforce, your AI agent can check for information in calls, transcripts, emails, and a host of other data repositories.

This is akin to the factory redesign that enabled electricity to significantly impact production. The question is “What does this mean for banking systems?”

How do Banking Systems actually work;

To understand what this means for the banking and finance system, it may be useful to go back into history. Around 30 years ago, bank technology centred around client-server architecture where desktops that resided in the bank’s premises were connected to back-end servers. The core functions of these systems were basic operations such as balance checking and posting transactions. Making changes to the system was cumbersome and required ripping apart back end code or installing specific software in each workstation. The advent of the 2000s saw this same architecture expanded towards other platforms such as the internet and mobile. In Africa this was enabled by Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) systems that acted as a connector between the monolithic back ends and the new transaction platforms. This was driven by players such as Fintech Group, Cellulant and Craft Silicon. This era was largely driven by digital transaction enablement. There was little to no thought given to customer experience or customer journeys. A number of African banks touted digitisation of their transactions as strong credentials for being digital leaders. In fact, this digital transaction enablement was a strong wedge that allowed players like GT Bank, Access Bank and Equity gain market share.

As the Fintech era emerged in the 2010s, players like Backbase and other Digital Banking Platforms realised that tweaks could be made to the overall banking architecture to enable a better user experience. Whereas the earlier generation of systems was monolithic i.e. all the business logic is tightly packed with the Database, newer generations would change this by decoupling business logic and the core database. New thinking emerged that differentiated between systems of engagement and systems of record.

Source: Forrester Research

The diagram above from Forrester Research shows this decoupling. The Digital Banking revolution of the last 10 years has largely been about separating the business logic from the Core Banking System and simultaneously moving towards a service oriented architecture in which each capability can be contained within APIs. The growth of cloud computing, the emergence of APIs and the subsequent enablement of micro-services all drove this “revolution”. Most banks are still within this journey and the ideal architecture has been the one below from a presentation given by Backbase.

Source: Backbase

What Backbase and their peers within the industry propose within this diagram is that business logic is stored within an “engagement platform” that they build. This engagement platform can then have connectors to other services such as card systems, payments systems such as Nibss, M-Pesa etc, the core banking platform and any other third party platform. Through this, the idea is to create unique workflows in the engagement platform and leave every other system to be a system of record.

Most “modern and sleek” banking apps are built using such architecture. The outcome is;

1. Sleeker user experience vis a vis 10 years ago but still pre-determined;

2. A continued focus on transaction enablement;

3. A model in which most people transact digitally but still require branches for more complex discussions such as mortgages, loans, trade finance and complex customer service;

The best way to think about how banking currently works is deterministic vs non-deterministic workflows. Deterministic workflows where there are constrained outcomes e.g. move US$ 500 from account A to account B or accrue 1% interest each month have been digitised. Non-deterministic workflows where there are random outcomes have remained analog or delivered through customer service agents.