ABBYY Survey Reveals Expected Investment Growth in Generative AI by banking sector

Financial Services industry leading on innovation, but challenges exist with deployment

New research commissioned by ABBYY has revealed that a staggering 91% of financial services organizations are using sophisticated Generative AI tools – but many experienced major challenges with deployment.

While 98% of banking firms reported positive results from GenAI, many admit to needing to augment it with other technologies for better outcomes, according to the 2025 ABBYY State of Intelligent Automation Report: GenAI Confessions. 44% of financial services companies say their investment in GenAI will rise more than 20% in 2026.

The survey, conducted by Opinium Research, shows that training the GenAI models was harder than expected for 39% of financial services firms, 32% found it difficult to integrate into business processes and 29% found their staff did not have the necessary skills to deploy it. In addition, 26% did not have proper governance.

It meant 42% of companies had to add document AI to improve outputs, while 39% used process intelligence, and the same amount asked staff to manually check results – much higher than the global average of 25%, suggesting too much manual intervention.

Adding other technologies led to 59% of respondents having increased trust in GenAI, 55% seeing better quality outputs, and just over half (51%) benefiting from more cost savings and better integration into their workflows.

While the top reason for introducing GenAI was to increase efficiency and customer service (67%), banking industry bosses are the most concerned about employee wellbeing. Over a third of respondents (35%) hoped the technology would reduce employee burnout and a quarter (25%) cited improving job satisfaction as a key goal - much higher than other industries such as transport and logistics (11%) and manufacturing (15%). 

However, the survey also revealed that four-in-ten (40%) of financial services leaders admit that a driving factor for introducing GenAI was that employees were already using it on a Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) basis for personal productivity – which could impact security concerns over Shadow AI. Over half (51%) say employees wanted the technology to “make them look smarter and more professional,” while 67% said it reduces workload and increases productivity.   

Generally, staff are optimistic about GenAI, with 88% of leaders saying workers enjoy positive results.  

Other key findings from the report include: 

• 65% of financial services organizations are using purpose-built AI – compared to 59% of companies globally 
• 62% use agentic compared to 53% on average by other industries 
• Top uses for GenAI in banking: data analysis (59%), employee productivity (56%), automating business documents (56%), customer-facing apps like chatbots (55%) 
• Departments using GenAI: Finance for fraud detection and cash flow predictions (57%), sales and marketing (56%) compliance and legal (45%) 
• Wishlist of improvements for GenAI include being free of human bias and using less resources 

Access the full State of Intelligent Automation: GenAI Confessions 2025 here for more information.

Methodology

Opinium research of 1,200 senior managers or above in companies of 100+ employees in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore, of which 64 were T&L organisations.

Research undertaken between 20th of June and 8th of July 2025.