Italy’s FinecoBank is betting that by 2029, AI won’t be a bolt-on feature. It’ll be part of how the bank finds customers, supports advisors, and moves money workflows faster, with fewer handoffs.
According to FinecoBank, the board approved a 2026–2029 industrial plan that puts “AI-based technological innovation” at the center of growth across banking, investing, and brokerage. The plan reads less like a splashy product launch and more like a systems overhaul: embed AI where time gets wasted, especially in onboarding and advisor work.
The plan, minus the buzzwords
FinecoBank’s biggest AI push is aimed at its advisor network. In the plan materials, the bank said AI should account for 25% to 35% of the improvement in advisory network productivity on net sales by 2029. The idea is to push more prep work to machines: cluster clients, surface patterns, and automatically generate next-step commercial actions so advisors spend less time sorting and more time advising.
FinecoBank also points to an advisor “Portfolio Builder” introduced last summer and says it intends to launch a dedicated advisor app to make tools easier to use in daily routines. This is the “AI makes humans faster” version of the pitch, not “AI replaces the advisor.”
The other side of the bet is customer acquisition. FinecoBank said onboarding procedures that integrate AI increased interactions from prospects seeking information by four times, with 95% of those interactions handled without impacting customer care. If that scales, it’s the kind of AI win banks quietly chase: fewer routine questions landing on humans, fewer queues, and a smoother path from “curious” to “customer.”
Put together, the strategy is to close a loop: AI-assisted prospecting and onboarding feed into human-led advice, and AI tools help advisors manage more clients without the experience feeling thin.
Why the timing is trickier than it looks
AI can speed up banking, but it also increases operational risk: model behavior, data handling, and who’s accountable when automated guidance goes sideways. In Europe, that conversation is happening in a broader push to tighten operational resilience requirements, where banks are expected to prove they can withstand disruption and recover quickly.
Regulators have also been explicit about what resilience looks like in practice. The European Banking Authority’s DORA framework spans ICT risk management, incident reporting, testing, and third-party risk, all of which get more complicated as automation moves deeper into core processes.
FinecoBank doesn’t frame its plan as “a DORA strategy,” but the implication is hard to dodge: more AI in the critical path raises the bar for predictable behavior, auditable processes, and systems that fail safely and recover fast. That’s the real test between now and 2029, alongside whether the bank’s productivity and onboarding claims show up consistently in results.
Also read: AI Predictions for 2026 lays out why agentic AI and governance are becoming enterprise requirements, not experiments.