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Banks are spending more on technology than ever before and have less to show for it than they should.
Despite the sector's net income hitting $1.2 trillion globally in 2024, McKinsey flags a stubborn disconnect: banks spend roughly $600 billion a year on banking technology, yet productivity gains remain low and valuations trail nearly every other industry by close to 70%. The money is going in. The returns are not coming out. A large part of that gap comes down to three compounding challenges that the industry has not yet solved. So what are they, and what would a genuinely better system look like?
The first is customer expectation. 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn't happen. Yet the gap between what customers expect and what most banks actually deliver is not narrowing. It is widening.
The second is compliance complexity. US and Canadian financial institutions spend $61 billion a year on financial crime compliance, with compliance costs having increased for 99% of financial institutions. Regulatory burden is not a static cost. It is growing.
The third is the contact centre capacity gap. According to Gartner, more than 75% of customer service leaders feel pressure from executive leadership to implement GenAI, yet most are far from realising its benefits. Meanwhile, Gartner finds that customer expectations for service interactions will only continue to rise. Contact centres are being asked to do more with the same headcount while simultaneously improving quality and containing costs. Something has to give.
In an ideal world, the solution starts with the channel problem. A unified omnichannel automation layer would handle routine enquiries consistently across voice, chat and digital channels, carrying full customer context from one touchpoint to the next. No customer would have to repeat themselves when moving between channels. No agent would have to reconstruct a conversation from scratch.
When a query does reach a human agent, the difference between a good interaction and a frustrating one often comes down to what the agent knows before the conversation even begins. Real-time agent assistance that surfaces personalised customer insights drawn from transaction history, prior interactions and behavioural signals means agents can respond with precision rather than starting from scratch mid-call.
Compliance does not have to be a bottleneck. Secure, compliance-aware workflows that embed identity verification and full interaction traceability into the process itself mean that KYC, AML, and data privacy requirements are met continuously and automatically, every time. Every interaction leaves a clean, auditable trail, removing the manual overhead that currently drives so much of that $61 billion compliance cost.
Finally, not every query should follow the same path. Intelligent routing that reads the nature and priority of an incoming request and matches it to the right specialist from the first point of contact eliminates the transfers and holds queues that erode trust fastest. Just 5% of contact centre leaders have a customer-facing GenAI solution fully deployed, which means the institutions that move on it now are not catching up. They are pulling ahead.
The $600 billion question was never really about technology spend. It was about whether that spend was reaching the places where customers actually experience the bank. For investors and executives watching the sector, the contact centre is no longer a cost line to be managed. It is the clearest signal of whether a bank's technology investment is working, and right now, for most institutions, the gap between investment and outcome has never been more visible.
