The news: Big banks have been racing to embed agentic AI into daily financial life in hopes of supercharging the customer experience and improving employee efficiency. But smaller financial institutions (FIs) are also launching agentic AI tools through fintech partnerships. For example, Citizens State Bank recently announced a collaboration with Payman AI.

Zoom in: Citizens State Bank, for instance, will deploy agentic AI agents across its seven Colorado branches to act as operational teammates to handle internal banking tasks and support teller workflows across branches, per a press release. 

While maintaining compliance and audit controls, these agents can execute multistep processes such as: 

• Automating loan collections 
• Servicing accounts 
• Generating reports
• Providing spending analysis 

For Citizens, this reduces manual work and improves efficiency so staff can focus more on customer relationships. For customers, it means faster service, better insights, and more informed staff interactions. 

Zoom out: In EMARKETER’s report “GenAI and Agentic AI in Banking 2025” we recommend that smaller institutions focus limited resources on high-impact use cases like personalized customer service or enhanced credit underwriting—instances where genAI can deliver quick, visible wins. Citizens is starting with practical, operational use cases likely to deliver quick efficiency gains and free up staff time. This supports the idea of generating early, visible wins while laying the foundation for more advanced capabilities. 

However, the bank’s current scope is largely focused on internal operations rather than higher-impact, customer-facing use cases that directly boost satisfaction or lending growth. Expanding into those areas will be key to maximizing the long-term value of agentic AI investments.

Implications for banks: Small and midsize FIs are already showing an AI literacy gap. Partnering with fintechs helps them remain competitive by quickly deploying agentic AI without the heavy up-front investment of hiring in-house AI experts. We will continue to see more of these partnerships—and an evolution of existing partnerships to include more customer-facing capabilities.

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