The news: Lloyds said genAI created about $63 million in value in 2025. It expects that to double to more than $127 million in 2026. Part of the bank’s plans include an agentic AI financial assistant for its mobile app, which the bank expects to go live early this year.

How it works: The chatbot’s purported value is to allow customers to ask questions about their spending, generate insights that inform financial planning, and help educate customers on financial concepts. It also includes a feature that connects customers to live support representatives when necessary. In addition, the system saves customer interaction data, creating better context for the bot’s responses.

Zoom out: Lloyds’ legacy mobile banking virtual assistant and Bank of America’s virtual assistant archetype, Erica—launched in 2018—use natural-language processing technology, a form of machine learning. But genAI has superseded this as the most advanced, human-like way to interact with a chatbot. However, our US Mobile Banking Emerging Features Benchmark 2025 reports that banks have not universally adopted handoffs from chatbots to customer services agents, let alone a more sophisticated technological solution.

Implications for banks: According to our October 2025 report GenAI and Agentic AI in Banking 2025, genAI is a turning point for personalization in banking. GenAI-powered insights are based on more customer data, with greater context to create recommendations conversationally, like budgeting advice or product suggestions tied to life events.

This goes far beyond chatbot results, which are based on finite options, have a mixed record for helpful responses, and use limited context for customer interactions. It is also a departure from employee-facing uses of genAI on which banks have focused. A successful genAI-based virtual assistant would be a new dawn for banking customer service.