The news: Revolut is debuting an AI-powered in-app assistant for UK customers. The tool can answer questions, break down spending, and offer tailored suggestions based on a user’s transaction data.

Trendspotting: Revolut is just the latest player to upgrade its virtual assistant. Many banks and neobanks are doing so with a focus on financial wellness—equipping assistants to perform tasks like setting up savings goals and budgets, generating quizzes about customers’ spending patterns, and answering questions in natural language.

Starling Bank launched a Gemini-powered virtual assistant in March, and Lloyds has plans to do the same. But Revolut reportedly relies on infrastructure it built itself.

Implications for banks: Fragmented financial wellness tools weaken banks’ ability to show up when it matters, as we discuss in our Financial Wellness Apps and Tools 2026 report. Budgeting, alerts, and monitoring features are often scattered across separate tabs, menus, and apps, forcing customers to piece together a picture of their financial health.

Recent advances in genAI could help address this fragmentation by enabling more conversational, integrated guidance. While banks have deployed virtual assistants for routine tasks like balance checks, account information searches, and transfers, these tools still struggle to interpret complex questions and synthesize relevant information across a customer’s broader financial picture.

The challenge for financial institutions (FIs) is now building virtual assistants that go beyond today’s in-app tools and compete with general-purpose AI tools that live outside of the FI’s interface. Making them work requires a strong genAI foundation, secure and meaningful access to customer data, and the ability to conduct banking activities on the customer’s behalf. Yet most FIs outside of the 10 largest haven’t deployed a virtual assistant at all yet, leaving them well behind the starting line.