How to Build a Ten Person Bank

HSBC employs over 225,000 people globally. Barclays, 72,000. JP Morgan Chase, 309,926. Banking has always been an industry of scale. Now, Generative AI and multi-agent systems (MAS) are redefining what’s possible.

Klarna’s AI agents now handle two-thirds of customer service chats — the workload of 700 employees. Across industries, AI is automating software development, security monitoring, and decision-making. Entire departments are being replaced by a handful of agents, managed by a small team of experts who remain in the loop.

As we highlighted in our recent whitepaper, How to Build the Agentic Enterprise, what  is happening is a total redesign and restructuring of work itself. In this new environment, a ten-person bank isn’t a compromise. It’s a real, and rapidly approaching, possibility.

Key bank functions:

CEO 

The CEO of an AI-enabled bank would need to be a visionary technologist capable of leading a pioneering bank where most of the work is done by AI. As well as leading the nine people in the bank, the CEO is responsible for implementing AI technologies, monitoring the performance of AI systems, assessing risks, and adapting the business strategy to leverage the capabilities of AI effectively.

This on top of normal bank CEO duties which include strategic decision-making, setting the overall vision and direction of the company, ensuring regulatory compliance, liaising with the board, stakeholder relationships, and driving innovation to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.

AI Governance - overseen by the Chief AI Officer  

The Chief AI Officer (CAIO) is responsible for ensuring that the bank’s AI systems are deployed ethically, effectively, and in full compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. The CAIO manages the governance of AI models across all departments, ensuring that AI-powered decisions are transparent, explainable, and aligned with the bank’s values.

In this role, the CAIO constantly monitors AI systems to mitigate risks, such as bias, data privacy concerns, and operational security, ensuring that AI is not only driving productivity but also maintaining trust and safety. 

Customer Support - overseen by the Chief Experience Officer  

The Chief Experience Officer (CExO) oversees the customer experience and design functions in the AI-enabled bank. Customer support is carried out by a personal AI banker which performs tasks including onboarding, KYC as well as handling all customer queries and transactions. Customers can interact with their AI banker via a highly sophisticated chatbot that uses vision, text, speech and code as inputs. The move marks a return to bygone days of walking into a bank and talking to your own personal banker. 

Deploying generative techniques, the AI banker can instantly generate widgets, dashboards and data visualisations personalised to each customer to onboard them, advise them, or help them apply for loans or mortgages. Crucially the personal AI banker will be able to adapt to each customer’s interaction preferences, using voice and vision for people who prefer a human style conversation, or text and visualisations for others.

Engineering - overseen by the Chief Technology Officer 

The Chief Technical Officer (CTO) is responsible for overseeing the technical infrastructure and user experience in the AI-enabled bank. The CTO manages autonomous AI services that develop, maintain, and update the mobile banking app and other digital platforms. With an army of AIs writing the code for the bank’s core platform, infrastructure, and digital touchpoints, the CTO ensures seamless functionality and top-tier user experience.

In this role, the CTO is also tasked with optimising the customer interface, adding new features, and making sure the overall digital infrastructure is continuously updated and enhanced using cutting-edge technology. With every element written in code, the bank’s infrastructure can be perpetually optimised for peak performance, ensuring a smooth and intuitive user experience.

Cybersecurity - overseen by the Chief Security Officer (CSO)  

The Chief Security Officer (CSO) is responsible for ensuring the safety and security of the AI-enabled bank. Leveraging specialist AI agents, the CSO oversees the development of bespoke cybersecurity systems that protect the bank from external threats, including hacking attempts at the customer support level and beyond.

The CSO continuously monitors the security infrastructure, using AI to predict, detect, and counteract cyber threats in real-time. By automating the creation and maintenance of custom security protocols, the CSO ensures the bank remains resilient to new and emerging threats, while maintaining the trust and safety of its customers’ data and transactions.

This division allows the CTO to focus on the technology, user experience, and design, while the CSO handles the critical role of maintaining and evolving cybersecurity within the AI-powered bank.

Product Development and User Acquisition - overseen by the Chief Product Officer 

The Chief Product Officer (CPO)  will oversee the bank’s dynamic 24/7 production line which constantly ingests customer data analytics on how the bank is being used as well as third party data, competitor data and market data. This data is then used to create new and innovative products and strategies across wealth, lending and spending that can be marketed to customers in a hyper-personalised way. Not content with just creating new products, the CPO will constantly rethink products, based on real time data, to break them out of their silos and reimagine them as customer focused products. 

Marketing — Overseen by the Chief Marketing Officer 

The AI enabled bank’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), will use generative AI to create and personalise assets and campaigns at hyperscale according to the brand guidelines. They can then distribute the assets/campaigns via digital acquisition channels such as social media. The CMO can also monitor the data around the marketing funnel including churn and adjust the marketing effort in real time on a per customer basis. 

Compliance and Legal overseen by the Chief Compliance Officer 

The Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) will have an AI-enabled compliance “engine” which uses large language models to ingest data from the bank and from the regulatory environment which is all in code. This ensures the bank continually complies with regulatory requirements in real time. 

Operations & Payment Systems - overseen by the Chief Operations Officer 

The Chief Operations Officer (COO) oversees the control centre of the AI-enabled bank, namely the model that defines and regulates all the processes in the bank including transactions, the ledger and payment systems. Using real time data on how the bank is running, and a collection of autonomous agents, the COO is constantly monitoring and improving how the bank operates.  

Treasury, Finance and Risk Management - overseen by the Chief Finance Officer 

Finance functions such as accounting, reporting, planning, treasury sits with the CFO who uses AI and assistants and agents to carry out tasks and transactions. The CFO is also responsible for risk management including credit risk, market risk and operational risk. They deploy AI to continuously monitor the bank’s risk exposure using real time data.

Conclusion

Leon’s AI-enabled Bank of Ten is unlikely to become a reality anytime soon. However his point is that technology is moving in that direction. Legacy banks need to think about how they can use this ground breaking technology to automate manual tasks and optimise processes and functions to create a bank which is leaner, more customer centric, more profitable and fit for purpose in an AI-first future.