Latest / Fintech Conversations & Insights with Efi Pylarinou
Paolo Sironi: What Do Bankers Do at a Branch That an AI Agent Can't?
Paolo Sironi and I co-authored a chapter in Brett King’s “Branch Tomorrow”, arguing that physical bank branches would become 360-degree advisory hubs, not transaction counters. Brett’s own closing line in that book was blunter: branches have no role in an agentic world.
Two new 2026 US surveys, Jim Marous’s Digital Banking Report and the Curinos/Adrenaline report on de novo branch expansion, and the numbers are hard to ignore (see links below). For the first time, over 50% of US bank executives rank advisory as their top branch priority, ahead of transactions.
Paolo and I go through what’s…
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