By Wissam Mobarak, Head of Group Organization, Business transformation and Procedures Department - Byblos Bank Group, Lebanon
Despite all the positive news we are receiving daily regarding AI, Banks executives in the Middle East and especially in Lebanon, are still not really convinced about the impact of AI to their company and, they are regularly avoiding including AI initiatives in their Master Plan or even in their future objectives.
This article will try, using international benchmarks and recent successes, to convince the CEO’s and Executives to jump immediately in the AI oriented-thinking in order to avoid missing the train before it will be too late.
Smashing facts from Q1-2025
By reading the below news headlines, we can deduce that the jump to AI is more serious than ever before and we can’t just ignore these developments if we are working in a business environment such as the financial institutions:
Stargate, a 500 bn $ program signed in the white house in the presence of Donald Trump last January, is a giga data centers in the US in anticipation of the future demands of AI.
GAFAM spent 180 bn $ in 2024 for the AI and for 2025 they will invest even more.
The AI summit in Paris in February 2025 promised the investment of 170 bn $ although Europeans are usually more concerned with AI ethics and regulation.
In the last 3 years the question was whether AI is going to save or destroy the world. This year in Davos, in January 2025, all the leaders and the companies present understood that AI will not destroy the world and started to look how to get maximum benefits from AI. They understood that AI is here to last, it is not a trend or a passing fashion mode.
25% of investors and company leaders confirmed that AI investments had a positive ROI in 2024 and this will increase in 2025.
In just 1 day, “DeepSeek”, the Chinese generative AI tool became number 1 in the world. At least for now. The story is not there as we can guess that the competition is launched since the last 2 years and definitely GPT 5 maybe even better. The idea is that DeepSeek cost less than few million $ whereas chat GPT is costing more than 500 m $ meaning that the AI is becoming cheaper and can be reached by any organization willing to invest in it, especially that it is in open source.
Only 3 days after the launch of DeepSeek, Alibaba announced the launch of Qwen 2.5 Max, an LLM tool.
And so on, …
AI replacing banking staff
According to Bloomberg, AI will replace minimum 200’000 staff in Big Banks within the next 3 to 5 years. This would be great because the objectives of CEO’s are to reduce cost and expenditures and we know that staff cost is the highest cost in banks. Routines and repetitive tasks are to disappear especially in call centers (thanks to Chat Bots) and AML compliance functions.
AI will also boost the productivity and profitability of banks and increase their profits by 15% on average in 2027, with a total gain of 180 bn $.
One example is the lending process: by analyzing and evaluating the profile of the borrower, the AI will deliver a faster and more precise response and even reduce the probability of default. JP Morgan who implemented “Debrief” to gain more than 30 minutes per client meeting. Debrief is an AI tool capable of recording, analyzing and summarizing a business meeting between the relationship manager and the client. The summary is not only a minute of meeting but contains also orders ready to be executed following the client approval.
On 25 of February, 2025 Peter Hoskins, a business reporter in the Daily Mail, reported that DBS (Singapore’s biggest bank) will cut 4’000 roles over the next 3 years as AI replaces Humans.
In his recent book (AI: Big replacement or complementarity?), Luc Ferry agrees that starting today and for the next decade a “Super Intelligent AI” will beat humans in all the domains. We will see Huge companies valued more than 1 bn $ without one single human employee! Secretaries, translators and back office staff are already being replaced easily by AI. We will even see AI with emotions and conscious.
NVIDIA who just dropped Project DIGITS, a 3’000$ personal AI supercomputer capable of running 200B parameter AI models. It has the size of a small laptop but 1000 times more powerful. NVIDIA CEO declared, in January 2025, that the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.
Benefits of AI for Banks
According to Deloitte, 70% of Financial Institutions use already AI or are planning to do it very soon. 65 bn $ will be invested by the FI’s for the AI in 2025 alone.
AI will dramatically enhance the operational efficiency of banks in automating key processes and in optimizing the management of data. Systems are becoming faster and more efficient, thanks to Machine Learning that continuously learn from new data. Systems become more agile and more flexible to changes.
AI is also used today for Security reasons. KYC is performing better thanks to AI which can detect faster the behavior of customers (changing behavior) and controlling on the spot and in real time the fraudulent transactions. N26, a neobank, divided by 10 the fraud cases thanks to AI.
A good example of AI usage in banks is the saving products. The AI can define the profile risk of the client, and then the AI will offer the best basket of products and combination of investments to client. Each interaction with the bank clients gives these FI’s valuable data that can be processed to create tailored and unique products.
New AI FinTech’s are being created to detect the over-evaluated portfolios / markets to an investor in order to make the good selection and the right starting point to the investment product / portfolio. AI is continuously watching the financial markets around the world as these are running 24 hours / 24. They can generate a summary (daily, weekly…) to the managers working in these banks in order to take the correct actions, avoiding the summaries prepared manually by the dealers and analysts and most importantly avoiding the human errors and subjective judgements. The robo-advisors will ultimately replace the private bankers to help clients trade on the different markets.
Predictive analytics are used in banks to increase profits by identifying when using the CRM, cross-selling opportunities.
In Contact centers, AI is creating capacity for a full engagement with customers and promoting better service outcomes by equipping contact center agents with the insights, information and expertise they need in real time. The agents (bots) are not only answering questions anymore but also solving complex problems by acting and launching other programs or by calling other Large Models for help.
Even in HRD, and we know how much Banks talent acquisition departments are suffering to find the right people with the increasing competencies requests, AI can depict the right CV’s and even conduct the first screening and interviews.
How to proceed
Financial companies will need to jump into AI but at the same time must avoid the chaos.
In order to avoid useless investment in AI, the banks must clarify their strategy and need to debate with its employees in order to speak the same language and look in the same direction. The Executives and the staff will define the objectives.
By doing so the employees will be at ease and remove the barriers and the resistance to change. At the end of the process the Top Management will define the priorities and will engage on the different projects and initiatives.
Conclusion
While AI is disrupting the whole economy, its impact will be multiplied in the Financial Sector which is already highly competitive and fully digitalized with the resurgences of FinTech’s.
AI will account for more than 500 million users by 2027 and generate revenues exceeding 16’000 bn $ by 2030 which is in less than 5 years from now.
Banks CEO’s and Executives must at least give it a chance by starting with a small project and see its benefits. The journey is definitely not easy as FI’s are dealing with customers revenues and wealth. But by following the proper AI governance, defining a clear AI strategy and ensuring that the needed team and skills are there, any company can reach a promising result.
