AI’s impact on banking: Insights from Banking Tech Award winners and finalists

Smartstream has been named winner of the Best AI Solution for Data Intelligence and Automation at the Banking Tech Awards, presented by FinTech Futures. The award recognises the most innovative companies across the fintech ecosystem, and Smartstream’s recognition reflects the real-world impact its AI-powered agentic automation platform is delivering for financial institutions.

Thomas Steinborn, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Smartstream, described the emergence of agentic AI as a fundamental shift in how the industry should think about its processes – not incremental improvement, but a full re-engineering of operations. Where generative AI offered productivity gains in the range of two to three times, agentic AI is moving toward gains of 100 times, with Steinborn projecting that every major player in the industry will have adopted the technology within three to five years.

This view is supported by the University of Cambridge’s 2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report, which found that 81% of respondents expect agentic AI to be mainstream by 2030, with 52% having already integrated the technology. Smartstream’s Smart Agents platform is purpose-built for this shift – autonomously investigating, classifying, and resolving back-office exceptions at scale, with full auditability and policy-controlled governance.

Across the broader awards cohort, a consistent theme emerged: the transformative potential of AI in financial services is inseparable from the governance and trust frameworks that surround it. As firms move from experimentation to production deployment, data quality, explainability, and human oversight are becoming as important as the capabilities themselves. For Smartstream, this is foundational – Smart Agents is designed from the ground up with embedded audit trails, maker-checker workflows, and explainable decisioning, ensuring every automated action meets regulatory expectations.

To explore how Smart Agents can reduce exception resolution times and cut manual investigation workload by up to 70%, contact Smartstream to arrange a demonstration or discuss your operational challenges with a specialist.