Heightened client expectations, mounting regulatory demands, and the acceleration of digital disruption are reshaping wealth management, while competition intensifies across global financial centres. How can relationship managers (RMs) deliver strategic value when their time is increasingly divided between administrative burdens and client engagements?
This article explores the potential of agentic AI — artificial intelligence (AI) capable of autonomous, goal-driven actions — to address this challenge. By merging automation with intelligence, agentic AI offers an opportunity to rethink the RM’s daily workflow, freeing time for high-value interactions and strengthening the overall client experience.
Context and challenges
Private banks are navigating one of the fastest-evolving landscapes in decades. Clients now expect hyper-personalised, real-time experiences, while digital transformation continues to redefine the rules of engagement. Competitive pressures are mounting, forcing traditional institutions to rethink their operating models and embrace innovation. As The Guardian recently reported, £100 billion (US$131 billion) in UK high street bank deposits vanished in a single year as savers flocked to digital-first challengers.
RMs remain at the forefront of value creation. Their daily reality is increasingly shaped by compliance checks, reporting obligations, and administrative work — reducing the time available for strategic advice and meaningful client engagement while also driving up cost-to-serve. Private banks face the dual challenge of improving accuracy in regulatory tasks and freeing client-facing teams to concentrate on revenue-generating activities.
AI adoption is already accelerating. Deloitte’s 2025 Predictions Report anticipates that half of companies using generative AI will deploy AI agents by 2027. Wealth management is no exception.
A new generation of AI, agentic AI, is emerging as a response to these challenges. Unlike traditional automation, it can pursue objectives autonomously, make decisions, and take actions with minimal human intervention. It can go beyond simple task execution and automation, and support end-to-end processes. It can handle routine activities such as monitoring portfolios, generating reports, or tracking regulatory updates. By automating these tasks, agentic AI frees RMs to concentrate on higher-value activities.
As Deloitte Luxembourg colleagues have underlined, agentic AI is best understood as part of a broader multi-agent network that can collaborate across processes such as know-your-customer (KYC) maintenance or anti-money laundering (AML) investigations, going beyond traditional task automation.
Agentic AI does not replace human expertise. Instead, it amplifies it by multiplying productivity, strengthening client relationships, and enhancing overall service quality.
What is agentic AI?
‘Agentic AI’ refers to autonomous systems capable of executing complex tasks with minimal human intervention. It is both goal-oriented and adaptive. It continuously monitors changing conditions, analyses data in real time, and takes proactive steps to complete tasks with efficiency.
Unlike traditional generative AI, which responds to prompts, agentic AI initiates actions, connects multiple processes, triggers workflows, and interacts across systems to achieve defined objectives. Generative AI remains reactive; agentic AI is proactive.
For wealth management, the implications are concrete. Agentic AI can automatically flag portfolio risks, generate tailored investment proposals, or coordinate compliance checks without requiring constant RM oversight. This enables RMs to dedicate more time to high-value client interactions.
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Transforming the RM’s daily workflow
The impact of agentic AI on RMs is best understood through its effect on their daily activities. RMs constantly balance time-consuming administrative work with revenue-generating advisory activities. Agentic AI reshapes this balance by reducing the burden of non-revenue tasks, while remaining regulatorily-compliant and completing administrative activities, and by enhancing efficiency in high-value engagements.
Freeing time from non-revenue tasks
Compliance and reporting: Agentic AI automates the most time-intensive compliance processes. AML reviews that once required 90 minutes can now be completed in just 12. KYC onboarding that used to take four hours can now happen in seconds. Large universal and custodial banks are already reaping the rewards, with one global institution reportedly saving over 10,000 hours annually through AI-driven automation.
Early adopters emphasise not only time savings but also fewer false positives and greater compliance scalability, even as challenges around explainability and data quality persist. However, private banks are still catching up, constrained by lower volumes, complex client structures, and legacy IT systems.
Administrative workflows: Pilots in large banks show agentic AI can automate up to 90 percent of meeting administration, from capturing discussion points to updating CRM, while RMs still provide key inputs and final validation.
Regulatory intelligence: Agentic AI can reduce manual compliance tasks by up to 70 percent by anticipating the impact of regulatory change on client portfolios and analysing a large volume of data points in seconds.
Enhancing efficiency in revenue-generating activities
Personalised investment recommendations: By analysing client objectives, risk tolerance, and market dynamics in real time, agentic AI surfaces tailored investment opportunities. It can dynamically detect underexposure to sustainable assets and proactively recommend ESG-compliant instruments as market conditions evolve, resulting in time savings of up to 75 percent in ESG assessment.
Proactive client engagement: Agentic AI can pinpoint critical engagement moments such as liquidity events or unusual transactions, often before they even reach the RM’s radar. It sends alerts instantly, enabling timely outreach that strengthens trust and enables new business opportunities.
Scalable, personalised communication: AI can draft portfolio updates, investment proposals, and follow-ups tailored to individual preferences. By combining scale with personalisation, it ensures clients receive timely, relevant, and human-validated communication.
Expected benefits
The true value of agentic AI in wealth management is in augmenting human expertise — not replacing it. Its impact is clear across three dimensions:
For RMs: By automating compliance monitoring, data collection, and administrative follow-ups, agentic AI reduces the burden of routine work and enables RMs to dedicate more time to building trust and delivering strategic advice. As AI agents become increasingly embedded in enterprise workflows, professionals can concentrate on the activities that truly drive growth.
For clients: Clients reap the rewards of proactive, personalised, and seamless service. Agentic AI analyses portfolios in real time, uncovers opportunities, and anticipates risks. This empowers RMs to deliver timely, tailored insights at scale, boosting responsiveness, satisfaction, and client loyalty.
For private banks: Agentic AI offers private banks operational efficiency, stronger compliance, and a clear competitive edge. By automating KYC monitoring and remediation, audit documentation, and portfolio monitoring, it cuts costs, improves accuracy, and frees client-facing teams to focus on revenue-generating activities. Research shows that leveraging agentic AI not only strengthens compliance and manages complexity but also boosts RM productivity, unlocking growth.
Challenges and safeguards
Agentic AI demands careful governance and risk oversight. Success hinges not just on technical capability, but on ensuring trust, regulatory compliance, and seamless integration across enterprise workflows.
Human oversight: While agentic AI can operate autonomously, RMs remain responsible for client advice. AI supports decision-making but never replaces human judgment. ‘Human safeguards’ are essential for maintaining trust and accountability, but the oversight required is minimal compared to the effort these tasks previously demanded.
This perspective mirrors broader Deloitte findings that adoption introduces not only efficiency but also risks, ranging from model bias to rogue agent behaviour, that underscore the need for rigorous human oversight.
Data protection and regulatory compliance: Wealth management operates in a highly-regulated environment. Any AI deployment must comply with GDPR and emerging standards like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act). Robust safeguards for data security, explainability, and auditability are essential to comply with regulatory requirements.
Integration with existing systems: Agentic AI must seamlessly integrate with core banking systems, CRM platforms, and compliance infrastructure. Poor integration increases the risk of fragmented workflows and shadow IT, while orchestrating AI across multiple systems ensures performance, scalability, and operational coherence.
In private banking, addressing AI challenges is not only about managing risk, but also about strengthening client trust, enhancing resilience, and supporting long-term growth. Deloitte Luxembourg leverages advanced AI expertise and deep industry insight to help banks turn these challenges into strategic opportunities.
Deloitte works to define tailored AI and automation strategies, implement Generative AI solutions, optimise processes, establish governance frameworks, and develop staff capabilities. Drawing on its global network and proven methodologies, Deloitte enables private banks to transform the way they operate, compete, and deliver value in the digital era.
Conclusion
Agentic AI is redefining the private banking landscape and its workforce organisation. By taking over operational, data-heavy tasks such as compliance, reporting, portfolio monitoring, and client communications, it frees RMs to focus on what truly matters: delivering personalised advice, engaging clients at the right moments, and building lasting trust.
For private banks, this means stronger compliance, greater efficiency, and a competitive edge. According to one recent Deloitte study, depending on an individual bank’s organisation and agility, agentic AI could free up 30 to 50 percent of RMs’ time and that of their assistants.
With AI augmenting human expertise rather than replacing it, RMs can work smarter, clients benefit from proactive, tailored service, and institutions unlock sustainable growth — proving that the future of wealth management lies in the seamless partnership between human insight and intelligent automation.
Interested in reading the Future View Toolkit 2025? You can read and download the report online here.
About the Future View Toolkit 2025
The Future View Toolkit 2025 focuses on the ways in which the wealth management industry across the world is future-proofing itself amid technological change, increasing compliance demands, advanced client expectations, and new operational models.
It features contributions from a total of nine industry participants, all bringing different perspectives to the challenges and opportunities that come with the future-proofing of this sector. Among these are six contributors from technology vendors, who have each contributed a topic-focused Showcase profiling an individual solution.
Our broader Toolkit Report Series covers thematic, geography and wealth manager segment-focused reports, each tasked with delving into the topics and supporting technologies of relevance to help wealth managers of all types better understand how they should bring technology into their business and in which areas.
About Deloitte
Deloitte is a leading global provider of audit and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax & legal, and related services. With more than 175 years of hard work and commitment to making a real difference, our organisation has grown in scale and diversity — approximately 415,000 people in 150 countries and territories, providing these services — yet our shared culture remains the same.
Deloitte drives progress. Our firms around the world help clients become leaders wherever they choose to compete. Deloitte invests in outstanding people of diverse talents and backgrounds and empowers them to achieve more than they could elsewhere. Our work combines advice with action and integrity. We believe that when our clients and society are stronger, so are we.
For more information, go to www.deloitte.com.
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