Extensive investment in generative AI (genAI) technology in this decade could be wasted because it will only be “transformational” in five years’ time, the head of digital customer engagement hub at Nordea has said.

On Wednesday at FinTech Connect 2024 in London, Søren Rode Jain Andreasen told delegates that genAI is still “fairly nascent”, suggesting that now is the time to train employees, put safeguards in place, and find models to address issues such as biases.

Helsinki-headquartered Nordea is the largest bank in the Nordics, operating across Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with total assets of €584.7 billion.

Andreasen shared that the Nordic bank is currently not yet exposing genAI to its customers, instead it is only using the technology internally.

Nordea has its own in-house platform as well as external technology, such as Microsoft Copilot, with the bank using it to boost efficiencies and support areas such as marketing and content generation.

The Nordea executive went on to say that the bank has reached an inflection point in 2024, with the organisation now handling more conversations through chatbots than its call centres.

“That being said, it’s still in its infancy,” said Andreasen

Agentic AI

Andreasen said that while there are some challenger banks experimenting with Agentic AI, for example through the development of AI agents, he doesn’t know whether it currently solves the problems Nordea has with its customers.

He did say however that he could see how having Apple AI on mobile devices could potentially solve some banking problems in the future.

“It will be years before we see something really powerful in that space,” he continued.

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