Bank of America now puts a cost and a benefit on its 130 to 140 AI projects and plans to double its AI budget, while Société Générale and Commerzbank tie AI to multi-year savings targets in their strategic plans. PYMNTS Intelligence finds CFOs increasingly measure generative AI by margins, operating costs and revenue per customer.
For vendors selling into financial services, hours saved and seats deployed no longer close the argument. The pitch has to survive a finance review: what it earns, saves or redeploys, and over what payback period.
For vendors and their marketers, the work shifts from storytelling to accounting. Build the business case before the buyer asks: a payback model built on the customer’s own cost baselines, case studies that name the dollars moved — not hours saved — and content written for the finance reviewer who now sits inside every deal. Sales teams should qualify on the customer’s measurement method early, because a pitch built on activity metrics will stall at finance sign-off. The firms that win will publish fewer, harder numbers: what the deployment earned, saved or redeployed, and over what payback period.
