Beyond consumer spending trends and tariffs, earnings season also has shed light on how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the financial services landscape, with both established banks and FinTech platforms leveraging advanced algorithms to fine-tune and fortify their operation. The companies featured below are by no means exhaustive, but offer a sampling of AI’s diverse applications.
Fortifying Against Fraud
The battle against financial crime is increasingly waged with AI, as institutions deploy models to detect and prevent fraudulent activities.
Visa reported its value-added services revenue grew by 26% in constant dollars in its fiscal third quarter 2025, and that segment’s growth has been buoyed by its acquisition of real-time AI payments protection technology developer Featurespace. Through Featurespace, Visa offers the Adaptive Real-time Individual Change-identification (ARIC) Risk Hub, which uses machine learning and AI to build more accurate risk profiles.
Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said on the conference call with analysts that “on the cybersecurity side, the stakes are getting higher and higher. The fraudsters are using latest technology, using artificial intelligence and generative AI, to power their solutions to breakthrough on the fraud side. … We’re doing exactly the same.” The company’s Decision Intelligence Pro, he said, “is leveraging data out of all sources of the internet, putting it through a generative AI engine for us … and instead of preventing fraud, we’re predicting fraud, which is the latest stage of this this kind of game.”
Automating Credit Underwriting
AI’s data-driven analysis is transforming how credit decisions are made, in turn broadening access to capital. According to Upstart’s Q2 2025 earnings, its platform automates 92% of underwriting decisions. This efficiency has significantly boosted the conversion rate—the percentage of inquiries turned into loans—from 14% at the beginning of last year to more than 23% in Q2 2025.
Upstart CEO Dave Girouard said on an earnings call that AI is also helping forge underwriting in sectors such as automobile loans, which has seen strong growth. He told analysts: “Auto is the first area where instead of directly training an auto model, we start by training a foundational credit model on data from multiple credit categories, and then apply fine-tuning to arrive at an auto specific model.”
Similarly, Lemonade leverages AI for precise pricing in its car insurance business. CEO Daniel Schreiber said on a conference call with analysts: “We have been AI native since day one. Relative to new upstarts, that 10 years in market gives us a real data edge, thousands of A/B tests, 10 million driving trips, millions of customer interactions and claims … By the time generative AI really accelerated in 2023 and onwards, we already had AI embedded across the tech stack with terabytes of proprietary data flowing through the system.” In the latest quarter, AI helped drive in force premiums 29% higher year on year.
Enhancing Operations and the Customer Experience
Companies also spotlighted the use of AI in operational backbone and customer-facing interactions. Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said during the most recent call that the company is “advancing a more digital future is with Visa Intelligent Commerce, which enables consumers to shop and buy with AI agents. It combines a suite of integrated APIs (application programming interfaces), including AI-ready cards with tokenization and authentication, together with a commercial partner program for AI platforms, enabling developers to deploy Visa’s AI commerce capabilities.”
As for the banks, Bank of America has charted its AI-underpinned progress through the past several quarters. Its AI digital assistant, Erica, has 20 million users for self-service active consumer interactions, up from 14.4 million three years ago. CashPro Chat is used by 65% of business, commercial and corporate clients, with Erica handling more than 40% of interactions. The company has also noted that “Erica for Employees” has been used by more than 90% of staffers, reducing calls to service desks by about 50%.
“We are currently working through many dozens of our AI proof of concepts beyond,” those aforementioned offerings, CEO Brian Moynihan said on an earnings call. “These investments are intended to help growth improve the client experience and our own productivity.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/