Scaling Service Excellence: How AI Agents are Transforming Scotiabank’s Payment Operations
Inside the bank’s strategy to turn premium services into scalable, intelligent offerings.
A Strategic Shift: Looking Inward to Scale Outward
While many financial institutions pursue client-facing automation, Scotiabank is taking a more strategic route — using AI to accelerate and scale what already delivers value.
Instead of reinventing services, the bank is re-imagining existing workflows with AI to scale premium offerings with speed and precision. This shift reflects a deeper understanding of AI’s role — not as a replacement, but as a force multiplier.
The opportunity isn’t about replacing what we do well—it’s about dramatically scaling it at speed.
With this, Scotiabank is embarking on its journey towards becoming a Frontier Firm, where human employees collaborate seamlessly with digital labor in the form of AI agents to scale impact and reduce costs.
As Kathleen Woodard, Head of Banking Industry – Americas for Microsoft, puts it: intelligence is becoming a “durable good: abundant, affordable and available on demand.” By embedding this intelligence into internal workflows, Scotiabank is creating a controlled environment to test, learn, and scale — laying the groundwork for transformation both inside and outside the bank.
Finding the Sweet Spot
Scotiabank’s approach to AI is guided by five principles:
- Focus on information-heavy workflows: Prioritize areas where AI can rapidly process and interpret data.
- Unlock constrained value: Target services that are limited by manual effort but rich in stakeholder impact.
- Elevate the client experience: Choose use cases that directly enhance service delivery.
- Enable auditability: Use AI in ways that allow outcomes to be explained and traced.
- Design with energy awareness: Consider the energy footprint and aim for sustainable choices.
This framework makes AI investments not only technically sound and strategically valuable, but also responsible and transparent.
Accelerating Prototyping: The Client Insight Report Initiative
The Challenge
The Client Insight Report, a detailed analysis of payments processed at the bank for a given client, has traditionally been a high-touch service available only to a select set of clients. Producing it required significant manual effort and time to reconcile complex and often inconsistent transaction data.
We would analyze all payment transactions for a client — what was processed, what failed and what remediation was required. It provided a great tool to discuss how we bring value to the client every day.
The Breakthrough
In partnership with EY and Microsoft, Scotiabank rapidly prototyped a system of AI agents to automate data transformation, analysis and report generation. Built in under three months using Microsoft’s Copilot platform, the initiative showcased how a small, focused team could achieve what traditionally required months of development and a large engineering footprint.
The Strategic Impact
- Speed to scale: What once took weeks now takes seconds, unlocking the ability to serve all clients.
- Service differentiation: Clients receive deeper insights, enhancing the bank’s value proposition more quickly.
- Revenue potential: A formerly bespoke service can now be offered at scale, creating new monetization pathways.
The Agentic System: A Team of Digital Specialists
The solution functions like a digital assembly line, with specialized agents handling distinct tasks — from data transformation to report generation. Each agent plays a specialized role, from cleaning raw data to assembling a polished client report.
The solution comprises five specialized agents, organized into two “teams”:
Payment Agents
Agent 1: Data Transformation – Converts raw payment data into structured tables.
Agent 2: Financial Reconciliation – Matches and verifies transactions.
Agent 3: Exception Handler – Uses external knowledge sources to explain and resolve discrepancies in payment data.
Client Insight Report Agents
Agent 4: Aggregator – Gathers all relevant data for report generation.
Agent 5: Client Insight Report Preparation – Generates a detailed client report.
Strategic Lessons from the Proof of Concept
Scotiabank’s Client Insight Report initiative offers clear takeaways for scaling AI with speed and impact:
- Start with client value, not technology – Begin with what clients care about, then use AI to scale it.
- Collaborate for speed and scale – Work with trusted third parties to move from idea to prototype quickly and reduce delivery risk.
- Frame the business case simply – Show how the solution helps deliver faster results, reach more clients, strengthen relationships and increase productivity.
It was very important for us to design a solution that can extend beyond the single use case. We have now set up the bank to deploy this solution, with minimal effort, to solve for other opportunities.
The Road Ahead
AI agents offer a powerful lever, not to replace human expertise, but to scale it. Scotiabank’s next move: extend agents across payment workflows, embed them into productivity tools, and identify rules to improve straight-through processing from patterns the agents recommend.
By removing manual bottlenecks from high-value services, the bank is redefining what excellence looks like in client delivery.
Scotiabank isn’t just automating tasks; it’s amplifying its ability to deliver premium services at scale. The shift from manual effort to intelligent execution turns operational constraints into strategic advantage and sets a new standard for service excellence in the era of AI.
We are very excited to position Scotiabank as one of our frontier clients at Microsoft. This solution is just the start of our partnership with the bank and EY.
Scotiabank will be sharing more on this journey at Sibos 2025. Explore our presence and learn more here.
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