Welcome to "Bloomberg Tech: Europe." This month, we are live in Turin, jumping deep into the heart of conversations about AI financing, development, deployment, and of course impact. On the show this month, we are focusing on banking, where AI employment is accelerating faster than ever. We will look at new vulnerabilities for banks and potentially for the financial system itself. In this episode, we will hear exclusively from Jamie Dimon, Revolut's Nik Storonsky, and Bending Spoons' Luca Ferrari.
But first, how quickly is AI spreading to the banking industry? The latest AI Index from Evident Insights shows us a pretty clear picture. The average bank's index score jumped 26% in the past year. That is almost three times the pace seen between 2023 to 2025. The leading banks now have roughly twice as many use cases per application area as the wider field. AI is shifting from general productivity tools into core workflows, including credit, fraud, customer verification, trading, and risk management.
Despite all the talk of AI causing layoffs, the Evident AI Index found the banks furthest ahead are still hiring AI specialists, with productivity gains largely being reinvested rather than used to cut headcount. JPMorgan remains in the top spot as the world's most AI-advanced bank for the fifth straight year. It is the only bank ranked first or second across all four Evident Index pillars of AI capability. Those are talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency.
In a moment, we will hear from Evident Insights' CEO and co-founder, who compiled the AI Index. First, let's hear from the man who runs the bank that tops the rankings. I spoke exclusively to JPMorgan's CEO Jamie Dimon about AI in London this week. He chairs a cross-industry coalition of U.S. corporate leaders working to protect critical systems against emerging AI threats.
AI has huge effects. I think it will cure a lot of diseases. It will make life unbelievable for people. The downside is obviously what you read about with the agents and Mythos and all these things. That is a legitimate concern. I am not getting hysterical over whether it is existential or not. But we are going to work to fix it. The banks have always had a system in place where we help each other. We also started a thing that started with 50 companies. It started in the U.S. It is across six industries: financial services, water, transport. These are industries that are a lifeline. But eventually, it expands to health care, pharma, agriculture. Every industry is kind of critical. Different vendors and different needs. We have to do it. We are always worried about cyber.
And you have thought about cyber risks for a long time.
Does AI make cyber systemic risks more likely?
Yeah. That is what I am saying. I said cyber is our biggest risk, and they hadn't published Mythos yet. It went up tenfold after Mythos.
Jamie Dimon speaking to me in London earlier this week. Let's go back now to the Evident AI Index, which benchmarks how major financial institutions are deploying AI across their organizations. Evident's CEO and co-founder explained to me what has changed in the past year and how quickly banks are putting AI to work.
What we are seeing now is the fastest pace of AI deployment we have seen to date. So that is one thing that comes out as a result. Of course, it's a lot of movement in the rankings, but the top three banks, led by JPMorgan in spot number one, followed by Capital One and RBC, remain the leading positions, which is really interesting because the pace of acceleration, the competitive pressures are really on, and they are moving really fast. It is just that those leading banks are moving even faster.
What does it tell us that the top three banks remain in that position a year later? Is it that when they adopt this technology it gives them that much more lead and it is that much more difficult for the competitors to catch up? Is that the dynamic we are seeing?
Yes. Two things. The common denominator among the three leading banks is JPMorgan established its research lab back in 2017. Jamie Dimon famously said in 2018, "We are going to be an AI-first organization." And from that flowed a lot of thinking early on, and pre-ChatGPT being released. How do we think about a bank being AI-led and how do we prepare for the changing dynamics of the financial services sector? Being early means you've got a head start in thinking about what the technology can do. You have reorganized your organization from a modern perspective. You start by centralizing, then you decentralize. You build the platform architecture that allows for speed in deploying GenAI and agentic AI fast and safely.
You also give the heads of your business in capital markets or investment banking or wealth management, asset management, the responsibility to deploy because they are closest to their own workflows, obviously. Then you fan out those specialists into business and functions. Now we are reaping the benefits of that early thinking.
You have data on hundreds of banks in Europe and the U.S. globally. What have you learned about the impact of AI on jobs, on the workforce? Are banks recruiting fewer people, fewer junior employees, or is that not the case?
This goes counter to the narrative we are seeing in the papers today. There's obviously been a big discussion around the job apocalypse, and I think Dario Amodei said that three years ago in 18 months 15% of white-collar workers would be gone. He obviously had not seen that rolled out. We have a very close front-row seat into what the enterprises investing most in AI, how it is impacting their employees in terms of jobs. We are seeing the opposite. We are seeing those banks and enterprises investing the most in AI are actually growing their headcount.
And the dynamics around that are, with this tooling, you are able to deal with all sorts of things you couldn't deal with before: backlog, being able to tackle problems you simply could not tackle before, new products that are spinning up. We are seeing headcount grow not only in those that are building the AI stack in the banks, but also non-technical talent: relationship managers, all sorts of people who are needed. Everyone is focusing on the jobs that are changing, and they are changing, don't get me wrong. Of course there will be much-needed call centers and looking at the process of onboarding. A lot of the document ingestion is now automated. But now new areas like monitoring more closely in high frequency that you could not before, it needs teams. I would say for every one job that is changing, you've got four new jobs coming up in the banks. I actually think that as a whole and over time AI will probably be the biggest job generator in decades.
That was Alexandra Mousavizadeh. Employees at HSBC are potentially unlikely to take much comfort from her upbeat assessment on AI and job creation. Bloomberg understands the bank plans to cut around half of all management and specialist positions at its U.K. wealth management business. The layoffs are said to be part of a broader push to use AI to serve affluent clients more efficiently. Impacted workers are expected to leave by the end of this month.
Coming up, Revolut's CEO's plan to take on U.S. banks and win. Our exclusive interview is next. This is Bloomberg.
Welcome back to "Bloomberg Tech: Europe," live from the Way By Tech conference in Turin. Taking on the biggest challenge yet, cracking the U.S. market. They are betting that their own tech stack can give it an edge over established banks. In an exclusive interview with Nik Storonsky in Turin, I asked how he plans to win in America.
We need to get full approval, then we will be a credit-first bank. We will launch credit cards, we will launch loans. It is a complete digital experience. The target audience is younger people, more affluent people, more people with a global background. I think we have a good chance. Even now, our existing business in the U.S., which is done with one of the banks, we have now invested a lot in this product. We are still growing in the U.S.
I know you're obsessed with product. U.S. consumers love their loyalty cards. They love their perks. You talked about what you are going to be offering. What kind of perks will you be offering to acquire those U.S. consumers?
Points as usual. Our offering will be with Amex or JPMorgan Chase.
Is the strategy in the U.S., is it about winning and dominating or raising the profile of Revolut? Jamie Dimon has spoken admiringly about you and Revolut, CEO of JPMorgan of course. Are you coming for his lunch?
You're coming for Jamie's dinner?
You have also talked at your listing, you expressed a preference for the U.S. The primary listing will be in the U.S. Can we assume that's how it is going to unfold?
That was always a target market, there is deep liquidity. Yeah.
Dual listing, U.K., U.S., primary in U.S.?
