Consumer banks are making two large investments that look, at first glance, like they contradict each other: pouring capital into branch networks while racing to deploy generative AI designed to keep customers out of branches entirely. In “Meeting the Bank Where the Customer Is,” TLCx Vice President of Banking and Financial Services Solutions Katia Acciarresi explains why this isn’t a contradiction — it’s one strategy playing out on two fronts — and what it means for the BPO partners banks rely on to deliver it.
Katia Acciarresi points to the numbers behind both bets. Bank of America’s EricaAssist now supports more than 18,000 customer service representatives with real-time guidance in under three seconds, while Fifth Third’s AI assistant, Jeanie, has lifted self-service containment from 3 percent to 42 percent. At the same time, Bank of America is opening 150 new branches, PNC is targeting 300 by 2030, and JPMorgan Chase has committed to roughly 500 new locations, including a tripling of its presence in Alabama. Digital channels absorb routine, high-volume servicing, Katia Acciarresi writes, while human channels — branch staff and contact center agents alike — are redeployed toward the moments that actually build or defend a deposit relationship.
For BPO partners, Katia Acciarresi argues, this changes the job itself. The routine call volume that used to fill a queue is shrinking, and what remains is more complex, higher-stakes, and more consequential to a bank’s growth targets. Partners who built their value proposition on handling volume at scale need a different offer: agents who can operate inside AI-assisted workflows, absorb surge demand from branch build-outs, support small-business digital banking, and do it all inside the governance frameworks banks are now formalizing for AI use.
Katia Acciarresi breaks down what this dual investment means channel by channel. In contact centers, the calls that still reach a live agent are, by definition, the ones AI couldn’t resolve — more complex account issues, more fraud disputes, more customers who are already frustrated because they tried the bot first. Agents also increasingly need to sell, not just resolve, as banks like Citizens Financial Group shift toward smaller branch footprints built around advice and relationship banking.
In branch support, expansion at this scale is a staffing and onboarding problem before it’s anything else. Katia Acciarresi cites PNC’s FirstBank conversion, which moved 1,620 employees and roughly 780,000 customers onto a new platform in a single event, and Huntington’s Cadence conversion, which transitioned 4,500 colleagues and onboarded hundreds of thousands of customers — exactly the kind of surge event where a flexible, quickly scalable outsourced workforce keeps a bank’s own staff from being overwhelmed.
In small-business digital banking, Katia Acciarresi notes that banks like US Bank, Fifth Third, and KeyBank are pushing self-service further into territory that used to belong to a relationship banker — which means small-business customers increasingly need support channels that understand small-business banking specifically, not generic retail servicing.
On multilingual and underserved markets, she points to TD’s Spanish-language rollout as a template: generative AI accelerated translation work across nearly 1,000 mobile app screens, but human review still handled quality assurance. AI for speed, trained people for accuracy and trust, Katia Acciarresi writes, is a pattern likely to repeat as banks expand into new geographies.
And on governance, she frames TD’s enterprise-wide Responsible AI Principles as a signal, not an isolated move. As AI takes on a larger share of customer-facing work, banks are formalizing how it can be used — and they’ll expect any partner touching those workflows to operate inside those standards, not beside them.
Katia Acciarresi closes with three shifts BPO partners need to internalize: the work is more complex, not less, because AI has already absorbed the simple volume; it’s increasingly event-driven rather than steady-state, shaped by build-outs, conversions, and acquisitions; and it now sits inside AI-assisted, governed workflows rather than alongside them. “Banks are not choosing between branches and AI, or between digital and human channels,” she writes. “They are building both, deliberately, because each does something the other cannot. The BPO partners who keep pace will be the ones who stop thinking about channels as separate lines of business and start building for the handoffs between them.”
Download the White Paper: Meeting the Bank Where the Customer Is
