Stop that. Do this.
Fintech experts with visibility into high-performing firms’ CX and growth strategies were anything but mealymouthed during last week’s LinkedIn Live event. In a candid exchange, executives from Amazon and TTEC shared bold best practices during a panel discussion titled, “How to turn fintech operations into an AI-powered growth engine.”
A dominant theme centered squarely on the holy grail: End-to-end unified customer experience. Fintech upstarts made “unified” a priority from the get-go with their digital-first advantage, prompting TradFi firms to modernize but there’s still much left to do. High-performing outfits are upping the ante again by leveraging AI to enrich customer engagement and outpace competitors.
AI maturity: Move past pockets
Jing Zhang, Amazon Connect AI Services’ go-to-market lead, said AI’s role was discussed widely by fintechs last year but 2026 has been a year of AI engagement and results. She broke down AI maturity into four stages, citing MIT research — experimenting, expanding, scaling, transforming — and noted it’s the latter two stages where AI does the heavy lifting foundational to a unified strategy.
“It’s no longer a technology problem,” she said. “It’s more about operational changes in addition to technology.”
A unified plan that enables customers to achieve their goals with less effort leverages AI at every touchpoint in the lifecycle from discovery, trial, and purchase to post-sale, and services, she said. “That means it’s not only customer support. There will be IT. There will be product teams. There will also be sales, marketing, and all different layers of your customer journey.”
TTEC Digital’s Will Tracy agreed, saying some fintechs are “experimenting with AI in pockets,” which curtails the ability to become proactive and predictive.
As sales leader for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tracy said it’s his observation that one division in an organization wants to deploy a bot for one purpose and another division wants to deploy AI for a different purpose. “Being able to unify that across channels, product lines, and across departments is where the unified strategy is starting to come together.”
Ray Klostermann, client executive, at TTEC, offered a unified strategy example familiar to many: “The cool thing about what Amazon does is when you ask for a refund, you trigger your own refund. You move from a simple chatbot interaction to an autonomous agent experience that executes on your behalf — and a human wasn’t involved.
“So that’s leveraging AI to fulfill the ideal great experience, which is: ‘I had a problem. Solve the problem. Can I have my money back?’”
Easy onboarding, no interrogation
Klostermann reeled it back to the fintech world, pointing to the onboarding process and the necessary Know Your Customer (KYC) interactions, often the first experience customers and merchants have with a brand.
“Fintechs are blending together CX and AI to create an effortless onboarding experience. They’ve taken the ‘interrogation’ out of the onboarding process. That’s what if feels like, that you’re being interrogated and you really don’t want to be part of that experience going forward.”
Rethink KPIs, focus on outcomes
Amazon’s Zhang and the other panelists agreed that change management is key consideration on the path to a unified strategy: Will your corporate culture adapt to new ways of thinking, operating, and even measuring success? Will traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) remain relevant?
“Average handle time. Average handle time. Average handle time,” said Klostermann in an animated fashion, for effect. “That’s always been the legacy metric.” Focus instead, he said, on outcomes. For instance, digital-first fintech brands focus on zero-touch resolution.
That’s what the everyone wants, ultimately. With AI, the correct data, and analytics brands can gain insights to a customer’s persona, how they spend money and use that intelligence to offer a loan. Coveted loan origination rates are far more appealing than claiming that AHT has been reduced 3%.
Tracy said a big focus is fintechs trying to be more proactive through other channels and digitally native channels first. “It’s a term we call ‘containment,’ which is essentially: How many interactions don't have to make it to a human, and what does that percentage look like?
Fintechs are moving away from activity-based measuring, like AHT, and instead looking at outcomes to measure success, said Klostermann.
Zhang returned to the four stages of AI maturity and encouraged companies to resist getting stuck in stages one and two (experimenting, expanding) and push ahead to stages three and four (scaling, transforming) to reap the full benefits of a unified AI strategy.
“I recommend an AI checklist. Have a data maturity plan. Make sure you have a technology infrastructure plan, organizational readiness, governance, and trust. Those five pillars are very critical for AI adoption overall to be able to scale and transform.
“You are not going to be there on one day, but have an overview and start small and you’ll eventually get to the vision. Go for it.”
To get the lowdown on the full Amazon-TTEC panel conversation, check out the LinkedIn Live event on demand: “How to turn fintech operations into an AI-powered growth engine.”
