The new research outlines strategies to help community banks and credit unions harness the power of generative AI for operational efficiency, growth, and cost savings
PLANO, Texas, May 29, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Hapax, an unprecedented AI solution for the financial services industry, in partnership with Cornerstone Advisors, a leading management and technology consultancy, today released The Playbook for Generative AI-Driven Productivity Improvement for Community Banks and Credit Unions.
AI adoption in financial services is shifting gears, from testing to deployment. By 2025, 35% of community financial institutions are expected to have chatbots, and 25% will be utilizing machine learning. McKinsey estimates that AI could automate up to 50% of banking tasks, leading to significant cost savings, while Accenture forecasts a 20-30% reduction in operational costs for banks and credit unions over the next five years.
Yet the reality today is that banking and credit union deployment of generative AI tools remains limited, with the success of these tools siloed. In fact, only one in five financial services institutions are using, or plan to use, generative AI for functions like IT, compliance, credit services, finance/accounting, or legal.
To ensure long-term AI success, the report's key findings suggest:
- Start where human-level frustration lives: Banks and credit unions are swimming in a sea of information, much of which lives in disparate documents with no central visibility. This leads to frustration for employees who spend countless hours searching for and validating the information they need to make business-level decisions. When applied to this knowledge management function, AI-powered assistants deliver fast, accurate answers in seconds.
- Expand into compliance: Compliance is a cornerstone for financial services institutions, yet it's hard to manually keep pace with changing regulations. AI-powered systems process and analyze regulatory changes in real time, ensuring financial institutions remain compliant without excessive manual intervention.
- Empower personal productivity: Financial services have grappled with a shrinking labor pool for years, yet fear of AI replacing human jobs remains. This is short-sighted as integrating AI into individual workflows allows for a more efficient, engaged, and satisfied workforce that is equipped with the tools they need to leave the mundane behind and focus on higher-value work.
"AI is about unlocking new growth opportunities for financial institutions," said Ron Shevlin, Chief Research Officer of Cornerstone Advisors, and author of the report. "For instance, banks that treat AI as infrastructure could scale customer personalization from 10,000 to 1 million users without having to grow headcount or IT spend linearly. But the key to a successful AI future will always lie in the ability to balance innovation with responsible AI governance."
"AI adoption isn't one static moment in time, it's a journey that starts with the right tools, strategy, and implementation that can be fine-tuned, tracked, and optimized ongoingly," said Kevin Green, CMO at Hapax. "This requires a true behavior shift for banks and credit unions, who have to think long-term strategy, not short-term gains. Short-sighted investments in point solutions today will not provide the value they seek as the tech advances, making it paramount to choose the right technology platform that provides industry-grade security, robust permissions and controls and clear understanding of the data sources out of the gate."
To learn more, download the full report here https://www.askhapax.ai/cornerstone-report
About Hapax
Hapax is a purpose-built Generative AI platform for the financial services industry, leveraging a custom Large Language Model (LLM) leveraging over a decade of proprietary data, including 20,000+ documents, 10,000+ hours of video, and 230,000+ strategic banker conversations. Combined with an institution's own data, the Hapax Intelligence Core centralizes and continuously learns from both external and internal documents, delivering accurate, validated responses tailored to the needs of highly regulated financial institutions. Hapax empowers banks and credit unions alike to create and execute workflows with context-aware, standards-aligned, and institution-specific decision-making, driving measurable business outcomes from day one. To learn more, visit https://www.askhapax.ai.
Media Contact
Colin O'Brien, Hapax, 617-459-1337, [email protected], https://www.askhapax.ai/
SOURCE Hapax
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