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Protected: AI in retail banking: closing the gap between ambition and adoption in DACH

By Emanuel Hammerer, Katalin Nagy, Anna Strohbach, Anita Yan

10/07/2026
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Reading time: 5 minutes

There is a clear gap in AI adoption: in banking in DACH, most AI use cases remain confined to the back office, employee capabilities and training lag behind global benchmarks, and high-impact, customer-facing use cases remain largely untapped.

To understand the reasons for that, this study combined desk research with nine in-depth interviews with AI specialists working across the DACH banking sector, focusing on retail banking as the region’s largest and most competitive segment and the one where AI can be scaled the most.

This article answers the following five questions:

You should now be able to talk about these key points of the article:

As part of the International Business Project required for their CEMS degree, students (Paweł Domitrz, Dmitry Ganzha, Zisheng Liu, Julian Müller, Alexander Oniushkin and Jan Steffen Toben) conducted a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of AI in retail banking. They completed this project with the help of zeb – Emanuel Hammerer, Katalin Nagy, Anna Strohbach and Anita Yan (with support by Nikola Jelicic, Expert Partner at zeb).