The End of Shopping? Agentic AI and the Future of Consumer Financial Services Introduction

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In the Consumer Finance Monitor podcast we are releasing today, Alan Kaplinsky, founder and former chair for 25 years and now Senior Counsel of the Consumer Financial Services Group, spoke with Professor Mark Bartholomew of the University at Buffalo School of Law, co-author with Professor Samuel Becher of “The End of Shopping,” a forthcoming article in the William & Mary Law Review. The article explores how autonomous shopping agents could transform consumer commerce and raises fundamental questions concerning consumer autonomy, privacy, competition and consumer protection.

The implications for financial services are especially significant. Consumers could use AI agents to select credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, insurance policies, bank accounts, certificates of deposit and investment products. An agent potentially could compare thousands of offerings in seconds and execute a transaction that a consumer might otherwise never undertake because of the time and complexity involved.

For banks, lenders, insurers, credit-card issuers and investment firms, agentic AI could reduce customer-acquisition costs, increase switching and intensify competition. But it also could make technology companies the principal gatekeepers between financial institutions and their customers. The company controlling the agent could determine which products consumers see, how those products are compared and whether a particular provider receives the consumer’s business.

Agentic AI also presents difficult legal and policy questions. Who is responsible when an AI agent makes a mistake? What happens when an agent has a financial incentive to steer a consumer toward a particular provider? Are existing disclosure, fair-lending, privacy, advertising and investor-protection rules adequate when the “consumer” making the initial decision is effectively an algorithm?

Key Topics Discussed:

• Why Financial Services May Be an Especially Attractive Use Case
• Implications for Banks, Lenders, Insurers and Investment Firms
• Who Is Making the Decision?
• Conflicts of Interest and Self-Dealing
• Consumer Protection Law May Have to Change
• Fair Lending, Insurance and Investment Concerns
• The Need for Guardrails
• Competition and Data Portability
• Privacy and Cybersecurity Risks Will Increase
• What Should Financial Institutions Do Now?
• Do We Need a New AI Regulator?
• Don’t Lock in the Wrong Rules
• What Does the Future Hold?

Consumer Finance Monitor is hosted by Alan Kaplinsky, Senior Counsel at Ballard Spahr, and the founder and former chair of the firm's Consumer Financial Services Group. We encourage listeners to subscribe to the podcast on their preferred platform for weekly insights into developments in the consumer finance industry.

View a transcript of the recording here.

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