Retail banking distribution is being reshaped by a combination of AI, digital bank growth, and changing expectations about when and how customers want support from people with their financial needs. Customers in the United Kingdom and Europe are increasingly using different providers, interfaces, and channels across different parts of their financial lives — changing how and where banks can influence decisions, capture economic value, and differentiate through service.
Oliver Wyman’s 2026 survey of nearly 7,000 customers across nine European markets suggests that technology and competition are reshaping retail banking distribution across three battlegrounds: helping customers shape financial decisions, capturing the economic advantage, and determining the role AI, digital, people, and physical distribution should play.
How AI is transforming financial product research and advice
The first battleground in customer financial decision-making has already seen AI become a key additional layer in financial distribution. Forty-nine percent of customers are already willing to use AI for tailored financial advice, up 10 percentage points from our 2025 survey.
That growing receptiveness to use AI is also translating into influence over product choice. While incumbent banks remain the most common starting point for customers researching a new financial product, one in four ultimately say an external source — such as search, comparison websites, AI, or advisors — had the greatest influence on their final choice.
AI has already reached parity with comparison websites in financial product research: Almost one-quarter of customers use an AI assistant during research, compared with 23% who use comparison websites, a much more established channel. Customers with multiple bank accounts are approximately twice as likely to use AI during research as those with only one account.
AI adoption does not automatically translate into deeper AI-enabled relationships. Even though almost half of customers are willing to use AI for tailored financial advice, 39% are not yet comfortable sharing any financial data with an AI assistant. And fewer than half are comfortable sharing any individual type of financial data. The challenge for banks is therefore not only to demonstrate the value of AI, but also to earn the trust and data access needed to make it useful.
As of today, banks have a clear trust advantage in data security, while external AI performs better on perceptions of recommendation quality and innovation. The opportunity for incumbent banks, in particular, is not simply to launch an AI assistant, but to combine bank-grade trust and security with differentiated AI capabilities.
The growing battle for customer share of wallet in retail banking
The second battleground is over the economic relationship between customers and financial institutions. Digital bank adoption is already broad across the UK and Europe, but penetration alone tells only part of the story. The more important question is whether that adoption is turning into relationships that become economically deeper over time. As it stands, 72% of digital bank customers already use their digital bank as their main or joint-primary account or say they are likely to make it their main account in the future.
The flow of money into those accounts suggests digital banks are starting to win that contest. Among customers with a digital-only bank, 50% moved more money into digital banks over the past year, while just 3% moved money out. Digital providers are also capturing meaningful wallet share: One-quarter of digital bank customers route more than half of their salary into digital banks, and 23% hold more than half of their savings there.
Most strikingly, digital banks are moving beyond just transactions and niche areas of banking, such as travel-related, into higher-value financial customer needs. Already, for example, among digital bank customers, 34% mainly use a digital-only bank for saving, compared with 37% who mainly use a traditional bank — effectively near parity. Salary and borrowing, however, remain much more firmly anchored with traditional banks, at least for now.
For banks, this means “main bank” status is increasingly an incomplete measure of economic primacy. The more revealing answers concern which bank receives the customer’s salary, which holds their savings, and which captures the bulk of their spending and borrowing.
Trust alone does not protect those flows. Among digital bank customers who moved more money into digital providers over the past year, 47% still trust traditional banks more to keep their money safe.
As these relationships deepen, traditional banks need to convert their trust advantage into relevance — earning a greater share of customers’ financial activity and the next incremental flow of money. Solving more of the customer's financial needs that matter and earning the next incremental flow is part of a deeper relationship.
Rethinking human expertise and bank branches in the age of AI
The third battleground concerns where customers seek help when making financial decisions. The future is unlikely to involve simple choices between AI and humans. Sixty-two percent of customers are open to AI-supported financial advice — but almost eight in 10 of those customers still want a human involved in some way.
That demand for human involvement is strongest when the stakes are high. Fifty-one percent of customers prefer to speak with a person about account problems, with similarly strong demand around mortgages, major financial decisions, and fraud or security concerns.
At the same time, human involvement is becoming less dependent on physical proximity. Forty-six percent are comfortable handling important financial needs remotely, up 13 percentage points from our 2025 survey.
This suggests that human expertise could be concentrated where judgment, reassurance, and trust genuinely help with customer decisions, rather than using expensive human capacity for routine activities.
That matters because much of today’s branch demand is still driven by routine activity. Cash remains the biggest driver of regular branch use: 57% of regular branch visitors cite cash as a reason for visiting, compared with 35% of occasional visitors. At the same time, routine balance checks and payments have overwhelmingly migrated to digital channels. The opportunity is therefore not to eliminate human access, but to move avoidable branch demand to digital channels and focus physical capacity on advice, problem-solving and reassurance.
The strategic challenge, then, is not simply whether to close or retain branches. It is about optimizing in-person access by migrating straightforward transactions to digital and AI channels while preserving seamless access to human expertise when it matters.
Three battlegrounds defining the future of retail banking
Across all three battlegrounds, banks do not need to own everything. But they do need to make explicit choices about which decisions they can influence, which economic flows they must defend, and where AI or human expertise creates real differentiation.
This will not be straightforward, especially for incumbent players, but it does offer a potentially winning solution if they can harness the latest AI and digital technologies alongside their existing advantages in trust and personal relationships. As customers choose to distribute their financial relationships across more firms and interfaces, the winners will be those that best leverage their existing advantages in line with emerging customer trends and translate them into influence over decisions, financial relevance, and deeper economic relationships.