By Alice Chambers |
Tyler Pichach, Microsoft’s global head of AI strategy and go-to-market for payments and banking, explored how AI is reshaping financial services at Sibos 2025. In two sessions, he highlighted how agentic AI can streamline operations and help fraud analysts work more effectively.
“Finance still relies on a lot of manual processes,” said Pichach in his first session, explaining that many organisations are only beginning to automate these tasks. He outlined the concept of the ‘frontier firm’ where firms adopt AI in phases, eventually deploying teams of intelligent agents to handle complex tasks.
Read Pichach’s definition of ‘frontier firm’ in the Autumn issue of Technology Record
Microsoft is enabling this transformation with tools such as the Microsoft365 Researcher agent, which uses reasoning models to run deep analyses, and Microsoft Fabric, which unifies data across an organisation. AI agents built into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Decision Intelligence Platform on Microsoft Azure help teams make sense of data and streamline decision-making.
The benefits of these tools include freeing up staff time to focus on higher-value activities and delivering more value to customers. Pichach also highlighted the role of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem, including AutoRek, FIS and OneStream, which are already leveraging AI to deliver practical solutions in financial services.
In his second session, Pichach focused on how AI can support fraud analysts. With scams on the rise, traditional analysis is limited by staffing, typically covering 100–150 cases at a time. Microsoft and its partners are helping analysts work smarter by training AI agents to act like fraudsters to help with flagging suspicious cases for human review.
Tools from partners like Quantexa make complex data easier to understand, while AU10TIX, BioCatch, iPiD and Symphony AI provide behavioural intelligence, facial biometrics, and backend automation to prevent fraud and stop scams before they escalate. By augmenting human expertise with AI, analysts can focus on high-value cases and make more confident decisions.