📘 The Playbook: Measure cost where the work happens
Bank of America's group efficiency ratio was 66% in Q3 2026. Its Consumer Banking segment ran at 50%, with a 31% return on allocated capital (Bank of America). One number hides the other. Our read: the same release hints at where that retail cost line is heading:
Fewer branches, more digital sales. Financial centers fell to 3,531 from 3,649 a year earlier, while 71% of Consumer Banking sales were digitally enabled and 24.2M clients actively used its Erica assistant, up 18% (same source).
AI spread wide, not deep (our read). "With more than 200,000 teammates using AI tools and 300-plus approved use cases across the company, we are turning our scale into a competitive advantage," said Chair and CEO Brian Moynihan (same source).
How to adopt it. Stop debating your group cost-to-income ratio and split it by segment, then by process: onboarding, servicing, disputes. For each one, ask what share now runs through a digital channel. The segment with the highest ratio and the lowest digital share is your first target.
📘 The Playbook: OCBC's AI sparring partner for advisors
The problem. OCBC's 900 wealth advisors in Singapore could wait up to three weeks for a one-on-one practice session, because each supervisor coaches up to 10 people on top of their day job. That meant uneven feedback from one supervisor to the next (OCBC).
The method.
AI plays the customer. A gen-AI tool, built over 12 months on anonymised customer-behaviour insights, plays realistic clients: building a portfolio, profiling risk, adjusting to market moves.
Practise on demand. Advisors rehearse as often as they want on their work devices.
AI writes the gap report, humans do the coaching. Each session produces a gap analysis for the supervisor, so in-person coaching goes straight to the weak spots.
Reported result. In the first three months, trained advisors booked twice as many weekly client appointments as peers who hadn't done the programme yet, and saw a 50% revenue uplift versus the prior three months (OCBC's figures). Malaysia and Hong Kong are next.
How to adopt it. Pick one high-value conversation your front line has every day, such as a mortgage refinance or an SME credit review. Script five realistic customer personas. Use AI for repetition and scoring, and save managers' time for coaching on the gaps. Then run a fair test: compare trained and untrained groups over the same period.
