Most banks aren't building their own agents. They're renting them.
Bank Director's 2026 Technology Survey found that 83% of banks using agentic AI get it embedded in third-party software. Another 44% pay vendors to build custom tools. Only 48% build anything in-house. And while 72% of banks have implemented generative AI, just 30% are using agents at all.
Renting is faster. It also means someone else decides what the agent can see, how it reasons, and what happens when it gets a number wrong. In an industry where every output can end up in front of an auditor, that's a lot to hand over.
Francesco Galletta and Felippe Felisola Caso went the other way. Today at 9:00 in McCarthy, their workshop, Stop Chatting With Spreadsheets, walks through building a financial analyst harness a team can trust. On Tuesday at 11:55, they explain why third-party agents weren't cutting it at their bank, and why they built their own.
For more build-it-yourself, stay in the workshop rooms. At 11:05 in Sutton, Ignacio Martinez shows how to build a memory-aware agent harness for financial crime detection. Learn and then try it yourself.
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