Consumers want AI help with financial applications, not the keys

European consumers are far more open to AI helping with financial applications than making financial decisions for them. Signicat’s survey, reported by The AI Insider, found 65% welcome assistance while retaining control, but only 14% are comfortable with AI opening a financial product on their behalf.

Watch Desk analysis

What happened

The survey covered 4,050 consumers and 450 financial-services business leaders across nine European countries. Signicat found that 79% of providers said they were ready for AI-initiated applications, while only 11% of consumers wanted AI to complete an application for them.

Trust falls further at the identity and contract stage: 15% said they would trust AI to verify their identity to a bank, and 14% to sign an account-opening contract. The survey also found that 60% had abandoned an online financial application in the past year, most often over excessive information requests and lengthy processes.

Why it matters

Financial firms may be preparing to hand more work to AI, but the gap in these survey results is a reminder that technical readiness is not customer permission. People may welcome help with paperwork while still wanting the final say over money, identity and legal agreements.

That distinction matters for product design: a system that prepares an application for approval is not the same proposition as one that opens an account on someone’s behalf. The research was conducted online by Sapio Research in August 2026 for Signicat, an identity and fraud-prevention company; it captures reported attitudes, not how consumers will behave once these services are widely available.

Our read

The clearest signal here is not that consumers reject AI in finance. It is that they draw a line between assistance and delegation. Providers would be wise to design for that line, rather than treating “ready for AI” as a synonym for “customers are ready to let go”.

There is also an unglamorous opportunity hiding in the numbers: 60% of respondents said they had abandoned an online financial application. Making those forms less tedious may earn more trust than giving an agent permission to sign them.

What to watch

• Whether financial providers offer AI assistance while keeping customers in control of submissions and decisions.
• Whether adoption changes as people encounter agent-led financial applications in practice.
• Whether identity checks and safeguards such as “Know Your Agent” frameworks become visible to customers.

Discussion spark: Would you trust an AI agent to submit a financial application if you could review every detail first, or should identity checks and signatures always stay with the account holder?

Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.