As customer expectations evolve, regulatory costs surge and revenue margins tighten, CGI Voice of Our Clients research reveals the top trends and priorities of retail banking executives in 2025. Interviews with 109 business and technology executives reveal key insights related to:

  • Enhancing the customer experience: A digital experience is no longer a differentiator; it’s a threshold.
  • Strengthening compliance: Compliance has moved from a legal issue to a strategic constraint.
  • Driving revenue: Retail banks are rethinking their revenue engines, shifting toward adjacent models like wealth management, insurance and sustainability-as-a-service.

In this video, we dive deeper into pressing issues for executives and share how advanced technologies like GenAI are enabling them to address those issues.

At CGI, we help retail banks digitally transform to achieve strategic business outcomes—from achieving sustainable growth, to driving operational efficiencies, to enhancing the customer experience.

Video transcript

A new era in retail banking

Retail banking is entering a new era. One shaped by technology and competing priorities. While AI and the cloud once dominated innovation, today executives point to more foundational factors for success: end-to-end digital modernization and mobile-first self-service.

These capabilities now top their priority list because they're indispensable to serving newer generations. Nearly 60% of executives cite modernizing infrastructure and applications as their top IT priority.

Addressing regulatory cost, talent and customer expectation challenges

At the same time, retail banks face major challenges. Regulatory costs are surging. Talent is thinning. Customer expectations are increasing.

Retail banks are no longer racing toward the future. They're rebuilding their present with speed and agility to meet the ever-increasing digital talent needs.

Many retail banks are building up their internal academies and joint ventures with external entities, as well as having a more junior digital talent supply chain. We also see that flexible work models and brand positioning are key to attracting talent.

Digital acceleration, mobile-first and other key trends

Our Voice of Our Clients research, based on interviews with 109 retail banking executives, reveals three emerging trends, which together signal a tipping point.

  1. Digital experience is no longer a differentiator, it's a baseline. Nearly 90% of executives cite technology and digital acceleration as their top macro trend.

    The younger customer base expects friction-free, AI-powered experiences, and because they can switch providers with a screen tap, banks must create and treat mobile-first journeys, not just as a nice to have, but as a baseline necessity.

    I think the survey confirmed the status of where we are when it comes to generative AI. It is something that many banks across the globe are really focusing on, and there is a lot of buzz and talk about it.

    But, when we look a little bit under the hood, we can see that there are quite a few initiatives that actually provide value today. So, I think we can envision a future quite soon where many organizations are taking the next step in order to deploy this internally, at scale.

  2. Compliance has moved from a regulatory topic to a strategic constraint, in Europe and Canada especially, diverting innovation budgets and slowing AI adoption.

  3. Retail banks are rethinking their revenue engines. Nearly 60% of executives say driving sustainable growth is their top business priority. With loan demand down and credit risk up, they're shifting toward adjacent models like wealth management, insurance and sustainability as a service.

    But, without digital scale and customer trust, it's a challenge to execute these strategic shifts quickly. What's emerging isn't just a need for new technology. There's a need for new discipline in modernization, outcomes measurement, and managing the long-term interplay between growth and governance.

    Based on the latest insights from CGI’s Voice of Our Clients research, we see banking executives moving away from doing things piece by piece and trying to get more over spanning projects to avoid duplicating costs for the same thing in many places, as well as enabling a better and smoother audit process across the entire enterprise.

Case in point: Leading retail bank modernizes wire payments

A leading North American bank set out to modernize its wire payment systems, phasing out legacy platforms and preparing for the SWIFT ISO 20022 mandate. The effort included new applications to handle wire traffic and capture operational data for real-time reporting and analytics.

In partnership with CGI, the bank introduced automation that significantly reduced manual processes. Entry tasks in the new wire engine were cut by 70%. A custom validation utility improved testing speed, comparing 1000 records in just 30 minutes. Testing cycles were streamlined. Data seeding time dropped from three weeks to five days, and automation and analytics testing reduced manual effort by half. All of which created a scalable future-ready payments foundation.

The result of this modernization is a resilient payment system designed to meet today's compliance needs and ready to support tomorrow's innovation.

Building the retail bank of the future

Our Voice of Our Clients insights show that retail banking is no longer about chasing the next big thing. It's about getting the current things right, and fast.

Banks thriving in this environment treat compliance as an enabler, not a speed bump, deploy AI where it creates value today, and see modernization not as a technology project, but as a path to strategic agility.

Executives are building the retail bank of the future. One smart step and one innovative platform at a time.