According to BCG’s Building Next-Gen Primary Banking Relationships report, 60-70% of users that banks and fintechs attract through digital channels never activate without additional effort. People sign up but do not fund their accounts and then forget about the app.
“Activation and digital usage needs to be promoted in branches and call centers,” the report says. “Front-office colleagues should be trained on the mobile app and coach customers during branch visits or calls.”
“Best-practice players have created a portfolio of about 100 specific activation campaigns delivered in a highly personalized manner based on actual customer behaviors rather than following a rigid pre-determined sequence of communications,” the report adds.
Here are BCG’s recommendations for activating users acquired via digital channels, tailored for banks and financial institutions:
- “Banks need to ensure accounts are immediately enabled for usage (e.g., digitally provision debit cards, enable payments, and reward first wave of transactions).”
- “Additional offers could include seamless methods for direct-deposit linkage (e.g., payroll-deposit redirect), mobile bill-pay tutorials, and rewards for loyalty-program sign-up and usage.”
- “Campaigns should encourage customers to fund and use their accounts by gamifying the experience to drive behaviors that establish primacy: ‘hook pricing’ for activation (e.g., ‘pay-for-transacting’), ecosystem offers, and promotional savings rates for highly transacting customers.”
The report also recommends changing staff-incentive systems to avoid conflicts between digital and offline channels and to align on unified goals: incentives should focus on cross-channel collaboration rather than short-term, channel-specific attribution.
It also provides benchmarks to test a bank’s success in achieving primacy:
- Fully digital new-to-bank sales: >50%
- Funnel pull-through rate: >90%
- Percentage of active customers at 6 months: 60–70%
How to Activate Bank Customers with AI
With modern communications-automation platforms, banks can tailor their outreach using voice synthesis, SMS, chat, and email. Yet phone calls remain the primary touchpoint for banks.
Many market players began experimenting with voice-automation systems for support, activation, and even debt collection four to five years ago. They operated strictly by script – asking misplaced questions, poorly reacting to tonal shifts, and overall remaining quite rigid. As a result, they were mostly used for standardized outreach to cut contact-center costs.
Over the past year, however, the quality of voice synthesis has improved dramatically. “Conversational quality (latency, interruptibility, emotion, etc.) is now largely a solved problem, with voice agents equaling or outperforming BPOs/call centers. This progress has been driven by OpenAI’s real-time voice model and the introduction of new models from other providers, such as ElevenLabs’s Conversational AI,” writes Olivia Moore, partner on the consumer-investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
According to a16z, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) firms account for 25% of the contact-center market share – and they are expected to become among the chief adopters of these new customer-communication AI technologies.
AI Voice Agents: 2025 Update (Andreessen Horowitz)Let’s frame how AI can help banks with customer activation. There are two key points to understand:
- AI operates autonomously – it does not require contact-center staff involvement.
- AI does not work in isolation from CRM – it knows everything about the person it’s engaging.
Thus, AI agents can deliver a deeply personalized experience – helping customers exactly where they need it – while scaling effortlessly.
The industry standard for AI-agent billing now mirrors cloud pricing: you pay for the number of agents you use. This lets companies flexibly respond to marketing pushes and seasonal demand swings. You can spin up many agents on Black Friday and dial back during holiday lulls.
Using AI agents can reduce contact-center costs by up to 60% – this is what we observe at Solda AI among our clients.
Here’s an example of how a Solda.AI’s sales agent handles an activation drop-off scenario.Another factor that, according to Olivia Moore, drives strong AI-agent adoption is their ability to outperform contact centers. In activation or sales calls, Solda.AI’s agents can convert up to 50% better than human teams. Several reasons explain this.
Why do AI agents drive more conversions?
- AI agents are trained on calls from top sales performers (and from the worst performers, so they don’t repeat their mistakes) and continuously learn and refine with each conversation.
- AI agents have no problem calling outside regular hours or within 30 seconds of registration.
- AI agents do not fear rejection, They remain polite yet persistent without stress or embarrassment – and people respond positively.
- They achieve higher connect rates through adaptive smart-dialing algorithms that optimize callback timing.
There are dozens of market research studies that, in sum, state: “slow communication means slow growth.”
That is why AI agents make it possible to maintain hundreds of individualized activation scenarios – each triggered by events in the CRM. And turning a 70% non-activation rate into a 70% activation benchmark is an achievable goal with AI.
Building Next-Gen Primary Banking Relationships (BCG)
“With recent advances in AI, we are now in a position where every client interaction can be hyper-personalized and controlled by a central orchestration “brain” which will learn from ongoing customer interactions and balance continuously between client needs and the bank’s engagement goals.” – the BCGs report concludes.
AI-Driven Activation Scenarios for Banks and Fintechs
In 2025, many banks and fintechs are using AI agents to run activation campaigns. At Solda.AI, we do this for companies such as Plata, Vivid Money, and tbi Bank – and it delivers not only new users but also millions of dollars per month in revenue. See our tbi Bank case study: How Solda’s AI agent earned an additional $1 M+ in new business volume for tbi Bank.
To make AI-driven activation more tangible, we’ve outlined a set of real-world scenarios that illustrate how banks and fintechs can use voice agents to address common drop-off points and drive meaningful engagement.
1. No First Transaction
The user has opened an account but hasn’t conducted any transactions.
AI Agent Action: Makes a proactive voice call to understand the user’s needs, then follows up via chat with step-by-step instructions and support while offering a reward for the first payment.
Outcome: The user completes their first transaction, activating full account functionality.
2. Verification Not Completed
The user downloaded the app but didn’t finish identity verification.
AI Agent Action: Makes a friendly call to ask what held up the registration, then walks the user through each verification step live on the call – collecting any feedback and resolving issues in real time.
Outcome: The user completes identity verification during the call, and the bank gains actionable insights into drop-off points to streamline the process for future users.
3. Card Not Added to Mobile Wallet
The user hasn’t linked their debit card to Apple Pay or Google Pay.
AI Agent Action: Makes a proactive call to guide the user through adding their card, then follows up in chat with a one-click setup link and a bonus incentive for their first tap-to-pay.
Outcome: The user links their card to the mobile wallet and completes a contactless payment.
4. Bill-Pay Not Activated
The user hasn’t set up any bill payments.
Agent Action: Offers a step-by-step tutorial, suggests establishing recurring payments, and awards a small reward for the first bill paid.
Outcome: The user activates bill pay functionality and adopts it as a regular habit.
5. Dormant After Five Days
The user opened an account but hasn’t returned in over five days.
Agent Action: Checks in via phone to see how things are going, then drops into chat a three-day engagement challenge and highlights popular app features.
Outcome: The user re-engages with the app and resumes regular usage.
That is how AI agents address the pressing activation challenges banks and fintechs face. Triggered by specific behavioral cues, they operate autonomously to execute processes that would otherwise require hundreds or even thousands of contact-center staff.
Upsell, cross-sell, KYC, retention calls, lead qualification – there are multiple use cases where AI is successfully applied in banks and fintechs. Activation is only the first but not the only stage of the customer journey that can be streamlined by leveraging voice AI agents.
Conclusion: key facts to remember:
- Banks and fintechs typically see 60-70% of digitally acquired users fail to activate without follow-up interventions.
- BCG’s core benchmarks for primacy are:
- 50% of new-to-bank sales executed end-to-end online
- 90% funnel pull-through rate
- 60-70 % of users active after six months
- AI agents can lift activation and sales-call conversions by up to 50% versus human teams.
- Contact-center costs drop by as much as 60% when banks deploy AI-powered voice agents.
- Solda AI clients report millions of dollars in incremental monthly revenue through AI-driven activation.
- AI agents operate autonomously, requiring zero live-agent intervention for standard activation flows.
- Real-time CRM integration enables hyper-personalized outreach – each scenario triggered by customer behaviors.
- AI-agent billing mirrors cloud pricing: banks pay only for the agents they use, enabling rapid scaling for peak demand.
- Slow communication means slow growth – AI agents can solve it.
- Hundreds of bespoke activation campaigns can be maintained at scale, each fine-tuned through continuous learning loops.
- By turning a 70 % non-activation rate into a 70 % activation outcome, AI agents transform customer primacy from aspiration into an achievable goal.
Contact Solda.AI to design and deploy AI-driven activation campaigns that drive measurable revenue.
