AI in Financial Services

Workflow Exercise Sample

The book pairs its analysis with practical exercises and reflection questions. This sample presents the guided capstone from Chapter 22. It asks readers to prioritize opportunities, design a workflow and defend a sourcing decision for a chosen financial institution.

The exercise brief

Five to eight hours, and suitable as a group capstone. Deliverable: a one-page agentic strategy snapshot for a chosen institution, supported by a completed Agentic Opportunity Prioritization Matrix for at least six candidate opportunities, a Human-Agent-System Swimlane Method diagram for the priority opportunity, a sourcing and operating-model recommendation, and an 18-month roadmap with named owners.

Choose a financial institution you can study in depth. Public disclosure is sufficient where an employer is not available, and the Indian and global cases in this chapter and in Chapters 18 to 21 provide the raw material for several.

Step 1: Build the opportunity list, and say where it came from. Identify at least six candidate agentic opportunities across the institution’s value chain. Record how each was identified, because the provenance of a list determines what is missing from it. Name at least one opportunity that no business unit would have proposed.

Step 2: Score the portfolio on the Prioritization Matrix. Apply all four axes, decomposing value into unit value, volume, and capture rate, scoring feasibility as a conjunction of its four conditions, separating severity, reversibility, and detectability in the consequence-of-error axis, and scoring strategic fit and reuse against the capabilities each opportunity would leave behind. Plot the quadrants. State explicitly what you are discarding and why.

Step 3: Test organizational willingness separately. For the top three opportunities, assess whether the owning business unit is prepared to redesign the workflow, and name the evidence for that judgment. Treat an unwilling unit as disqualifying and reorder accordingly. This step exists because it is the variable most strongly associated with realized returns and it is absent from the matrix by design.

Step 4: Draw the swimlane for the priority opportunity. Decompose the process into stages, apply the three-question Role Allocation Test to each, specify every handshake, populate the fallback lane, and place instrumentation at the boundaries.

Then subject every human review point to the falsification test set out in the Practitioner’s Lens, and move or redesign any stage that fails it.

Step 5: Make the sourcing and operating-model recommendation. Decide build, buy, or partner for each layer of the stack and justify it against the concentration findings in this chapter. State how the institution would exit a model provider, and how long that would take today. Specify the operating model: centralized, federated, or a center of excellence with delivery in the business, with the reporting line named. Identify whether any planned customization would make the institution a provider under the European regime, which turns on the three triggers the European regime sets, each of them keyed to whether the system is or becomes high-risk, and which carries the heavier obligation set if the answer is yes.

Step 6: Write the one-page snapshot and the roadmap. The snapshot states the institution’s agentic position in one page: where it will compete, the three opportunities it will fund, the capability it is building that outlasts them, its sourcing posture, and the two or three metrics its executive committee will review. The roadmap sequences eighteen months with named owners, decision points, and the metric that would cause each initiative to be stopped. State what the institution will disclose publicly, and what it will not.

Reflection questions

List six agentic opportunities in your institution and record how each was identified. What kind of opportunity does your identification process systematically fail to surface, and who would have to be in the room for it to appear?

Apply the capture-rate test to a business case you have seen. If the released hours are distributed in fragments across many people, who is accountable for converting them into anything, and what happens to the business case if nobody is?

For one agentic design in your institution, state for each human review point what error the reviewer is expected to catch and how they would see it. Which review points cannot survive that question?

Frameworks to use

The Agentic Opportunity Prioritization Matrix and the Human-Agent-System Swimlane Method provide the structure for the exercise. Read their complete explanations and worked applications in the sample chapter.