“AI-first thinking is non-negotiable” was the subject line of an internal message I shared with our team, challenging them to integrate AI tools into their daily workflows, design products that interact naturally with AI, and embrace it as a supportive, productivity-boosting partner. (Spoiler alert: the preliminary results have transformed our code productivity, product time-to-market, and team morale.)
Yet, despite its immense promise, many financial institutions continue to underestimate or even resist the transformative power of AI-driven innovation. Many are trying to bolt it on after the fact, hoping incremental change will keep them competitive. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can’t just integrate AI—you must reimagine integration altogether.
The next era of financial services will be defined not by how many systems a bank or credit union runs, but by how intelligently those systems work together.
We all have an integration problem. What’s yours?
For years, the rapid expansion of SaaS applications has led to a tangled web of point-to-point connections between core systems and external platforms. What was meant to streamline operations has become brittle, expensive, and a significant drag on innovation. This legacy integration problem—marked by manual coding, fragmented data, and rigid infrastructure—is no longer sustainable (I’ve been saying this for years).
Some financial institutions (FIs) have taken steps to address it, layering on vendor middleware to abstract the complexity. But that often just shifts the problem. If you still rely on rigid, vendor-controlled middleware, the integration burden remains, especially as you scale. You may have bought time, but not flexibility.
If FIs persist on this linear path, they face the stark choice of continually hiring to keep pace or conceding to slower, less competitive operations.
There’s a new integration problem in town. And it’s a big one.
With the rise of AI, a new layer of complexity is surfacing.
AI demands real-time data, system-wide orchestration, and intelligent decision-making that crosses product, platform, and departmental lines. It’s no longer enough to connect systems—those systems must interact seamlessly, dynamically, and at scale. AI becomes challenging to deploy, govern, or extend across the organization without a modern integration approach.
According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI Survey, AI adoption has surged, with 75% of organizations using AI in at least one business function, marking a clear recognition that manual integration approaches are now strategic liabilities rather than operational necessities.1 And AI adoption in financial services is skyrocketing with Avato reporting that industry usage increased from 40% in 2024 to 52% in 2025, confirming that scalable and practical AI solutions are rapidly becoming the norm in the industry.2
As AI adoption spreads, integration complexity is ballooning, resource demands are growing, and traditional approaches don’t scale. If FIs stay on the traditional, linear path, they’ll be forced to either grow their teams endlessly to keep up or settle for slower, less competitive operations.
AI hasn’t created the integration problem. But it’s revealed just how critical—and urgent—it is to solve.
Banks and credit unions must reimagine what integration looks like.
We founded PortX to address this integration crisis head-on. Our cloud-native integration platform, Fintech Hub, reduces the complexity and burden associated with traditional integration processes. We’ve enabled banks and credit unions to streamline and standardize their technology ecosystem, significantly cutting down on resource expenditure and operational overhead.
Legacy banking infrastructure, however, wasn’t built for the AI age. Data still lives in silos. APIs are inconsistent. Connecting systems can still be a manual, time-consuming grind. But that’s precisely where we see the opportunity: to transform integration from a burden into a strategic asset—powered by AI, designed for speed, and ready to scale.
In response, we’ve taken our platform to the next level by embedding AI at its core. If you missed our recent announcement of PiXi AI, check it out. For FIs, this means a new, more innovative foundation that adapts to your systems, understands your data, and builds intelligent workflows across your stack. AI isn’t an add-on—it’s the new backbone of scalable, strategic integration.
The culmination of the integration journey: turning unified data into strategic intelligence
Our vision for Fintech Hub is an AI-native integration platform that doesn’t require FIs to start over. Instead, it connects across your existing ecosystem—the core, payments, CRM, analytics, and more—learning how your systems work and orchestrating workflows across them in real time.
I’m talking about more than just automation. It’s about building a foundation where AI can act across your organization—intelligently routing data, streamlining operations, and enabling new use cases that weren’t possible before. Think of it as the nervous system for modern FIs—always-on, adaptive, and built for a future of continuous change.
AI empowers experimentation and failing fast—and it’s working in the real world!
When FIs can move faster, innovation accelerates naturally. At first, this may seem obvious. However, in financial services, the relationship is more nuanced and critical. Innovation in banking isn’t just about generating ideas—it’s about executing them across a complex web of legacy systems, regulatory constraints, risk management protocols, and siloed teams. That execution is where most innovation dies.
Speed lowers the barrier to trying something new. It means fewer approvals, shorter deployment cycles, and faster feedback loops. This agility fosters a culture where ideas can be tested quickly, iterated on, and scaled—without waiting months for integration or infrastructure readiness.
This is no longer just theory—it’s taking shape in real-world use cases. In Citizens Bank’s 2025 report, 63% of CFOs noted substantial improvements in payment automation thanks to AI, reflecting a 23% increase over results from only a year ago. Nearly 60% also reported significant enhancements in fraud detection capabilities.3 These results highlight how AI, when strategically deployed, delivers measurable impact across critical operational areas.
Our PiXi Data Mapper, currently available in Integration Manager, dramatically accelerates data mapping. It reduces weeks of manual work to minutes, cutting up to 40% of overall project timelines!
By embedding AI into the integration layer, FIs can move beyond system maintenance and into strategic orchestration—connecting best-of-breed technologies across the institution in real time, without fear of technical debt.
AI’s greatest impact: a force multiplier for people, not a replacement
Yet, the ultimate transformation powered by AI isn’t just technological; it’s cultural and strategic. In our internal discussions, I continually stress the importance of empowering our teams through AI. A McKinsey report recently highlighted how employees often feel more prepared to adopt AI than their leaders recognize. The report shows employees’ eagerness to leverage AI for routine tasks, allowing them to focus more on strategic, innovative work.4
At PortX, we’ve fully embraced this philosophy. By offloading manual tasks, AI allows our engineers to focus on architecture, strategic impact, and innovation. As a result, success stories now surface weekly—sometimes even daily.
While I was writing this article, one of our developers posted this win: after launching a new feature, they uploaded key code files into an AI tool. Within minutes, it generated both technical and user-friendly documentation, formatted and ready for publication. The entire process took less than an hour, replacing a manual workflow that typically took four to five days.
Though our AI initiative is still in its early stages, the current estimates are promising: about a 50% increase in code productivity and AI generating 35% of new code.
But it’s not just about speed. AI is elevating code quality, accelerating testing, and freeing teams to think bigger. We aren’t trying to squeeze every last drop out of our people. The opposite is true. If done correctly, AI as a companion has the potential to boost productivity and significantly alleviate employee burnout and attrition.
Stop thinking about integration as plumbing, but as the platform for intelligence.
Forward-thinking leaders are reimagining integration in the AI era. By adopting a composable architecture, they can fluidly connect best-of-breed technologies as needs evolve, without being held back by rigid systems. AI-driven integration empowers this shift, enabling organizations to move with agility, innovate at speed, and unlock new opportunities as they arise.
We’re not chasing theoretical frameworks. We’re solving real problems in the real world. And the reward for those who get it right? Faster innovation. Lower risk. Better culture. And access to an entirely new layer of enterprise intelligence trapped behind outdated integration.
That’s the future we’re building at PortX.
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
- https://avato.co/ai-in-financial-services-2025-key-insights/
- https://www.citizensbank.com/corporate-finance/insights/artificial-intelligence-trends-report-2025.aspx
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/superagency-in-the-workplace-empowering-people-to-unlock-ais-full-potential-at-work
