Two-thirds of banking sector AI research driven by five banks

Editorial

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Evident’s report analysing over 2700 AI-specific papers from 50 of the world’s largest banks, shows that the sector has increased annual AI research output by seven times over the past five years.

Since 2019, the number of banks publishing AI research has nearly doubled from 25 to 46 out of the 50 lenders tracked.

However, a handful of players are still dominating: last year, 65% of this research was driven by just five banks – JPMorganChase (37%), Capital One (14%), Wells Fargo (five per cent), RBC (five per cent), and TD Bank (four per cent).

According to Evident, it’s possible to map the banks’ historic research pipelines directly to their AI use cases and products – from RBC’s ATOM model powering lending to Capital One’s multi-agent systems for customer service.

AI Agents and Agent-based systems research is now the fifth most popular research paper theme. Agentic themed research accounts for nearly six per cent of year-to-date 2025 publications – or twice the current share of public agentic use cases Evident found across banking.

“Through their research programmes, banks like JPMorganChase, Capital One, RBC, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank are setting the tone for how AI will be deployed in high-stakes, regulated environments,” says Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO, Evident.

“In contrast to the more commercially-guarded R&D practices of Big Tech, these banks are signalling the future of applied AI in financial services and, most impressively, moving from research pipelines into production at scale within two to three years, which is lightning fast by academic standards.”