Two-Thirds of Banking Sector AI Research Driven by Five Banks: JPMorganChase, Capital One, RBC, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank

AI benchmarking and intelligence platform Evident has today published its latest report, The State of AI Research in Banking, analysing over 2,700 AI-specific papers from 50 of the world’s largest banks. 

The report shows that the big banks have increased their annual AI research output by 7x over the past five years, with the most AI-advanced institutions focusing on research areas that directly serve their AI production pipelines.

Since 2019, the number of banks publishing AI research has nearly doubled from 25 to 46 out of the 50 banks tracked by Evident. Last year, two-thirds of this research (65%) was driven by just five banks – JPMorganChase (37%), Capital One (14%), Wells Fargo (5%), RBC (5%), TD Bank (4%).

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 responsible lending to Capital One’s multi-agent systems for customer service. Examples of banks where research papers have served as blueprints for production include:

• Capital Markets & Trading: Scotiabank, RBC Borealis, BlackRock, JPMorganChase
• Transactions, Risk, AML, and Fraud: RBC Borealis, NatWest, CommBank

• Agentic AI and Workflow Automation: Capital One, JPMorganChase, UniCredit
• Causal AI and Personalisation: BBVA, TD Bank
• Customer Experience and Summarization: NatWest, JPMorganChase

“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,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Co-founder and CEO of 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.”

The State of AI Research in Banking report also points to the rise of agentic AI as a priority within the world’s largest banks.  

Evident’s data shows that AI Agents and Agent-based Systems research is now the fifth most popular research paper theme. Agentic themed research accounts for nearly 6% of year-to-date 2025 publications – or twice the current share of public agentic use cases Evident found across banking.  

As more resources pour into agentic research, there has been an accompanying year-over-year decline in papers focused on Computer Vision (-0.7%), Scientific Discovery (-1.8%), and Healthcare / Biomedicine (-2.2%). This data further underscores where and how banks are shifting efforts away from open inquiry, in favour of applied research that clearly relates to immediate business applications. 

“While academic research within big business is often dismissed as a vanity exercise to keep PhDs happy, our analysis shows the opposite. The leading banks are pushing the frontier on emerging technologies like agentic AI – building the architectures and workflows that will soon underpin real-world applications. This isn’t research for research’s sake: it’s laying the foundation for faster deployments, smarter trading agents, and the next frontier of AI-driven financial services,” added Mousavizadeh.