Fintech Takes x FairPlay Presents Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders Title: Episode 5: AI Agents in Financial Services: What Happens When Robots Make the Calls?

Aug 12, 2025

Guest Alex O’Rourke is a fintech advisor, lawyer, and AI cofounder who aids in understanding AI's roles. Joining him is Jay Budzik, Senior VP at Fifth Third Bank and an expert in applying AI in finance. They dive deep into agentic AI, discussing its potential to redefine customer interactions and loyalty by acting autonomously. The conversation highlights risks like compliance issues and ethical concerns, emphasizing the need for human oversight. It’s a fascinating exploration of how AI could reshape financial services for both businesses and consumers.

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INSIGHT

Agentic AI Means LLMs With Tools

Jay Budzik defines agentic AI as LLMs connected to tools that act on user goals.
These agents can autonomously take actions like booking flights or investigating tasks.

INSIGHT

Agents Have PDA: Perceive Decide Act

Alex O'Rourke says agents have "PDA": perceive their context, decide how to meet goals, and act.
He stresses autonomy is partial and comparably powerful to human agents at scale.

ADVICE

Vet Vendors By Asking 'Why Build This?'

Jay Budzik and Alex O'Rourke advise to vet agent vendors for team, deployed examples, and risk plans.
Alex stresses asking vendors "why did you build this" to confirm deep problem understanding.

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Welcome back to Model Citizens: AI Compliance for Banks and Fintech Lenders, a six-part miniseries from the Fintech Takes podcast in partnership with FairPlay.

In some ways, this is the episode everything has been building toward. We’ve explored AI in customer acquisition, underwriting, and compliance — but we haven’t gone deep on the buzziest, most frontier concept in the mix: agentic AI.

In Episode 5, we tackle the systems that don’t just analyze or predict, but actually act.

With Kareem Saleh (Founder & CEO of FairPlay) co-hosting, we sit down with Alex O’Rourke (fintech adviser, lawyer, and AI cofounder) and Jay Budzik (AI/ML product and tech leader; Senior VP at Fifth Third) to unpack the implications of letting autonomous agents loose in financial services.

Highlights include:

Why agentic AI breaks the “rules vs. empathy” binary that has defined human vs. machine roles (and how that opens new risks in compliance, customer service, and fraud detection)

How AI agents will reshape customer loyalty (expect your robo-butler to switch your accounts for better rates while you sleep)

Why banks might be more prepared than anyone thinks, thanks to a pre-existing culture of risk management (and why consumers remain the weakest link)

Don’t miss our deep dive into the wild frontiers of agentic AI … and what it means for the future of work, trust, and intelligent systems in finance.

Don’t forget to subscribe and catch the rest of Model Citizens; more insights to come!

This miniseries is brought to you by FairPlay.

FairPlay is an AI enablement company for financial services. They help companies build, test, optimize, validate and govern AI models. Learn more at Fairplay.ai

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