Devesh Maheshwari

There is a growing difference between organisations experimenting with AI and organisations redesigning themselves around it. In financial services, that gap is becoming increasingly visible. The conversation is no longer about isolated use cases or internal productivity gains alone – it is about whether businesses are prepared to rethink operating models, customer experiences and decision-making structures for an AI-driven future.

At Lendi Group, that shift is already underway through a clear ambition to become ‘AI Native’ by mid-2026. Importantly, the strategy is not framed around replacing human expertise with automation. Instead, the focus is on creating a business where AI and people work together in ways that improve speed, transparency, trust and scalability across the entire lending journey.

Over the next year, the business is concentrating on embedding AI directly into both customer and broker experiences at enterprise scale. The industry has moved beyond the novelty phase of generative AI. The real challenge now is operationalising it meaningfully. That means automating repetitive processes, introducing intelligent agents that support brokers in real time, and creating customer interactions that feel faster, simpler and more personalised without losing the human element that underpins trust in financial services.

Underneath those customer-facing ambitions sits a much deeper technology transformation. Becoming AI Native requires more than deploying new models or copilots. It demands foundational change across infrastructure, data governance and architecture. For Lendi Group, a significant priority will be strengthening data pipelines, improving ML Ops maturity and ensuring every AI capability is built on governed, secure and compliant frameworks. In a highly regulated sector, trust cannot be retrofitted later – it has to be engineered into the system from the beginning.

Core infrastructure modernisation also forms a critical part of the strategy. Real-time decisioning, scalable microservices and agentic AI architectures require environments designed for adaptability and resilience. The objective is to build the technical scaffolding that allows innovation to move quickly without compromising operational reliability or regulatory alignment.

Strategically, customer experience remains the central lens through which these investments are being evaluated. The home loan journey has historically been complex, fragmented and paperwork-heavy. AI presents an opportunity to reduce friction from lead through to settlement while giving customers more transparency and confidence throughout the process. At the same time, brokers and internal teams are being equipped with AI copilots and workflow automation designed to free them from administrative burden and allow greater focus on relationship-building and advisory value.

The path forward is not without challenges. Financial services organisations are currently operating at the intersection of rapid technological acceleration and increasing regulatory scrutiny. Balancing innovation with governance remains one of the defining tensions of the AI era. Scaling AI responsibly requires new governance models capable of evolving at the same pace as the technology itself.

Data quality also remains one of the industry’s biggest practical hurdles. AI is only as effective as the environments feeding it. Connecting legacy systems, standardising data flows and maintaining accuracy at scale remain difficult but essential pieces of the transformation equation.

Perhaps the most underestimated challenge, however, is cultural rather than technical. Becoming AI Native requires organisational belief, adoption and behavioural change at every level of the business. Success depends not just on deploying technology, but on helping people trust it, understand it and see value in new ways of working.

That leadership philosophy is reflected in one of the most important lessons learned along the journey: clarity matters more than control. Strong leadership is about establishing a clear vision, empowering capable people and creating an environment where teams can execute better collectively than any individual leader could alone. In an era defined by constant technological change, resilience increasingly comes from alignment, trust and the ability to move together with purpose.

The next generation of financial services leaders will not simply be the businesses using AI tools. They will be the organisations redesigning themselves around AI-enabled ways of operating while keeping human trust firmly at the centre of the experience.