Financial institutions have spent decades adapting the way they operate to the software they buy.
A wealth firm wants to change its onboarding process. An insurer wants to change how submissions are triaged. A brokerage wants to redesign its renewal workflow.
The people closest to the work often know exactly what needs to change. But making it happen means configuring systems, mapping fields, submitting tickets, engaging vendors, or waiting for development resources.
AI is starting to invert that relationship.
Instead of financial institutions continually adapting their operations to software, we’re entering a world where software can increasingly adapt to the intent of the business.
The software industry has given one early version of this shift a playful name: vibe coding.
But the interesting part isn’t AI writing code. It’s what vibe coding tells us about where software is heading.
Vibe coding points to a much bigger shift
The premise behind vibe coding is simple: describe what you want in plain language, let AI create it, and refine the result conversationally.
The starting point is no longer the mechanics of the software. It’s the outcome you want to achieve.
That may sound like a change in how software gets built. But the bigger shift is in how humans interact with software.
For decades, we’ve learned how software works. We’ve learned its interfaces, configuration systems, rules and limitations.
Now software is beginning to understand more of what we want.
For financial services, that has implications far beyond building applications faster.
It points toward a future where the people who understand the business can play a much more direct role in shaping the technology that runs it.
Financial services has an adaptability problem
Insurance and wealth management aren't short on software.
A wealth firm might have a CRM, custodian, financial planning platform, document management system, e-signature provider, and portfolio management system. An insurer or broker has its own collection of policy, agency, underwriting, claims, document, and communication systems.
But the actual work rarely happens neatly inside one of them.
Opening an account, transitioning an advisor, evaluating a submission, preparing a proposal, or renewing a client can involve data and documents moving across multiple systems, teams, rules, approvals, and exceptions.
And those processes don't stand still.
A firm enters a new market. An underwriting appetite changes. A new custodian is added. Compliance requirements evolve. An operations team identifies a better way to handle a process. A new product is introduced.
The people closest to the work often know exactly what needs to change.
The software doesn't.
That gap matters more as financial institutions face pressure to grow, consolidate, launch new products, improve client experiences, and operate more efficiently.
The challenge isn't simply automating today's processes. It's being able to continuously adapt how the business operates.
What if the starting point was business intent?
Imagine an operations leader at a wealth firm doesn't start by asking:
How do I configure our systems to support this process?
Instead, they describe what they need:
We need an onboarding process that collects client information once, prepares the appropriate custodian documents, routes exceptions to operations, and gives the advisor visibility into anything holding up the account.
An underwriting leader could describe how submissions should be processed, what information needs to be captured, which appetite rules should be applied, and how different risks should be routed.
A brokerage could describe how a renewal should move from client data collection through marketing, quote comparison, proposal creation, and client delivery.
The domain expert describes what the business needs to accomplish.
Software handles more of the translation into how it gets done.
That changes the relationship between financial institutions and their technology.
Today, there is often a translation layer between the people who understand a workflow and the technology that powers it. Business requirements become tickets, configuration projects, vendor requests, or development work.
As software becomes more intent-driven, domain expertise can become a more direct input into how workflows are built and changed.
That doesn't eliminate the role of technology teams. It gives them leverage. Technology teams can spend more time on architecture, governance, data, controls, and the harder problems that require their expertise, while the people closest to the business gain more agency over how their processes operate.
And that leads to the bigger opportunity.
It isn't just about building faster. It's about adapting faster.
A process improvement identified by the people doing the work shouldn't have to sit in a backlog for months. A change in business strategy shouldn't require the firm to redesign its operations around the limitations of its software.
Technology can increasingly adapt to the operating model of the firm, rather than forcing the firm to adapt to its technology.
Financial software is moving from configuration to intent
Vibe coding gives us an early glimpse of what happens when people no longer need to understand every technical detail between an idea and working software.
For financial services, the bigger opportunity is applying that same interaction model to the operational workflows that actually run the business.
The goal isn't to turn every operations leader, advisor, underwriter, or broker into a developer.
It's to shorten the distance between what the business needs and what its technology can do.
Of course, running a financial institution is fundamentally different from vibe coding a website or prototype. Financial workflows are complex, interconnected, regulated, and consequential.
Intent alone isn't enough.
The next question is what this new interaction model needs to look like when the software isn't a prototype, but infrastructure a financial institution actually runs on.
That’s where the next phase of this shift begins.
