We’ve all read the big consultancy firms’ reports on what Gen Z wants from their banking experiences, but when did you last speak to a member of Gen Z to get input firsthand?
Tyk’s Laura Heritage tackled this head-on at the LEAP 2026 conference, through a lively panel discussion with Gen Z consumer Sidney Olson and Reuben Piryatinsky, CEO of Altitude Consulting.
Gen Z’s financial life
Gen Z is the first generation to grow up in a fully digital world. They expect instant, embedded, transparent financial services to be available through seamless and intuitive apps. What does that look like on an individual basis? Sidney outlined her own banking needs as an insight into what’s important to Gen Z:
- A main bank account, accessible via an app
- A local branch for depositing cash (example: depositing tips when working as a server)
- The ability to pay for things and receive money with an app (example: using Venmo to pay for Girl Scout cookies and to receive repayments from friends)
- Support with saving (example: a bank account that puts the first $x of a paycheck into a savings account, while still leaving enough in the main account for rent, food, and fun)
- Financial services shaped intuitively around need (example: Instagram uses an algorithm to know what users want, so why can’t banks?)
- Support from humans with key banking tasks, such as opening accounts.
Would Gen Z trust AI as part of this? Perhaps. Sidney explained that she would be open to recommendations from AI as help with saving and handling money, but would be hesitant to allow AI free reign in implementing those recommendations.
The case for Open Banking
Altitude Consulting CEO Reuben explained that Open Finance is the key to delivering the types of experiences that will satisfy Gen Z. At its core, Open Finance is about being able to share your financial data securely and with consent, from your primary institution to other financial institutions and apps. Consumers won’t ask for it by name but they’re increasingly demanding the services it facilitates.
Gen Z (and Gen Y) expect full, always-on banking capabilities that they can use in a self-serve manner. If social media apps can roll out regular updates without taking services offline, banks need to follow suit to earn Gen Z’s trust. Achieving the high performance and low latency required support this means focusing on three areas:
- APIs: things like response compression on payloads and caching for static reference data.
- Event-driven architectures: webhooks for notification and consent events, plus Kafka-based event streams. A lot of the systems banks are using weren’t built for these real-time data demands, so need to adapt.
- The FDX standard, to ensure all the data needed is available. FDX isn’t so much a requirement for regulation as it is a driver of innovation – it’s the foundation of the modern Open Banking experiences that Gen Z demands.
Spotlight on security
Consent, control, transparency, and security are the cornerstones of Open Finance. Recent agentic AI security incidents have highlighted the importance of the latter, increasing the need to focus on “know your agent” processes, to understand which agents are connecting to financial data, for what purpose, and how they’re going to use the data. Data minimization and the principle of least privilege apply.
Interestingly, Sidney doesn’t dwell on the security risks of banking. Having grown up with tech all around, she trusts her bank to provide secure digital experiences.
Such trust is easily broken and difficult to regain, meaning financial institutions need to work hard behind the scenes to deliver it continuously.
At the same time, banks must provide the data sharing that Gen Z expects as part of seamless financial experiences. One of the core elements of Open Finance is the ability for the account owner to provide consent for sharing data in a way that gives them transparency and control, so they see which organizations they’re sharing data and for what purpose. Users must also be able to revoke consent at any given moment.
Financial institutions that have implemented Open Banking capabilities can provide consent dashboards for this, enabling users to see which third parties they’ve permissioned to access their data to easily revoke it.
AI in financial services
Reuben observes that Open Finance has been a major catalyst in terms of data standardization. Financial institutions are standardizing data across their business lines, products and departments, focusing on enhanced data governance and visibility. This is reducing the siloed nature of financial institutions while also making them ready for AI use cases, as AI requires access to high-quality data.
Many financial services organizations are already employing AI in internal models, restricted to specific use cases, but there aren’t yet many examples of agentic AI connected to financial data. While the infrastructure for it is there, end-to-end security and governance systems need to mature before agentic AI can flourish in the financial world. This is likely to occur over the next few years.
At the same time, banks need to remember the human element. Sidney is likely to adopt an app once she sees it take off among her peers. This kind of social proof is key to earning Gen Z’s trust when it comes to new products. Banks need to win hearts and minds, not just deliver technical capabilities.
Keen to know more? Then check out this article on Open Banking and its key features and benefits. You can also discover the Tyk FAPI Accelerator for Open Banking here.
