Your banking app is being compared to Netflix. Not the bank next door.

The benchmark for your banking app is no longer who has the longer feature list.

It is the last great experience your user had on any app. That is a brutal standard — and most banks in this part of the world have not admitted it to themselves yet.

I have spent time both inside traditional financial institutions and building digital products from scratch. When you are a founder shipping versions of your product every eighteen months or less, you develop a certain dislike to feature bloat as a strategy. Features are easy to copy. The experience of feeling known by a product is not.

The New Competition Is Not Who You Think

At UCB, we launched UCB One during Pahela Boishakh with a conviction — that the next differentiator in digital banking is not the transaction catalogue, it is the relationship intelligence underneath it, the experience that customers want in their life, not just banking transactions.

This week, City Bank Bangladesh launched their all-new CityTouch — positioning it as the first truly AI-powered, hyper-personalized banking app in the country. That is a significant statement. And it signals something bigger than one product launch: the conversation in Bangladeshi banking has finally shifted from ‘what your app can do’ to ‘how well it knows you’.

But this is not a Bangladesh story alone. It is a global inflection point that arrived faster than most bankers expected.

The Digital Wave is Global

In March 2025, Nubank — Latin America's largest digital bank, serving over 114 million customers — partnered with OpenAI (yes, you read that right) to deploy AI across customer experience and operations.

They built a Call Center Copilot powered by GPT-4o, reduced chat response times by 70%, and now handle over 2 million customer chats monthly with AI resolving up to 50% of tier-1 inquiries without human escalation.

More awesomely, they used multimodal AI to let customers initiate payments via voice message, image, or WhatsApp chat — eliminating app navigation entirely. Result à Transaction processing time dropped a whopping 60%.

Nubank's CEO put it plainly: "Because we are digital, we need to be 10x more human."

In April 2026, Backbase — which powers digital banking for over 120 institutions including TD Bank and Standard Bank — launched what it calls an ‘AI-native Banking OS’. Their central argument: roughly 80% of frontline banking work happens in the gaps between systems — the handoffs, the exceptions, the coordination that no single tool owns. That is precisely where AI agents break down today. Their solution is a unified operating layer where customers, employees, and AI agents share the same context and operate under the same policy authority.

The framing matters: the problem in banking is not the absence of AI features. It is fragmented architecture that makes AI unreliable when deployed on top of it.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo's AI assistant Fargo crossed 1 billion customer interactions in under three years. 50% of their retail / consumer accounts are now opened digitally. McKinsey reports that banks deploying AI copilots have increased developer productivity by 40%.

McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions — and 76% get frustrated when they do not receive them. That frustration is not directed at your bank specifically. It is directed at the gap between what they experience on Spotify, on Grab, on any well-built consumer app — and what they find when they open their banking app.

My take: The efficiency argument for AI is settled. The experience argument is just beginning.

What This Means for Bangladesh

We are at an early enough stage in this market that the category is genuinely open. No bank here has cracked what I would call habitual financial utility — the point where your banking app disappears into your daily behaviour rather than demanding your attention.

CityTouch's launch this week, and UCB One's continued growth trajectory, are both symptoms of the same truth: the Bangladeshi banking customer is evolving faster than the industry has historically moved to meet them. And the industry is not just racing against its own inertia — it is building within a regulatory perimeter that global benchmarks do not face.

Bangladesh Bank's guidelines require customer data to remain within national borders, discourage the use of third-party messaging channels like WhatsApp in banks, and impose security protocols where customers need to change passwords every few months. These ‘guidelines’ add friction to the kind of seamless AI-native experiences Nubank or DBS can deploy freely.

In a country like Bangladesh, data sovereignty and consumer protection are legitimate policy goals. From a tech-entreprenuer point of view, what it does mean is that building genuinely personalized, AI-powered banking experiences in Bangladesh requires more architectural creativity than simply importing what worked in Brazil or Singapore.

That is the discomfort the industry needs to live with. But that’s never a show-stopper.

We are at an early enough stage in this market that the category is genuinely open. No bank here has cracked what I would call habitual financial utility — the point where your banking app disappears into your daily behaviour rather than demanding your attention.

UCB One launched 2 months back, CityTouch launched this week – they both are symptoms of the same truth: the Bangladeshi banking customer is evolving faster than the industry has historically moved to meet them.

The question every digital banking team in this country should be asking right now is not “what should we build next?” — it is “what does this specific customer need before they know they need it?”

Knowing that answer faster is the race.

And hence, the teams that win it will not be the ones who shipped the most features. They will be the ones who had the discipline to build a product philosophy — and an institution willing to trust the product team enough to execute it.

Zeeshan Kingshuk Huq is the CCO at United Commercial Bank PLC. He has previously built and scaled digital products in financial services and e-commerce. He can be reached at zeeshan.huq@gmail.com