As banks and payment providers put artificial intelligence (AI) assistants to work, U.S. consumers are drawing a clear line: AI can protect their money before it is allowed to spend it.

According to the 2026 FIS Consumer Pulse Survey, released by FIS® (fisglobal.com), a global leader in financial services technology, 57% of surveyed U.S. adults said they are comfortable with an AI assistant flagging or freezing a suspicious charge without asking first, while 50% want to approve every transaction an AI assistant makes. FIS conducted the survey in partnership with research firm Kantar.

Read together, the results give banks and credit unions a clear roadmap for introducing AI into consumer banking: start with protection, preserve customer control and demonstrate accountability before expanding into more autonomous financial activity, such as transacting on a customer's behalf.

"The path to AI that moves money starts with AI that protects it," said Jim Johnson, Co-President of Banking Solutions at FIS. "Consumers are open to innovation on their terms: they want security, control and confidence that someone is accountable when something goes wrong. Banks that build AI around those expectations will earn the trust to do more."

Protect first, then transact

When it comes to specific tasks, comfort is highest where AI plays a defensive role. U.S. adults surveyed in the 2026 FIS Consumer Pulse Survey are most comfortable with an AI assistant flagging or freezing a suspicious charge (57%) and paying a recurring bill they previously approved (55%). Comfort is lower for sending money to another person or business (47%), opening a new savings account (43%), and applying for a loan or credit card (40%). The pattern shows consumers are most at ease when AI flags fraud or handles payments they have already authorized, and least at ease when it initiates new credit relationships. Notably, only the defensive and pre-approved tasks register majority comfort; every task that initiates a new transfer, account or credit relationship falls below the 50% line.

Consumers are writing the terms for AI

Trust, consumers indicate, depends on accountability. When asked to identify their top three conditions for trusting an AI assistant with their money, 58% of respondents selected a refund guarantee for mistakes, and 56% selected access to a human who can review or override decisions. Among respondents who are not ready to hand money management to AI, 70% say they want to stay in control of their own money.

A generational divide banks will have to serve

Readiness to hand day-to-day money management to an AI assistant varies sharply by generation, the survey found. Millennial respondents are the most ready (61%), followed by Gen Z respondents (58%) and Gen X respondents (33%). Readiness drops to 11% among respondents aged 62 to 69 and to just 3% among adults aged 70 and older. Overall, 37% of respondents say they are ready to delegate day-to-day money management to an AI assistant, 49% say they are not, and the balance indicates they are neutral on the subject — a spread that will require banks to serve widely divergent expectations within the same customer base.

Deepfake scams are already reaching consumers

AI impersonation scams — schemes that use AI-generated voices or video to impersonate trusted people — are already widespread. Among U.S. adults surveyed, 35% have been targeted by an AI impersonation scam or know someone who has, and 22% have been targeted personally. Of those targeted personally, 58% received fake-voice phone calls.

Gen Z respondents (55%) and Millennial respondents (48%) are the most likely to have been targeted or to know someone who was — the same generations that report the highest readiness to hand day-to-day money management to an AI assistant. These same groups are also the most confident their bank could stop a deepfake scam, at 57% and 65%, respectively, compared with 46% of all respondents. In a separate question, 47% of all respondents said they are confident their bank would return money lost to a deepfake scam — confidence that trails the 58% of respondents who selected a refund guarantee for mistakes as a top condition for trusting an AI assistant with their money.

What FIS is doing

FIS builds control, accountability and human oversight into its AI solutions for financial institutions and their customers through its Trust Assured framework.

For agentic commerce — AI agents transacting on a consumer's behalf — FIS enables AI agents to use a tokenized payment credential governed by spending limits and merchant controls set by the consumer and their card issuer, so the agent pays with its own credential instead of the consumer's primary card.

For bank compliance teams, the FIS AML Investigations Agent is designed to compress anti-money-laundering investigations, from hours to minutes in some cases, and surface the highest-risk cases for investigator review. Agent actions are designed to be auditable, and final decisions stay with human investigators.

Source: GlobalFintechSeries