Microsoft says legacy banks are hitting a breaking point as AI takes over the heavy lifting

Artificial intelligence is pushing financial systems toward a model where machines execute transactions at scale, raising new challenges around control, oversight and infrastructure, said Microsoft and Chainalysis executives.

Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, said Tuesday that legacy systems will face increasing pressure as transaction demands grow more complex. The tipping point comes when “latency, scale, complexity are starting to impact your ability to compete,” forcing firms to rethink how their systems are built, he said at an event hosted by Alchemy in New York City.

While automation has long been part of finance, Borden said the focus is now shifting from capability to trust. “It’s not about, can technology automate … executing a hedging strategy — that can be done. The question is: can you trust it? Can you audit and control?” he said.

Microsoft, which offers its own AI assistant in many of its products, is developing tools to manage that transition, including systems that assign identities and permissions to AI agents and track their actions. In regulated environments, Borden said firms must be able to show “what controlled it” and whether a system “followed the policy” when decisions are made without direct human input.

Jonathan Levin, co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, said the crypto sector already offers a working model of automated finance. Blockchain networks process large volumes of transactions through smart contracts and software-driven wallets, creating what he described as an environment similar to agent-based systems. “We’ve been preparing for these moments way before other parts of the financial services industry,” Levin said.

That experience extends to risk management. Levin pointed to efforts to track illicit funds across “thousands of different wallets” as an example of the kind of monitoring needed in a system where transactions happen at scale without direct human input.

Looking ahead, both executives expect a mix of systems to coexist. Levin said “the majority of commerce in 10 years time will be settled on public infrastructure,” while Borden pointed to a more integrated approach linking public blockchains, private networks and existing rails.

“I do think traditional rails will continue to exist,” Borden said, with software acting as the layer that connects them.