The financial sector is accelerating its digital transformation by leveraging **AI (artificial intelligence)**. As AI technology becomes more deeply integrated into financial products and platforms, **customer convenience** has significantly improved. Clients of securities firms and asset management companies can now make swift and accurate investment decisions using enhanced mobile apps and dedicated website features powered by AI. The insurance, credit card, and mutual finance industries are also actively adopting AI for business expansion and risk management, utilizing it as both a "sword and shield."

Additionally, financial companies are pioneering new markets by maximizing their expertise in specialized areas. As they seek future growth opportunities, traditional boundaries between customer bases—such as individuals vs. corporations, large enterprises vs. startups, and domestic vs. global—are collapsing, driving **disruptive innovation**.

## Asset Management & Securities: Elevating Customer Convenience with AI

**Mirae Asset Global Investments** is expanding its presence among domestic and international clients through AI innovation. In April of last year, it became the first comprehensive asset management company in South Korea to launch a dedicated robo-advisor service for retirement pensions, "M-ROBO." This AI-based pension management solution analyzes investors' age, risk profile, and target returns to automatically design customized portfolios and rebalance assets based on market conditions. It stands out by automating not just advisory services but also actual investment decision-making.

Mirae Asset has also integrated AI into public funds and ETFs (exchange-traded funds). The "Mirae Asset Rational AI Global Momentum Mixed Asset Investment Trust," established in January 2020, is South Korea’s largest AI-driven public fund, achieving an average annual return of over 10% since inception. The "TIGER AI Korea Growth Active ETF," South Korea’s first AI-powered active ETF, outperformed the KOSPI by over 30 percentage points.

In 2023, Mirae Asset acquired Australia’s robo-advisor specialist "Stockspot," followed by establishing a U.S.-based AI subsidiary, "Wealthspot," in 2024. Last year, Wealthspot collaborated with U.S. ETF manager "Global X US" to launch the "Global X Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (GXIG)," an AI-driven bond ETF. Industry experts suggest AI-based bond ETFs could become a new growth driver.

**Samsung Asset Management** has gained attention for "FunETF," an AI-powered ETF information portal that significantly enhances investment convenience. The portal allows users to search all domestic ETF and fund products, including KODEX ETFs, with filter searches combining criteria like ETF type, returns, and trading volume. It also supports simultaneous comparison and analysis of up to five ETFs.

In December of last year, Samsung Asset Management introduced "PortRabbit," a monthly dividend portfolio service. It automatically suggests optimized asset allocations tailored to account types such as pension savings, ISA (Individual Savings Account), and IRP (Individual Retirement Pension).

**Korea Investment Management** has built the "ACE ETF" framework, covering the entire AI industry. Its flagship product, "ACE Global Semiconductor TOP4 Plus," focuses on investments in SK Hynix, NVIDIA, TSMC, and ASML, achieving a cumulative return exceeding 500% since listing. This aligns with the expanding investment focus on semiconductors, data centers, and power infrastructure driven by the AI revolution.

**Shinhan Securities** is innovating personalized asset management through its "AI PB (Private Banker)" service. The AI PB feature in the Shinhan SOL Securities app acts as a personal investment assistant, curating and summarizing market information and news based on users’ holdings and interests.

## Insurance & Card Services Transformed by AI

AI is also enhancing user experiences in the insurance and credit card sectors. Beyond improving internal workflows, financial institutions are now leveraging AI to expand **customer touchpoints**.

**Samsung Life Insurance** introduced a generative AI-based writing system to fundamentally improve the quality of customer communications. By inputting key keywords, the system generates natural-sounding drafts for customer guidance, simplifying financial jargon into everyday language and replacing Sino-Korean or foreign terms with native equivalents to boost customer understanding.

Samsung Life Insurance also implemented an "AI Speech Consistency Analysis" service. Its proprietary AI voice analysis engine detects speech patterns, intonation, and vocal characteristics to preemptively prevent financial fraud.

**Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance** expanded its index-based coverage for flight delays and cancellations in overseas travel insurance to include return and connecting flights. This index-based approach, which pays a fixed amount if predefined criteria are met, skips complex damage assessment processes and is seen as a future-proof insurance model for AI-driven automatic payouts.

**Mirae Asset Life Insurance** provides AI-based health management services through the "Healthcare AI" feature in its mobile app "M-LIFE." By linking medical records and health check-up data, it predicts major disease risks and offers personalized health management recommendations.

**DB Insurance** is deploying AI robo-tellers in its customer engagement compensation system. Developed in collaboration with Samsung SDS, the system provides initial guidance within 30 minutes of receiving a car accident report.

Financial institutions are accelerating customer service improvements through digital transformation. **Samsung Card**, alongside affiliates Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, and Samsung Securities, unveiled the revamped "New Monimo," a unified financial platform app under Samsung Financial Networks. Two years and four months after its launch, Monimo has attracted 10 million users and now offers enhanced personalized features.

**Lotte Card** introduced "Discovery," a curated service in its app "Digiroca" that leverages Lotte Group’s vast retail data. It provides personalized recommendations across categories like travel, pets, golf, education, and home styling. The service integrates AI deep learning and machine learning models to analyze customers’ card payment data, Lotte Members’ category preference indices, and Lotte Department Store brand usage information.

The **National Credit Union Federation of Korea** operates the "iMoA Account" via its mobile app "OnBank," allowing parents to manage their children’s financial activities remotely. The federation is also strengthening its risk management framework through early warning systems and real-time monitoring powered by digital technology and AI.

## Disruptive Innovation for Future Growth

Meanwhile, financial companies are exploring diverse future growth opportunities. **Samsung Securities** has pioneered asset management services for corporations and their employees, including stock compensation programs.

Through its corporate financial service "AT WORK," Samsung Securities has attracted a large number of corporate clients. The service’s core feature is managing companies’ stock compensation programs, including stock grants, restricted stock units (RSUs), and employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs). Targeting businesses that wanted to retain talent with stock incentives but hesitated due to administrative burdens, the number of employees using the service surpassed 100,000 by the end of last month, with over 400 corporate contracts secured.

**Korea Investment Financial Group** is connecting domestic startups with global IT companies to expand social contributions and future customer bases. Through its subsidiaries Korea Investment Accelerator (KIAC) and Korea Investment Partners, the group collaborates with Microsoft to host the "Synergy Club" workshop, providing global scaling opportunities to over 40 promising startups like FuriosaAI, BioDesignLab, and Enerzai. Since its inception, KIAC has invested 40.8 billion Korean won in 120 companies, with 66% of investments targeting startups under three years old, solidifying its position as a "first institutional investor."

**Hanwha Investment & Securities** is pioneering the real-world asset tokenization (RWA) market. It made strategic investments totaling approximately 18 billion Korean won in U.S. Web3 specialist "Chrysus" and 10 billion Korean won in "Cross Angle," the operator of virtual asset data platform "Zanggle," to expand its digital asset infrastructure.

![Financial AI Transformation](https://www.chosun.com/resizer/v2/GQUE2YIOVZFFVHKAJOYXZ4YZRM.jpg?auth=1558d242171030a15cdd5bb1248f8374294199febc24df7ca4a5d024869e986e&width=616)

*This article has been translated by Upstage Solar AI.*

Financial Sector Accelerates AI-Driven Digital Transformation Mirae Asset, Samsung, Korea Investment Lead Innovations in Asset Management, Insurance, 

How AI is Revolutionizing Financial Services: From Robo-Advisors to Personalized Customer Experiences

A dealership employee in Tennessee has been charged after being accused of taking a customer's vehicle to an area sports bar.

## Incident Details

According to Tennessee authorities, the reported incident took place in January when a woman reported her car was stolen from the **Mercedes-Benz of Collierville dealership**.

![Derrick Nguyen](https://gray-wcsc-prod.gtv-cdn.com/resizer/v2/XJKICVMMMBDETMVV7CJLR6FTG4.png?auth=9bc0627340d6e809f897a2aa97f6b4f4171f7fe2c338101b222d2de923c2d0a5&width=980&height=551&smart=true)
*Derrick Nguyen (Collierville Police Department)*

Officers said the car owner told them she dropped off her vehicle the month prior for repairs. But she realized it had been taken after the **tracking device in her vehicle alerted her to movement**.

The vehicle was located at **TJ Mulligan's, a Memphis-area sports bar**, police said. The car owner's key fob was also found on the employee.

## Employee Identification and Charges

The worker was later identified as **Derrick Nguyen, a service technician at the dealership**.

According to the arrest affidavit, officers noted **Nguyen was intoxicated and refused to answer questions without a lawyer present**.

Nguyen was arrested and charged with **theft of property $10,000 to $60,000**.

The vehicle owner's lawyer has since accused the dealership of making light of the situation through different marketing promotions while saying Nguyen remains employed.

A dealership employee in Tennessee has been charged after being accussed of taking a customer’s vehicle. 

Mercedes-Benz Service Tech Arrested: Shocking Incident of Customer's Car Taken to Sports Bar

## NiCE Cognigy's Vision for Customer Service

At the recent NiCE Cognigy Nexus 2026 event in Munich, Germany, enterprise CX leaders got a firsthand look at how **agentic AI** is transforming customer service operations. This was the first combined customer event since NiCE acquired Cognigy in 2025, and it revealed a clear strategic direction that's ahead of most comparable acquisitions at this stage.

![AI and Human Collaboration](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/3efd58a84567aa47702f91344384229a88ba5270/2026/03/26/946a22de-89df-4c09-b4a0-737159b51420/act-screenshot-2026-03-26-145107.jpg?auto=webp&width=1280)

## A Strategic Integration That Makes Sense

When NiCE acquired Cognigy, there were immediate questions about how the combined entity would approach the market. Cognigy had built a loyal enterprise customer base that specifically chose their platform because it worked with multiple Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platforms, not just NiCE's CXOne.

**The solution was brilliant in its simplicity:** Cognigy continues to be sold and deployed independently, giving the combined company a dual go-to-market structure. This protects existing Cognigy customers while expanding NiCE's addressable market, and provides CX leaders on competitive platforms a credible path to enterprise-grade agentic AI without requiring a full migration.

NiCE CEO Scott Russell outlined the integration priorities in three clear terms:

1. **Organizational:** Aligning people and strategy across both companies before making product changes
2. **Scale:** Channeling NiCE's engineering and go-to-market resources into Cognigy's product roadmap
3. **Focus:** Making the agentic CX platform the singular priority

## From CCaaS Platform to CX Orchestration Layer

The most significant strategic shift revealed at Nexus was NiCE's transition from a traditional CCaaS platform to what they're calling a **CX AI platform**. This isn't just marketing language - it represents a fundamental change in how customer service is orchestrated.

A traditional CCaaS platform manages the operational mechanics of contact center infrastructure: routing, workforce management, quality assurance, and analytics. A CX AI platform, as NiCE is positioning it, functions as an **orchestration layer** that coordinates AI agents, human agents, and AI copilots across channels, departments, and the full span of the customer engagement lifecycle.

## The Unified Platform Vision: Ending Fragmentation

Cognigy co-founder and NiCE chief AI officer Philipp Heltewig made a crucial point in his keynote: even in 2026, most customer interactions remain handled by humans. While agentic AI deployments are growing rapidly (Cognigy reported a 500% increase over the past year), the operational reality across most contact centers is a **fragmented stack**.

Human agents work on one system, AI agents on another, knowledge management in a third, and analytics siloed elsewhere. This fragmentation creates the frustrating experience customers know all too well: re-explaining their situation each time they're transferred between systems or agents.

NiCE Cognigy's architectural response is a **unified operating layer** where AI agents, human agents, and AI copilots draw from the same knowledge base, workflows, and underlying models, supported by a shared analytics layer that enables continuous improvement across the entire system.

## Innovations That Actually Solve Real Problems

Several product capabilities announced at Nexus deserve serious attention from enterprise CX leaders:

### Automation Discovery
This capability addresses one of the most persistent challenges in enterprise agentic AI adoption: knowing where to start. Instead of requiring organizations to define use cases from first principles, this tool analyzes existing interaction data to surface **high-ROI automation candidates**, quantify the opportunity, and generate production-ready agent journeys.

### The Simulator
This addresses the absence of structured pre-production evaluation in most current agentic deployments. The tool creates synthetic customer personas to **stress-test AI agents** against realistic, adversarial, and edge-case conversation scenarios before those agents go live.

### MCP Integration
Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a significant interoperability advancement. NiCE Cognigy is positioning itself not only as an MCP client but also as an MCP server - exposing its platform capabilities as governed services that external AI systems can invoke through a standard protocol.

### Proactive Engagement
This capability extends the platform's footprint across the full interaction lifecycle. Proactive engagement enables AI agents to **initiate outbound interactions** based on real-time contextual data, anticipate customer needs, and engage in genuine two-way conversations.

## The Human Element: Still Crucial

Contrary to some narratives about AI replacing human agents entirely, NiCE's position is more nuanced and realistic. High-volume, lower-complexity interactions are increasingly well served by AI agents, and the economics and quality of those interactions are compelling.

However, for more complex interactions requiring judgment, empathy, or contextual reasoning that current AI systems cannot reliably replicate, **human involvement remains necessary**. AI still contributes in these scenarios by reducing after-call work, surfacing relevant knowledge in real time, and automating administrative overhead.

## The Rise of Machine Customers

One of the more forward-looking concepts discussed was "machine customers" - the idea that AI agents will increasingly act as autonomous buyers or service requesters on behalf of humans. While this shift is already happening, the more accurate characterization may be that we're moving toward **AI as an intelligent decision-support layer** rather than an autonomous decision-maker.

Bain & Company has projected that agentic commerce in the US could reach $300 to $500 billion by 2030, representing 15% to 25% of total online retail. These numbers should inform enterprise CX investment planning.

## The Bottom Line for CX Leaders

The central question for CX leaders is no longer whether agentic AI will reshape their operations - that question has been answered. The operative question is whether the platforms they're building on can **orchestrate agentic AI at enterprise scale**, across the full interaction lifecycle, with the governance structures and observability capabilities that complex organizations require.

NiCE Cognigy Nexus 2026 provided evidence that this is exactly what they're building toward, and that execution is on track.

From contact center platform to CX orchestration layer, these are our key takeaways from the NiCE Cognigy Nexus 2026 event earlier this month.

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