Lisa Frazier, Head of Innovation at Wells Fargo, says the bank wants to use artificial intelligence not just to make their customers’ experience smoother and more delightful, but to help them make better financial decisions as well.

“It’s become easier to buy things than ever before,” she said during her Ignite Ideas talk at Bank Innovation Ignite 2019 in Seattle on Monday. She said the shift toward seamless, real-time payments, while helpful for consumers, also comes with pitfalls for their financial health.

Frazier said AI can help banks reduce their operating costs and provide services, such as financial advising, that many consumers long believed–correctly, in many instances–they couldn’t afford.

“There’s a lot of data that we in the banks see,” she said. “There’s a lot of data outside the bank world.”

The key, she said, is bring that data together and making sense of it.

Joel Kashuba, Senior Vice President of Design & Innovation at Fifth Third Bank, said banks have “reams of data” on their customers, but rarely can the data tell banks how their customers feel and what obstacles they’re actually facing in everyday life.

He said during his Ignite Ideas talk on bringing outside thinking into financial services that banks need to consider how people are most likely to navigate their day, and learn to anticipate the kinds of offerings they will have to be ready to provide.

Similarly, Matt Richardson, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Solutions at Citizens Bank, said during a panel on payments that banks need to be thinking about how to use data to anticipate the next logical step a customer will take, rather than just making it easier to do it.

Banks and fintechs alike have an interest in getting another mile out of the data that banks already have on their customers, and they see opportunities to work with each other to do so.

This is not to say that’s an easy process.

Tim Clewley, Senior Vice President of Sales for lending fintech Numerated, said banks are really hard to sell to because they really know what they want. He said during a panel on building the future of banking that Numerated has established trust with banks largely through its business with providers like FIS and Fiserv, and is now seeing more inbound requests.

Clewley said the company recently went back to the banks it’s doing business with and asked why they partnered with Numerated. The banks had a variety of answers, he said, but one common thread was they needed to move more swiftly with digital transformation. “It’s an important thing for them and it’s a competition play,” he said.

Ruben Izmailyan, founder and CEO of fintech Budgit, said during the panel that the industry already knows people have generally low trust in startups and generally high trust in financial institutions. But the FIs still have some work to do in untangling the data they have and putting it to the best use.

However, when it comes to extracting intelligence from data, a lot of the focus put on early-stage startups is misplaced, Izmailyan said. “You need good data to get good use out of AI and ML,” he added.

The banks, of course, are the gatekeepers of much of that good data.

“We need bank data,” he said, in order to understand what customers are spending money on and what their bills are. He said customers need to provide data as well, to get as complete a picture as possible.

Izmailyan predicted banks will make more use of white label solutions from fintech partners and that there will be fewer banks with subpar products, even outside of the core focus of what they do.

“I think traditional banks can succeed but by not being traditional anymore,” Clewley said.