Boardroom brief for financial services
In short
A one-page brief for the head of digital or product: what agents do in financial services today with dated examples, three decisions for leadership, three asks for the web team and the numbers that frame the risk. Written to paste into a deck. Experian's card comparison and Aviva's pre-filled quote anchor its examples.
What agents do in financial services today
- 27 Aug 2026
Experian launched a credit cards app in ChatGPT on 27 August 2026 that compares card offers in chat, then sends users to Experian's site to see offers matched to their credit profile.
- 15 May 2026
Go.Compare launched an insurance app on ChatGPT, reported 15 May 2026, letting users compare car, van and home policies and re-run quotes.
- 25 Mar 2026
Aviva piloted a ChatGPT app for home insurance quotes, reported 25 March 2026, with quotes that pre-populate Aviva's online application.
- 26 Nov 2025
PayPal enabled its merchants to be discoverable and paid for inside Perplexity in November 2025, with the retailer staying merchant of record.
Three decisions for leadership
- Where the agent stops and the customer takes over: quote, comparison, pre-filled application, signed application.
- How fraud and risk teams treat an application or payment that an agent started.
- Which rates, fees and eligibility rules are public text with an effective date.
Three asks for the web team
- Put rates, fees and effective dates in the HTML of every product page.
- Publish key facts and terms as HTML pages, not only PDFs.
- Tell us whether our bot protection blocks verified agents on product and application pages.
The numbers that frame the risk
- 5 Nov 2026
On Ora's public leaderboard read 5 Nov 2026, the 400 entries in the Payments & Fintech category averaged 53.8 out of 100; 49 scored B (70) or above and 5 scored A (86) or above.
- 8 Oct 2026
Ora's lab found (8 Oct 2026) that agents clearly recommended agent-ready businesses in 20 percent of answers against 11 percent for businesses that were not agent ready, across 37,927 runs on 1,056 business sites.
- 30 Sep 2026
Cloudflare reported on 30 September 2026 that in heavily crawled categories such as Retail, Computer Software, IT and Services, and Financial Services, human traffic fell as much as 40 percent in under a year.
Six checks and what each answer means
Put these six questions to the people who run the site. An answer of no or not sure means the item below is open.
| Check | If the answer is no or not sure |
|---|---|
| Has anyone checked in the last six months whether your CDN, firewall or bot protection blocks AI crawlers or AI assistants? | Please export the current AI bot settings from our CDN or bot protection and tell us, for each of Search, Agent and Training traffic, whether it is allowed, challenged or blocked, and on which pages. |
| Do your key pages (products, services, prices, policies) show their main text without needing JavaScript to run in the visitor's browser? | Please list which of our page templates deliver their main content in the first HTML response and which need JavaScript to show it, starting with product, pricing and policy pages. |
| Are prices, availability, opening hours and delivery or cancellation terms written as text on the page, not only inside images, PDFs or pop-ups? | Ecommerce or product leadership decides which prices and terms are public. The web team then puts them on the page as text, including taxes, fees and cancellation rules. |
| Can the main task on your site (buy, book, subscribe or request a quote) be completed with standard web forms and buttons, without a CAPTCHA at every step? | Please walk our main task end to end as a guest and list every step where a CAPTCHA, a custom widget or a pop-up appears. |
| Has your payments or fraud team agreed how to treat a purchase or booking that an AI agent starts for a customer? | Finance, payments and ecommerce agree a written position on agent-started purchases: allowed, allowed within limits, or handed back to the customer. Fraud rules are then set to match. |
| Is there a named person in your business who owns how AI agents are treated on your site? | The leadership team names one owner for agent experience, with a quarterly review of the bot rules, readable pages, agent checkout settings and verification. |
How to measure it: track it on Ora
Put one measurement line in the brief. Scan the domain with Ora and record the score out of 100, the grade and the four layer scores: Discovery, Access, Usability and Payments. For financial services, Ora's leaderboard listed 400 sites on 5 November 2026, with a median of 53 and a top score of 93, so those two numbers are the first comparison a board can read.
Rescan after each fix the web team ships and report the change once a quarter. Say in the brief what the number leaves out: Ora reads public pages only and publishes no data on repeat scans, and its fixing service is a waitlist, so the web team still makes the fixes the report lists. The tool choice page says why this is the scan to use.
Where the sector stands
In the crawl of 4 Nov 2026, 95.8 percent of financial services sites with a readable robots.txt allowed the four main AI agents at the root, and 92.1 percent of home pages gave readable text to a plain fetch (448 domains in the sample). See the financial services scorecard.
Sources
- Experian: Credit Cards app on ChatGPT (27 Aug 2026) (experianplc.com/newsroom/press-releases/2026/experian-launches-credit-cards-app-on-chatgpt--offering-a-new-wa), read 4 Nov 2026.
- FinTech Global: Go.Compare ChatGPT app (15 May 2026) (fintech.global/2026/05/15/go-compare-launches-insurance-app-on-chatgpt), read 4 Nov 2026. Reported by trade press.
- FinTech Global: Aviva ChatGPT home insurance app (25 Mar 2026) (fintech.global/2026/03/25/aviva-pilots-chatgpt-app-for-home-insurance-quotes), read 4 Nov 2026. Reported by trade press.
- PayPal: agentic shopping with Perplexity (Nov 2025) (newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-11-PayPal-Launches-Agentic-Shopping-with-Perplexity), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Ora public leaderboard, category averages (ora.ai/leaderboard), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026) (ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026) (blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Ora leaderboard API (GET /api/leaderboard) (ora.ai/api/leaderboard), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Ora methodology (ora.ai/methodology), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
Last reviewed