JPMorgan Chase has extended its lead as the world’s most artificial intelligence-advanced bank, once again topping the Evident AI Index.
The index’s top three is unchanged from 2025, with JPMorgan Chase joined by Capital One and Royal Bank of Canada. The top 10 is dominated by North America, with CommBank the only representative from Asia Pacific and UBS the only European lender.
Evident’s index draws on public data points across four areas: talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency. Across the 50 banks assessed, AI capabilities advanced nearly three times faster over the past year than the average across the previous three years. This, says Evident is because, over the past four years banks have moved from defining their strategies, to building the foundations, to deploying AI across the enterprise.
As a result, scale is no longer defined as simply giving 100,000 employees access to the same LLMs or tools. Instead, AI is diffusing, moving deeper into the workflows that underpin the top leading banks. That is speeding up and derisking some of banking’s biggest processes, says Evident.
At Capital One, an AI fraud tool embedded in its dealer platform, ProtectID, prevented approximately $150 million in potentially fraudulent auto loan applications in 2025.
Across that broad range of applications, the 50 banks in the index have disclosed 1,107 AI use cases since 2021, with a growing number now able to associate use cases with a concrete impact. The top 10 banks account for a quarter of all impact-linked use cases, and half of all those with a direct financial outcome.
ROI frameworks are maturing too. The number of banks reporting a realised or projected return across their AI activities is up to twelve from eight last year, with CommBank, Lloyds Banking Group and TD Bank among the new entrants.
Meanwhile, banks are still adding AI talent, but the mix is shifting from building the foundations to enabling the people who use it. The ten banks adding the most AI talent account for the majority of recruiting across all areas, with over a quarter of their new roles focused on enablement specifically.
Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-CEO, Evident, says: “This was the year AI in banking went industrial. Banks across the Index are moving faster than at any point since we began measuring, but what separates the leaders is everything they have built around their models, from the data and the plumbing, to the guardrails, and the habit of building something once and scaling it everywhere. That foundation is what allows them to put AI into production at pace.”