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10 Best AI-Powered Financial Stocks to Buy According to Analysts

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Banks and lenders have spent years promising that artificial intelligence will cut costs and speed up decisions. This autumn, the people who supervise them started asking a harder question: what happens when the software starts acting on its own?

Reuters reported in an exclusive that the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC are asking banks how they limit, monitor and approve AI actions, whether agent decisions can be audited, and how an autonomous system gets shut down. None of the agencies has prescribed specific steps yet.

Regulators Ask Banks Where the Off Switch Is

The concern reaches well beyond Washington. The European Central Bank gave lenders an end-October deadline to produce plans against AI-enabled cyberattacks, and the Bank of England is pressing banks on their recovery plans.

Michael Woodbridge, a cybersecurity partner at Grant Thornton in London, said, “The adoption of AI is often outpacing the ability to put the controls in place.” Sukand Ramachandran, a managing director and senior partner at BCG, warned that a serious attack could lock customers out of their accounts and disrupt payments across the wider economy. More on the lenders under that scrutiny is in our ranking of the best bank stocks according to billionaires.

Privately held AI developers sit at the center of the debate. European banks and regulators have grown frustrated by limited access to Anthropic’s Mythos tool this year, amid concerns that US banks may get first access. Rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI were also reportedly involved in a breach of Hugging Face, another private company.

A Market Selloff Tests the AI Trade

Investors are also testing how much they believe in AI spending. Democrats won the House and Senate in last Tuesday’s midterm elections, and Bloomberg reported that many of the winners ran on anti-AI platforms.

Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel, said investors are “questioning the growth assumptions for data center suppliers and pulling back pretty broadly.” Readers weighing where analysts still see room to run can look at our list of oversold AI stocks where Wall Street analysts are spotting 50%+ upside.

Barry Knapp, managing partner at Ironsides Macroeconomics, said he is not a buyer of anything right now. In his view, investors had acted as if data centers were a new state of affairs that could be projected years into the future.

Photo by Mizuno K on pexels

Our Methodology

To compile this list, we searched for AI-powered financial stocks and AI fintech stocks, and reviewed rankings published by financial websites over the past 12 months. From the stocks that came up, we picked the 10 with the highest average upside potential, based on analysts’ average price target, as of November 9, 2026. We also list each stock’s number of hedge fund holders as of Q2 2026, from our database of 1,006 hedge funds.

At Insider Monkey, we are obsessed with what hedge funds do. The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Insider Monkey’s quarterly newsletter strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 612% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 375 percentage points (see more details here).

10 Best AI-Powered Financial Stocks to Buy According to Analysts

10. S&P Global (NYSE:SPGI)

Market Cap: $135.74 billion

Average Upside Potential: 12%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 124

S&P Global sells the data that AI models and agents are being built on. Its Kensho unit packages that data into AI-ready feeds, and the company has combined its Model Context Protocol tools and adaptive retrieval agents into a single AI data portal. Customers who buy AI products are worth more: contract value in Market Intelligence is growing 1.8 times faster for AI customers than for others, and API call volume is up nearly 50% since the second quarter. Inside the company, AI is used across data operations, research, software development and analyst work.

The stock reflects a business with momentum. Third-quarter revenue grew 7%, and management raised its full-year profit outlook in the same release that opened a strategic review of its Capital IQ and associated data businesses. The company also expects to repurchase more than $7 billion of stock this year.

Chief Executive Martina Cheung said the businesses in the review are “strong and have significant opportunities ahead of them as technology changes how customers access, analyze, and use information.” Whether artificial intelligence can make that data worth more is the question behind our analysis of S&P Global’s data business.

9. Block (NYSE:XYZ)

Market Cap: $53.31 billion

Average Upside Potential: 15%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 76

AI runs through how Block builds and sells. An internal coding agent called goose began by automating engineering tasks and is now embedded in the foundation of the business. Squaremates, the rebranded AI assistant for Square sellers that used to be called Managerbot, is the template for Moneybot, which is planned to predict and present the right interface to each Cash App customer.

Cash App’s lending business is lifting profit faster than revenue. Gross profit rose 22% to $3.24 billion in the third quarter, and consumer lending originations grew 40% to $19.0 billion. Adjusted operating income grew 92% to $923 million, a 29% margin. Management raised its full-year outlook to match, now expecting adjusted diluted earnings per share of $4.15, up 75%.

Analysts stayed constructive after the report. On November 5, Barclays kept an Overweight rating and raised its price target to $105 from $100, calling it another quarter of beating estimates and raising guidance, while Scotiabank analyst Lance Jessurun kept a Sector Perform rating and raised his target to $89 from $82. Whether costs can keep pace with that growth is the question in our analysis of Block’s lending-led gross profit growth.

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