AI-Enabled Personalization and Adaptive User Interface Design in Mobile Banking Applications: Opportunities for Saudi Financial Technology

AI is increasingly the driver of which financial information mobile banking users see, with recommendations and adaptive interfaces representing conceptually separate interventions. This is an integrative review of their interplay, benefits and risks in the Saudi financial technology context. The review draws on 30 peer reviewed papers from 2020 to 2025 to provide a critical synthesis of evidence on banking adoption, intelligent interfaces, recommender systems, explainability, fairness and security. The evidence suggests that improved relevance and reduced navigation effort can lead to greater perceived value, although the benefits are contingent upon a number of factors including stable user interaction patterns, appropriately calibrated levels of trust, meaningful levels of user control and protection from inappropriate financial nudges. A layered design framework is proposed which links permissioned data, contextual inference, interface adaptation, user safeguards and accountable evaluation. It makes a clear distinction between the evidence that exists from other markets and the hypotheses that would require testing in the Saudi context (bilingual interaction, accessibility, open banking consent and the difference between routine and consequential decisions). Rather than simply assume that more personalised screens lead to better financial outcomes, the framework treats personalisation as a conditional capability whose legitimacy is predicated upon demonstrable consumer benefit. A staged research and implementation agenda is also proposed which includes comparative experiments, longitudinal outcomes and governance checks as part of a responsible deployment process.