Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

Download the free Innovation in Retail Banking report, with insights from 170+ banking executives worldwide: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/dbr/dbr314 Bancolombia built a digital bank to compete with itself. It now serves 24 million customers. Many U.S. bankers still think of Latin America as a region catching up. Fidel Vargas, Chief Information Officer of Bancolombia, says that's the wrong lens. Inclusion, fast digital adoption, real-time payments, and a wave of new competitors, from Nubank to Revolut to Mercado Pago, have forced Colombia's largest bank to innovate at a pace few U.S. institutions face. The result is a model worth studying for any bank or credit union, built by an institution with more than 32 million customers. Fidel walks through why Bancolombia let Nequi, the digital bank it started inside the bank 10 years ago, become its own licensed company with 24 million customers, and how the group decides when an internal initiative needs more speed, a different regulatory setting, or a brand of its own. He also explains why Bancolombia brought more than 60% of its IT people in-house and builds what sets it apart. That decision rule, starting inside and separating only when a customer need demands it, is one any institution can apply at its own scale. On AI, Bancolombia moved past experiments two years ago and put generative AI in front of customers, cutting its contact center budget by more than 20%. Fidel explains why innovation and resilience aren't competing priorities for a 150-year-old bank, why he believes banks that don't modernize won't survive, and why his toughest daily challenge is helping his own people keep pace with change. He closes with the daily forums Bancolombia runs to keep its teams aligned with how fast customers are moving. About the guest: Fidel Vargas Londoño is Chief Information Officer of Bancolombia, part of Grupo Cibest, where he connects business and technology and leads digital transformation across the bank and its companies. Thanks to Infosys Finacle and Qorus for making this conversation possible as part of our ongoing work on innovation in retail banking. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

A bank or credit union that waits for balances to grow before helping a customer start investing may be handing the relationship to Robinhood Banking. Robinhood Banking has reached more than $3 billion in deposits by starting with customers who were already investing. Robinhood reported more than $3 billion in Banking deposits from over 240,000 funded Banking customers at the end of June 2026, within a base of 28.4 million funded customers. About 40% of Banking customers had signed up for direct deposit. Those figures show traction, and they leave open how much income is arriving and whether Robinhood has become a primary account. Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC, provides banking services, and Robinhood describes itself as a financial technology company. Gold members who receive qualifying direct deposits earn checking interest and certain fee waivers, giving existing investors a financial reason to move recurring income to a company that already holds their investments. Javelin Strategy argues the larger risk for banks and credit unions may be the investment assets of younger, upwardly mobile customers, who are easy to overlook while balances are small. Bank Policy Institute research found banks lost ground in brokerage and mutual fund services between 2016 and 2022, which fits a pattern of customers starting to invest outside their main institution. The episode follows a made-up customer named Daniel, who is happy with his bank and starts investing $50 a month elsewhere, and asks what his institution had ready that evening. Daniel's story shows how a customer's decision could unfold. It closes with a test to run this week: have your team show an existing customer starting a $50 monthly investment, in the app and at a branch or by phone, and count the screens, calls and days. Four questions show where an ordinary customer would stop. About: Banking Insights Videos give bank and credit union leaders a practical view of one development at a time. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and host of Banking Transformed. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Banks can give each customer a VIP on the phone with voice AI, if trust comes first. Bland CEO Isaiah Granet says his AI already handles more than 3 million phone calls a week. At JPMorgan Chase, a great customer gets a private wealth banker. Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, believes voice AI can give everyone else a version of that relationship: a contact in their phone that answers by name at any hour. He estimates call centers cost companies more than $1 trillion a year worldwide, says that spending is already about as lean as it gets, and argues the bigger opportunity is customer lifetime value. He also sees savings in cutting the phone tree, hold time and drop-off friction. Granet is direct about what it takes to deploy conversational AI in a regulated institution. Bland does not build on the large frontier AI labs and will run on premise so customer data stays inside the bank or credit union. He recommends starting slowly, with a first interaction that simply routes the call, and says Bland's average time to go live is under 30 days. He also explains why internal notes need rules, since an unflattering comment about a customer could surface in a call. The conversation gets practical on the details that shape the customer's experience. Granet explains warm transfers, where one AI keeps a caller company while a second AI briefs the call center agent, and citations, which pull policy or reference numbers from a call and write them back to a system of record. He also covers mortgage calls, the pathways approach that lets a language model follow an institution's procedures, why one brain should serve voice, text and chat, and why Bland trains a voice that competitors cannot use. About Isaiah Granet: Granet is the co-founder and CEO of Bland, which began in health tech, went through Y Combinator and pivoted to voice AI. Bland builds conversational voice AI for large enterprises. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Hear the full conversation with Jorge Camargo of Bank of America on Banking Transformed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KibFqG47KzQ Banks and credit unions can let customers see and correct what the institution assumes about them, the way Amazon's About You page does for shoppers. Bank of America's experience shows customers will share what matters when someone asks. Amazon now gives shoppers a page where they can view, change or remove the preferences behind their recommendations, and even ask its shopping assistant what it knows about them. Most banks and credit unions still decide what a customer needs from transaction data the customer never sees. When that guess is wrong, the customer gets an offer that doesn't fit and quietly concludes their financial institution doesn't really know them. Jim Marous draws on his conversation with Jorge Camargo, who runs digital platforms at Bank of America. Erica, the bank's virtual assistant, has handled more than 3 billion conversations that came down to about 700 consumer banking topics, and one overarching concern customers bring to the relationship: am I good? By 2023, Life Plan users had scheduled more than 2.3 million follow-up appointments with the bank's financial specialists. Jim lays out three questions any institution can ask: what's your biggest financial challenge, how can we do better, and where else do you do business? The follow-up that matters most is "Did we get this right?" This isn't a big bank story. A community bank or credit union can start this week with one financial need, one channel it already has, and a promise to respond. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thefinancialbrand.com.

Community banks and credit unions keep pace by putting their own data to work for customers. Many community banks and credit unions already have the technology, data and insights they need, and are waiting too long to put them to work. That execution gap is what customers and members feel. Greg Adelson, President and CEO of Jack Henry, joins Jim Marous to explain why the technology gap with the largest banks is narrowing while the execution gap keeps getting wider, and what it takes for community institutions to keep pace. Greg sees the institutions that end up acquired as the ones that waited too long or chose not to invest. The way forward starts with data. As Greg puts it, nobody has more data than a bank or a credit union, and the flow of funds shows where customers and members are moving money long before an account closes. He and Jim discuss turning that insight into a better experience, and why no provider can be the best at everything. That makes partner choice critical. Institutions need partners that work openly with others and can help them deploy at speed and scale. On AI, Greg's advice is to protect what community institutions were built on- service, relationship, and trust - by taking cost out of the back office and putting those savings into people on the front line. He closes on the opportunity he'd act on first: Gen Z. About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed explores the people and ideas changing retail banking. New episodes multiple times each week.

PayPal and Venmo already have brand recognition and a huge customer base. Can they become your customers' primary bank in the future? PayPal's CEO has shared their plan for the future. PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous breaks down what Venmo's debit card economics, Teen Accounts, and a rejected $53 billion buyout bid actually say about where that trust is headed next, and what it would cost your bank or credit union if a customer's paycheck lands there first. Inside the episode: • → PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger. • → PayPal CEO Enrique Lores has told investors he wants Venmo to become a one-stop shop for money management, crypto, and investing, modeled directly on SoFi and Chime. • → Venmo Teen Accounts let kids 13 to 17 receive direct deposit tied to a parent's Venmo, meaning a first paycheck can land in Venmo before it ever touches a bank or credit union. • → Stripe and private equity firm Advent offered a 28% premium to buy PayPal in July, and reporting says Venmo, not Braintree, was the real prize behind the bid. • → Zelle still moves nearly three times as much P2P money as Venmo, but Venmo wins on frequency, identity, and brand pull, the real foundation of a banking super app. • → A Fiserv marketing executive's own teenage daughter got her Venmo debit card before anything arrived from her traditional bank account, a preview of the customer banks are losing first. • → Every dollar that sits in Venmo and gets spent on a Venmo debit card earns your own debit card nothing, while Venmo builds a map of customer spending you'll never see. Institutions and research referenced: PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Zelle, Stripe, Advent, Chime, Nubank, SoFi, and Fiserv. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Microsoft's financial services data chief forecast in 2023 how banks would use generative AI. Charles Morris now leads agentic enterprise strategy at Truist, and his early calls are worth revisiting. In February 2023, barely two months after ChatGPT reached the public, Jim Marous asked Charles Morris, then Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft, where generative AI was headed. Morris admitted he had never lived through an inflection point like it, then got specific. He described AI as a copilot to a human pilot who stays responsible for every output, speeding up first drafts, summaries of long documents and search across large content libraries. For compliance and documentation-heavy work in banking, he said, the early value was simply spending less time reading what nobody needed to read. He pointed to CarMax, which used OpenAI models to summarize customer reviews for every car it sells and cut work it estimated would take years down to a few months, with its own team approving the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with knowledge systems that hold verified facts, and called a professional human in the loop the strongest safeguard against errors reaching customers. That pairing, now widely known as retrieval-augmented generation, became a common pattern for enterprise AI. On jobs, Morris argued generative AI would show which parts of knowledge work are repetitive and which depend on creativity and people, changing roles and creating new kinds of work. This is the first Flashback Friday, a replay of one of our most-viewed conversations tested against what has happened since. Morris has since become SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Listen for which of his calls held up, and how far your own bank or credit union has moved since 2023. About the guest: Charles Morris was Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft when this conversation was recorded in February 2023. He is now SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.

Download Alkami's 2026 Generational Trends in Digital Banking research: https://www.alkami.com/resources/research/2026-generational-trends-in-digital-banking-report/?YouTubeIV54 To win over millennials and Gen Z, a bank or credit union has to win their primary checking account. J.D. Power finds these generations open 67% of all new primary checking accounts, and community institutions are winning less than their existing share. Millennials and Gen Z are the customers who will replace the baby boomers most banks and credit unions rely on today. Yet J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Millennial & Gen Z Checking Satisfaction Study shows midsize banks, community banks and credit unions hold 26% of these relationships while winning only 21% of new ones. Fintech customers rate their accounts higher on fee fairness, real-time balances and help making progress, and J.D. Power found many of the gaps come down to design and policy choices. Jim Marous uses his own son's banking to show where these relationships go: $200 a paycheck left at a top-5 bank to cover automatic payments, direct deposit at Chase after a rewards card he found through AI and search, daily spending on Venmo, and a credit union checking account that only makes the mortgage payment. As Jason Dorsey, who led new research for Alkami, puts it, a primary banking relationship is no longer a promise of exclusivity. Jim then lays out six moves for product, marketing and contact center teams: being named when customers ask AI or search where to bank, a 3-minute mobile account opening, no fees on small overdrafts, available balances that update the moment a purchase is approved, goal-based onboarding with a progress tracker and short money lessons, and helping customers discover the right feature at the moment it fits. The customers who will sustain a bank or credit union's growth may already have an account there. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

A $3.2 billion credit union chooses its digital partners from member surveys, and the results show. Chartway Credit Union runs $3.2 billion in assets and serves 265,000 members, yet it brought in $2 million in CD deposits in under 45 days without leading on rate. It segmented members with known excess liquidity, reached them with a personalized Pulsate push, and took them through one-tap Entersekt authentication straight into account opening and funding. Esteban Guerra explains why a batch email and a trip to the branch would have lost a large share of those members along the way, and why the targeting kept the money from behaving like hot money. The method behind it starts with members. Chartway surveys them, builds its roadmap from what they ask for, then searches Q2's Innovation Studio and checks references with credit unions on a similar stack before choosing a partner. With 85% of members on the mobile app and roughly 1.7 million logins a month, any partner that adds friction to mobile doesn't make the cut. And the feedback flows both ways: Chartway takes what members tell it back to its partners, and it often ends up on their roadmaps. Speed has changed the math for smaller institutions. Work that took six to nine months now takes weeks, and Chartway had ScribeUp subscription management in a production pilot in under two weeks. During a fraud spike it added background authentication rather than friction and cut manual reviews by 40%. Esteban, whose credit union was named Q2's 2026 Credit Union of the Year, closes with advice for banks and credit unions earlier in the journey: start with your members, invest in your people, and do the due diligence. About the series: The Experience Factor is a special Banking Transformed series with Q2, recorded at Q2 CONNECT 2026 in Austin, Texas, featuring consumer banking experts and financial institution leaders on how account holder experience and engagement drive long-term success. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Agentic AI: Powering the Self-Driving Bank: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/agentic-ai-powering-the-self-driving-bank/ A bank or credit union that judges Meta's Muse by whether it moves deposits is watching the wrong risk. Within about 10 days of launch, Muse was the most downloaded free app on the iPhone, and it reads customer accounts through Plaid. Meta's chief AI officer has challenged people to see whether Muse can find them $1,000, and the Muse Money Challenge gives customers a low-risk reason to connect their accounts. A forgotten subscription or a lower bill is a small win, but small wins build a habit. Each useful result makes it easier for a customer to bring the agent a bigger question, from which credit card to use to where to borrow for a major purchase, and none of that requires moving a single deposit. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous builds on his earlier video, The Agentic Bank Run. Many observers, including the chief economist at Apollo, are now warning that AI agents could pull low-cost deposits out of checking accounts. Jim argues that deposit flight may be the last thing to move. The earlier exposure is influence over the decisions that grow a relationship, including the lending side of the balance sheet, where Plaid's liabilities data gives an agent a view of card and loan balances. Jim closes with five practical moves for a bank or credit union: testing Muse internally, alerting customers when a recurring bill increases, reviewing customer borrowing before an agent does, giving branch and contact center staff the tools and authority to respond to an agent's comparison, and running a 30-day money challenge that puts a real person behind the help. Most of these moves rely on data the institution already holds, and the episode is candid about what that data can and cannot tell you about a customer's next financial decision. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Bank and credit union leaders are misjudging what frustrates their customers most, and the fix starts with leaders hearing those customers firsthand. In a ServiceNow study of more than 34,000 people, half of customers named a lack of empathy as their top service frustration, while only 23% of executives identified it. ServiceNow surveyed more than 34,000 customers, service reps and executives across eight industries, with banking and financial services among the largest groups of executives. On every customer frustration the study compared, executives came in lower than customers. The widest gap was unclear explanations of processes and policies, which in a bank or credit union means fee notices, disclosures, and letters that leadership teams write and approve. Meanwhile, reps spend less than half their time on customers and juggle three to five systems to solve one problem. Jim Marous argues that distance keeps this gap open. He shares what happened when he asked a large credit union's board and senior leaders who had spent time on the front line in the past year why his own management trainee rotation taught procedures rather than customers, and how Delta resolved his complaint without a handoff. Marbue Brown, who led customer experience for Chase's consumer bank, adds the banking version: broad employee authority within compliance. The episode closes with five practical steps for bank and credit union leaders: hear customers before approving a fee notice or letter, spend a day each quarter in a branch, the contact center or a back office area with a change to own, trace one recurring problem through every handoff with AI carrying the context, give employees the authority and training to resolve issues on first contact, and look for needs customers never bring to you. Banking Transformed explores the changes reshaping banks and credit unions, with practical insight for the leaders responsible for what comes next. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Most banks and credit unions chase new deposits before growing the relationships they already have. Megan Pannier of Fiserv says onboarding has been an industry priority for 25 years, and a lot of institutions still aren't doing it well. Megan talks with banks and credit unions every day, and the theme she hears most as they plan for 2027 is deposit growth. With everyone fighting for the same deposits, she argues that acquisition, retention and relationship deepening have to work as one strategy. Too many institutions still stop after the first few onboarding messages instead of using their data to decide what comes next. In her view, the work can't stop once the account is open, because relationship growth is a continuum. Data is the biggest barrier Megan sees. Institutions sit on more customer data than they know how to use, even though a bank or credit union can see a customer's full financial picture while other providers see only a slice. Her standard is that data only has to be directional, and she shares how Fiserv itself relies on partners like Snowflake to connect its own data. She also explains why disciplined growth beats retreating, and where AI is actually working: fraud prevention and marketing personalization. Megan's daughter turned 16 and opened her first account at a bank that doesn't allow Zelle under 18. Her babysitting money moved to Venmo, which had a debit card in her hands within 2 days, and she now treats it like a checking account. Megan's point is that the competitor to worry about is whoever owns the customer's daily financial activity. Her advice for every CEO finishing a 2027 plan is to start with the customer and answer one question first: why would someone bank with us? About the guest: Megan Pannier is Head of Bank and Adoption Marketing at Fiserv, where she works with banks and credit unions on growth, onboarding and customer engagement. She and Jim Marous first worked together at Zions Bank. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Read the research: https://finhealthnetwork.org/programs/financial-health-pulse Hear the podcast: https://youtu.be/VNylQkBCmBM?t=412 A customer of more than 20 years, rarely late on anything, took an unexpected medical hit, and his bank may never have noticed. He is one of an estimated 16.5 million American households that slid down a level of financial health in a single year, and banks and credit unions have their best chance to help before the first missed payment. The Financial Health Network's 2026 Financial Health Pulse finds financially vulnerable households rose from 15% to 17%, matching the highest share on record, while nearly 1 in 4 households moved up or down a level of financial health in one year. The pressure reached homeowners, business owners and auto loan borrowers, 40% of whom now say their overall debt is more than they can manage. Many of these households are customers most banks and credit unions would call safe, and most still look fine on paper. Jim Marous tells the story of a friend who has banked with the same institution for decades and was rarely late on anything, until an unexpected medical bill changed several things in his account at once. Each change on its own meant little. Together, they told a story. Jim explains why portfolio averages hide customers like this, why financial wellness programs often sit apart from the account where the slide shows up, and why the stress of that moment decides whether customers see their institution as being on their side. The episode closes with four specific moves: watch for combinations of change against each customer's own history, prepare help that fits a timing problem or an ongoing shortfall with costs explained upfront, reach out through a named person the customer can call, and measure whether customers were still doing better six months later and felt supported. For more on putting the data you already have to work, listen to Jim's Banking Transformed conversation with Rachel O'Neil of Alkami, "Turning Insights into a Competitive Advantage." About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thedigitalbankingreport.com.

Download the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report for free: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-retail-banking-trends-and-priorities/?YouTubeIV50 This is the wrong moment for a bank or credit union to slow its AI deployment. Our own industry said so before any of this noise started. Public unease about artificial intelligence is high, and the people building the world's most advanced systems have started saying out loud that the pace needs to slow. Pew found that 63% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, against 2% who think it is moving too slowly. Inside banking, that atmosphere has begun functioning as permission to wait. Jim Marous opens this episode with a board director who asked the question directly: should the institution slow down because of everything he had been reading? Jim argues the answer was settled months ago in a quieter moment. Surveyed by their own trade association, banks described themselves as cautious about AI and still concluded that inaction carries the higher cost, through deeper vendor dependence, internal expertise that never develops, and ground lost as AI becomes part of everyday banking. Nothing in the recent wave of warnings touches any of those three, because the argument at the top of the industry is about how quickly to build the next generation of models, and retail banking is not building them. The episode then does something unusual with the year's scariest AI story. Read closely, the recent disclosures of unexpected model behavior describe a governance failure any banker would recognize: systems rewarded for the wrong things, tasks that could not be completed, errors nobody wrote down. That reframes the whole debate as operating guidance, and it leads into a plain answer to where AI belongs in next year's plan, which use cases to deploy today, which one to pilot where the customer can see it, and what to hold until an approval step exists. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive.

Lifecycle campaigns beat acquisition by 2 to 6 times. Acquisition still gets the budget. Marquis analyzed thousands of campaigns across more than 100 banks and credit unions and found that lifecycle programs, the work an institution does with the account holders it already has, run 2 to 6 times more efficient than acquisition and prospecting. Our 2026 State of Financial Marketing report puts acquisition first among priorities, with retention and cross-sell well behind. The priority order and the return order point in opposite directions, and most institutions have not noticed. Satin Mirchandani, Chairman and CEO of Marquis, joins Jim Marous to get specific about what an institution's own data already knows. An auto loan at month 32 of a 36-month term. An account holder whose transaction frequency has quietly dropped. A household whose product mix has fallen behind the cohort that looks just like it. Each is a signal the institution already owns, and each one has a campaign attached to it that mostly never runs. The conversation also covers what counts as a response versus a funded account, why purchased intent data can spook the people it is aimed at, why messy data is a poor excuse for waiting, and why the explosion in side businesses is breaking the way most banks and credit unions group a household. Satin brings an outside perspective on why our industry keeps funding its lowest-returning work while the higher-return work sits untouched in the core system. Download Marquis 2026 FI Trend Report here: https://mktg.gomarquis.com/2026-marketing-trend-report About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed brings banking and credit union leaders the perspectives shaping the future of financial services. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Somebody is going to walk an extra lap around the block tonight because the ring on their watch isn't closed. Nobody is paying them to do it. That is gamification, and it is the most reliable behavior change tool built in the last 20 years. It also runs on a number somebody invented. 10,000 steps was never a medical standard. It was the name of a pedometer sold in 1965, and no study sat behind it. Jim Marous opens this Banking Insights episode by explaining what the mechanic really does, and that most banks and credit unions have never put a progress bar in front of a customer at all. Applied well, it moves the numbers that decide a relationship. Swaystack reports a 24% increase in meaningful first-month funding across the institutions using it, with Peak Credit Union live in 81 days and Think Bank in 90, both on digital banking platforms they already ran. The step customers stall on most often is the direct deposit switch, which also decides primacy, and Cornerstone Advisors finds institutions lose 3.36 digital applications for every one they complete. The episode then argues the mechanic should not stop when onboarding does. It covers the CFPB finding that the most popular savings rule was not the one associated with the most saved, the field experiment showing that crediting progress already nearly doubles completion, and Fifth Third's Life360, the planning platform that already answers the question everyone else's progress bar cannot. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

The most valuable thing a rewards program does has almost nothing to do with the reward. Bank of America reopened its rewards program this year and has enrolled more than five million people since May. Jim Marous opened a checking account at one of its branches specifically to hear how the associate would explain it, and what he got was not a product pitch. The program gave that employee a legitimate reason to talk about his whole relationship with the bank, what he would receive right away, and what would change if he brought more of his banking over. That conversation, rather than the cash back, is the part a community bank or credit union can learn from. The episode looks at why most programs cannot have that conversation. The average customer now keeps deposit accounts at three different institutions, and one in five moved money away from their primary institution in the previous three months. Under a typical tiered construct, 80% of customers account for only 14% of deposits, so most of the book sits outside anything the institution would call premium recognition. Jim frames the design problem as a door and a ladder: the door decides who gets in at all, the ladder tells them where they can go next, and most institutions put the hurdle at the door and build nothing above it. He also takes on the affordability objection directly, separating merchant-funded offers from the debit interchange exemption, and he shows what a useful relationship conversation sounds like in three sentences. The episode closes with four decisions any institution can make, including one that costs nothing: deciding which group of customers you will recognize automatically, because of who they are rather than what they hold. Research from Curinos, J.D. Power, PYMNTS Intelligence and the Federal Reserve, with examples from Bank of America and PNC, and material from Jim's interview with Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Bank of America dropped the $20,000 minimum. 5 million clients enrolled. For most of the last decade, a large bank rewards program was something a client earned their way into. Bank of America’s preferred rewards program required $20,000 in balances, making loyalty a benefit of affluence rather than a feature of everyday relationships. BofA Rewards moved the entry point to any eligible checking account, making 30 million clients eligible immediately. More than 5 million have enrolled since, with 1.5 million of those in the first month. Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America, joins Jim Marous to explain why checking was the non-negotiable anchor, how the higher tiers were made better rather than diluted, and why the lifestyle benefit threshold came down from $1 million in assets to $100,000. She also details what a primacy shift actually looks like in the data: direct deposits moving over, more card transacting, and a change in the top-of-wallet card. The most useful finding for other banks and credit unions is about channels. 80% of enrollments happen digitally in two taps, but Narula is clear that digital is the fulfillment channel and financial center associates are the catalyst. Roughly 20,000 new-to-bank clients open a checking account and enroll every week, 2.5 times the pre-launch rate. Narula closes with her advice to any leader planning a change at this scale, starting with associate education long before launch. Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe for new episodes multiple times each week.

2026 State of Financial Marketing report is available for free at https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-state-of-financial-marketing/?YouTube More than half of the banks and credit unions in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research have generative AI operational or better inside marketing. Not one of them describes its customer data as real-time and AI-ready. That gap runs in a straight line through the study. Generative AI raised production capacity, while thin data and almost no predictive decisioning keep the output from being relevant. 55% are not using predictive AI at all. 1% rate AI-driven content and creative as effective, the lowest score on the tactics chart, against the largest planned budget increase in the research. We funded the layer that produces marketing and held flat the layer that decides who should receive it, when it should arrive, and whether it worked. It also explains the distance between what this industry says about personalization and what it does. 83% sit at segment-based personalization or below and 1% call themselves hyper-personalized. Two-thirds of what we call personalization is choosing which audience receives a message, which is list selection under a newer name. Jim walks through what that looked like when he ran marketing at a bank, sorting a core tape by ZIP code and balance tier, and what has genuinely improved since. None of it is a reason to wait. Good solution providers build strong targeting on imperfect data every day. Imperfect data can't recognize what just happened to a customer and respond while it is still happening. Personalization and decisioning is also the least outsourced marketing function in the study at 13%, even though a lack of internal talent is the second-largest barrier, which means this industry outsources its strengths and protects its weaknesses. ABOUT: Jim Marous is Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast.

Your vendor may own the technology debt. Your institution owns the consequences. Technical debt is usually discussed as a money-center bank problem, so community banks and credit unions hear it and go back to work, because they don't write code. But institutions still contracting with a legacy core are paying the maintenance on that provider's accumulated debt. Outsourcing didn't remove the debt; it changed the relationship to it: a large bank can inspect its own and decide what to repair, while a smaller institution can only live with the consequences. In this episode, Jim Marous argues that the real difference is ownership. At a large bank the problem has a department, a register and a budget line. At a community institution it has no owner, no number and no seat at the strategy table, so it surfaces every 5 to 7 years as a procurement conversation about price per account. He puts the argument inside a scene every banker will recognize: a small product change, a room that likes it, an estimate that comes back at 9 months, and an idea that goes on a list nobody reads again. The stakes have changed, because AI is the first technology whose value depends almost entirely on whether the institution can absorb it. The answer is selective decoupling rather than core replacement: hundreds of single-solution providers now run alongside a large core, so the core can remain a stable system of record while the capabilities that need to move fast are free to do so. With a guardrail, because collecting providers badly trades core debt for integration debt. Stop making your core the answer to every technology question. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Melissa Stevens has a rule at Fifth Third: your employees are your brand. The chief marketing officer of one of banking's strongest regional brands joins Jim Marous to explain how Fifth Third grows relationships from the inside out, by giving its people the data, the insight, and even the influencer status to become the bank's most trusted voices. Stevens makes the case that customers never experience a bank as a marketing campaign. They experience it as the colleague who answers the question and solves the problem, and she has built her whole approach around that. That means letting employees post about the bank on social media without fully scripting what they say, because you can't script authenticity. It means arming bankers with insight, not just data, so a conversation is about the customer rather than the product. And it means watching for the quiet signals of a customer drifting away, like a direct deposit that suddenly splits in two, and reaching out before they're gone. She's also candid about the tradeoffs. Fifth Third deliberately kept generative AI away from its customers, choosing accuracy over personality, after growing its Jeanie assistant from barely 20 percent accuracy in its early days to the low 90s. She talks through carrying 500,000 Comerica customers into a new brand without breaking their trust. And she grades herself an honest C-minus on the one thing she worries about most as the company grows. For any bank or credit union trying to grow relationships in a crowded market, this is a clear look at what works and what most institutions get wrong about their own people. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

We won the adoption argument. Every hand in the room. And the income statement didn't notice. Four years ago, Jim Marous asked a room of bankers how many had used an AI tool in their work, and fewer than one in four hands went up. Last week he asked the same question and nearly every hand in the room went up, many of them belonging to bankers over 50. Adoption in the banking industry has moved faster than almost anything Jim has watched in his career. Over the same period, the share of organizations that can point to any impact of AI on their earnings has not changed. This episode opens with a recurring pragmatic check-in on where banking actually is with AI, and it locates the gap elsewhere than in the technology. Banking has digitized the same way three times: paper became PDF, PDF moved behind a portal, and now the work inside the queue has been sped up. Every round improved the surface the work sits on. None of them touched the space between two departments. Mortgage lending shows the result on the income statement, where closings have come down roughly two weeks since 2021 while the cost to originate at a bank or credit union has stayed flat and pull-through has declined. Retirement rollovers show the same failure landing on the customer, where an IRA application takes five minutes, and the transfer still runs on a paper check in the mail, during which about a third of job changers cash out instead. The argument lands on ownership rather than tooling. Every step inside a department has an owner, a budget line, and a number. The space between two departments has none of the three, which is why three waves of digitalization kept landing on documents and never on the gaps. Jim closes with three moves: picking a process instead of a task, assigning one owner across the whole span, and measuring end-to-end. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Most institutions aren't undifferentiated. Their differences are unwitnessed. Cover the logo on the mobile app, the website and the branch sign, and most leadership teams cannot pick their own institution out of a lineup. Jim Marous opens this episode with that test, then turns it around: the problem is rarely that a bank or credit union has nothing worth choosing. The problem is that the advantage was built somewhere no customer will ever see or feel it. The spine of the episode is an exercise Jim ran with a board recently. Everybody writes one sentence explaining why a customer banks with them, in the customer's words, and then the room crosses out anything that fails three tests. Distinctive, meaning the institution down the street could not write the same sentence. Valuable, meaning a customer has actually named it as the reason they chose or stayed, which most rooms cannot answer because nobody ever asked. And witnessed, meaning a customer can see, feel, measure or describe it through the channels they really use, and so can the prospect still deciding whether to start. From the diagnosis come four moves: capture the customer's own words at the opening, at the anniversary, and on the way out; put a number in front of the customer once a year; publish real voices rather than institutional language; and approve nothing that cannot survive the same three tests. The episode closes on the harder question, which is what an institution should do when nothing survives at all. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Customer experience expert Jay Baer is stepping away from the keynote stage after 17 years and moving deeper into the world of tequila. He joins Jim Marous for a Banking Transformed conversation centered on five pours and five customer-experience questions for banks and credit unions. Tequilas tasted, in order: → Nosotros Blanco → Lost Lore Joven → Arette Reposado → Wild Common Añejo → Cazcáñes #7 Extra Añejo Each tequila opens a different discussion: first impressions, disconnected experiences across channels, the role of AI and automation, the difference between satisfaction and loyalty, and the advice Jay wants financial leaders to carry into the next decade. Jay explains why connected customer experience is usually a culture and leadership challenge rather than a technology problem. He also argues that as AI tools become widely available, the human touch becomes more valuable, especially when something goes wrong. His parting warning is direct: the more customers are treated like numbers, the more they will treat their financial institution as replaceable. Jay Baer is the author of Talk Triggers and Hug Your Haters and co-founder of The Tequila Report.

Your NPS went up again last quarter. It still can't tell you which customers actually sent you somebody. Gallup studied more than 24,000 banking customers. Run the standard formula and the score came out at 11. Change only how a 9 and a 7 get counted, and the same answers from the same people produce negative 14. Nobody was resurveyed. Nobody changed their mind. Jim Marous makes the case that the industry's favorite metric records what customers say they might do, while the number that actually connects advocacy to growth records what they did. Only about 15% of customers ever produce a new customer, yet referred customers generate the vast majority of new customer profit, at a time when the cost of acquiring a customer has nearly doubled since 2019. The episode covers why the score inflates on its own, the sampling problem nobody names, why the man who invented NPS built an accounting-based counterpart to it and why almost nobody adopted it, and five moves for building referral measurement as a permanent capability rather than another refer-a-friend campaign. #Banking #CreditUnions #NPS #CustomerExperience #Referrals #FinancialServices

There is a $1.7 trillion blind spot sitting inside your bank or credit union right now. The Census Bureau counts 29.8 million businesses in the United States with no employees at all, taking in $1.7 trillion in annual receipts, about 6.8% of the economy. Almost all of that money runs through a personal checking account at a bank or credit union that has never asked what the owner is building. The industry treats this as a detection problem, to be solved by moving these owners onto a business account. The research points somewhere else. When a small business owner has a real question about running their business, 48% call another business owner. Jim Marous makes the case that the largest unmet need in this segment is connection to other owners at the same stage and to specialists who understand a business of that shape. The neobanks built for gig workers compete on tax buckets, invoicing and fee-free checking, and none of them competes on this. The capability to deliver it already sits inside every institution's own portfolio, unused, because the data was never structured in a way anyone could act on. That is what makes this an AI problem rather than a product problem. The episode closes on three actions: point the model at the portfolio rather than the credit decision, give the banker a briefing built from internal affinity and external context, and make the introduction personally, with both sides' permission. Home services is the vertical to pilot first. Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Only 18% of banks have integrated AI workflows. Everyone else is automating the past. Most banks and credit unions are using artificial intelligence to make yesterday’s work faster, then measuring the result with yesterday’s numbers. Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, and Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, call this the iteration trap and argue it is the same failure that has consumed digital transformation. Their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, published by Wiley in 2026, draws a line between an AI-enabled company that uses AI to do what it already did and an AI-forward company that uses AI to do what it could never do before. By their own research, only about 5% of companies have reached the second group. In this conversation with Jim Marous, Solis and Wright explain why an organization chart hides the handoffs where value stalls and why a work chart exposes them, how savings from iterative AI should fund the innovative AI that grows revenue, and what a chief executive should put in front of a board that has never approved an investment without a payback period. Wright describes a government delegation that planned to deflect 90% of its citizen calls and could not answer why. Solis describes 75 chief executives who admitted, privately, that they are expected to know what to do and do not. Marous brings the discussion back to banking throughout, from the quarterly reporting cycle that rewards cost-cutting to the risk avoidance culture that new bankers are trained into on their first day. He closes with his own prediction that the next wave of consolidation among banks and credit unions will be decided by readiness rather than by size, with the sharpest question in any acquisition being how much friction the acquired institution brings. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week, and subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Your institution is spending real money to bring people to the front door, and most of them never get through it. Cornerstone Advisors found 3.36 digital checking applications abandoned for every one completed, or nearly 9,000 potential accounts at the average institution. Research from Debbie puts average application completion around 15%, with the ID upload as the single biggest drop-off point, and some institutions decline 70% of the applications they receive. Meanwhile the average cost to acquire a member runs around $489. Most of that gets treated as a KYC and compliance requirement, and most of the time it is not. The customer identification program rule is risk-based. It permits non-documentary verification, allows identity to be verified within a reasonable time after an account is opened, and expects your procedures to define what someone can do while verification is still underway. Most systems only have approved and declined. Jim Marous looks at what the identity decision is costing banks and credit unions at the new account desk and in digital account opening, why the same gate gets run again on customers who have been with you for years, and what a risk-based verification path looks like in practice. Featuring research from Cornerstone Advisors, FICO and Debbie. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Organic Relationship Growth is Easier Than Prospecting and Available Daily Your cheapest growth engine is the customer whose transaction history you're already holding. Every month, your customers' accounts send money out to banks, brokerages, mortgage companies, auto lenders and installment lenders. At the customer level, that's a flow of funds analysis: where money enters, where it leaves, and which parts of the relationship are being served somewhere else. It won't tell you everything a customer owns or owes, but it will show you where money is going, how often it moves, and which outside relationships are active. Deposits and investments held elsewhere leave a trail as outbound transfers, and no credit bureau reports them, so your bank or credit union may be the only one positioned to see them. Loans held elsewhere show up as recurring debits. Every one of those is a form of credit somebody else underwrote for a customer you had already acquired and already paid for. Acquisition costs are rarely fully loaded, and roughly a third of new accounts leave within the first year. That's what makes this an organic growth argument rather than a reporting exercise, and it's growth you can begin sizing before you spend, because the volume, the frequency and the timing are already visible. Jim Marous shares his own money movement across two top 5 institutions, neither of which has ever offered him an alternative to what they can see him doing elsewhere. Some institutions have never assembled this view. Others have assembled it and attached no action to it. Different starting points, and the same result for the customer. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Lay a new core over a broken process, and the process just runs faster. Darius Wise told his staff the credit union was not good at what it did. Red Rocks was coming off two years of net losses, a core conversion was underway, a merger had just fallen apart, and the board was turning over. Darius spent two decades as a pastor before financial services. He joined Red Rocks as Chief Impact Officer, took the interim CEO seat during the worst of it, and returned the credit union to profitability within 11 months. In this episode, we talk about what that took. Exiting a merger after staff had already been told about it, and the trust that cost. The layoffs. The habit of softening hard news that he had to unlearn in his first month. Why he'd rather be respected than liked. And the thing he wants every institution buying its way out of trouble to hear: new technology on top of bad people and bad process only lets you do bad faster. We also get into the board he inherited, the reverse mentoring that changed it, why he's building branches while others close them, and why he'd rather choose a merger partner than be chosen by one. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Banks and credit unions rate higher than the fintechs on buy now, pay later. J.D. Power scores bank programs at 704 for customer satisfaction, compared with 603 for fintechs. Almost none of the spending is ours. The gap is timing. Our pay later arrives after the purchase, the fintechs own the purchase itself, and the moments a customer needs money the most, the emergency repair or the gap before payday, arrive without a checkout button at all. Meanwhile, Affirm and Klarna have both applied for industrial bank charters. Jim Marous lays out 3 levels of response based on when your institution shows up, from the card installment plan after the purchase to money already waiting in the mobile app before the customer knows what they will need it for. And he makes the case that the real advantage is not approving faster. It is the cash flow context that lets a primary financial institution structure the right answer, or say no when that is the better answer. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Deep institutional experience isn't enough for the job ahead. New thinking alone isn't either. Your next CEO has to bring both. CEOs in financial services stay in the seat about 9 years, longer than almost any other industry, at the exact moment AI, data, and new competitors are rewriting what the job requires. Yet only 9% of banks have identified a CEO successor with a timeline and a plan of action, down from 17% a year earlier. Most succession plans are built to replace the person already in the seat rather than to prepare for the job that is coming. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous argues the job now resembles a barbell. One end is credit judgment, relationships known by name, and having run the institution through a cycle where things went badly. The other is fluency in data and AI, command of partnerships, and a temperament that can carry bets, some of which are supposed to fail. The failure falls in the middle, and one person rarely holds both ends, which makes this a team question rather than a hire. Darius Wise of Red Rocks Credit Union shows what that looks like. He spent 15 years in pastoral leadership and arrived with no banking experience, then rebuilt the senior team around people who knew what he did not. His board runs on reverse mentoring, where the credit union's own employees teach the directors how the institution operates. The episode closes on custodian versus builder, and why that has nothing to do with age. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top-five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thefinancialbrand.com.

A new account costs a bank or credit union over $400 to win, yet more than 40% go inactive within the first year. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous talks with Har Rai Khalsa, co-founder and CEO of Swaystack, about closing the gap between account opening and account activation. Har Rai explains why the first 30 to 60 days decide primacy, why onboarding has to be product-specific, and how "reboarding" the existing base surfaces value institutions already own. He shares the results behind the approach, from a 5% portfolio-wide lift in direct deposit to a 71% increase in account openings with no added ad spend, and makes the case that activation is self-funding and that "silent attrition," not weak account opening, is the real threat to loyalty and profitability. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new conversations on account activation, onboarding, primacy, and the future of banking.

Your bank knows the customer. The employee sitting across from that customer usually does not. Banks and credit unions have spent millions learning about the people they serve, then built an access model that keeps most of what they know away from the employees responsible for those relationships. New research from MIT's Center for Information Systems Research finds that only 28% of employees regularly draw on the data assets their organization has already built, and that employees who do reach data spend 61% of that time finding and preparing it rather than learning anything from it. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous examines the gap between data creation and data use inside financial institutions. He argues that the industry measures one kind of risk carefully and never records the other: the relationships lost, the avoidable fees nobody questioned, and the marketing dollars spent acquiring customers who quietly went dormant, all because a signal never reached a person who could act on it. Drawing on the MIT research, the Digital Banking Report study of agentic AI in banking sponsored by OpenText, and examples from Fifth Third and Bangor Savings Bank, he shows why fraud teams have already solved this problem and why far fewer institutions have done the same work for the employee desktop. The episode closes on a question every leader can answer this week. What would change if the person handling your next important customer conversation could see what your institution already knows, and had the authority to act on it? About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top-five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thefinancialbrand.com.

Branch networks in the United States are growing again, yet only 9% of consumers name branches as their preferred way to bank. Both facts are true because the branch’s job has changed from acquiring new customers to deepening relationships with the institution's existing customers. Jim Marous examines what the largest banks are actually doing with physical distribution. Chase reports that half of the new checking relationships in its expansion markets come from existing credit card customers. Bank of America clients booked roughly 10 million appointments with specialists last year, with 90% of interactions digital, and the bank reports a 50% increase in digital sales in markets where it opens a financial center. Research from Curinos and Adrenaline finds accounts opened in a branch carry higher balances and are 25% more likely to remain open after a year. The episode argues that branch business cases should not begin with projected households and deposits, and that branches should be measured on a market P&L rather than a lobby P&L. It closes with a framework for deciding whether to build, remodel, or close, applied market by market rather than building by building. Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and host of the Banking Transformed podcast.

Nick Cowell, Principal and US retail banking leader at Deloitte, joins Jim Marous to unpack the firm's new series, 2050: Banking Beyond, and the question at its center: in 25 years, will banks still own the customer relationship? They get into why that relationship is the asset most at risk as AI agents, embedded finance, and open banking move engagement outside the bank's walls, why banks know so much about customers but tell them so little, privacy becoming a premium service, and the day talking to a human costs extra. Nick also explains why the next wave of consolidation will be driven by AI readiness rather than asset size, and the three no-regrets moves every bank and credit union should make now. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

The platform may have been designed to transform the institution, but often, the institution ends up redesigning the platform instead. Two institutions purchase the same digital account opening platform from the same provider. One can open accounts in just 3 minutes, while the other takes at least 9 minutes because it still requires a legacy ID step within the new technology. The provider and the solution are the same; only the results differ. Jim Marous explores why many digital banking investments deliver exactly what was promised but still leave the institution no better off. Drawing on the barbell concept in digital maturity research from Alkami Technologies linked below, where the largest institutions and the strongest smaller ones consistently outperform the middle, he outlines the three conditions no provider can own for a financial institution: the destination, the discipline to protect the intended result, and the ownership that ensures a decision is carried through the building process. Report: https://www.alkami.com/resources/research/reports/retail-banking-digital-sales-service-maturity-model-report/ Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Nubank can change the economics of deposits that it has never won. The Brazilian digital bank has conditional approval for a U.S. national bank charter and plans to open by 2027, and most coverage is asking whether it can take a meaningful share of the market from American institutions. Jim Marous gives the pragmatic take: Share is the wrong thing to watch. Nubank built more than 130 million customer relationships in Latin America by leading with credit and earning the deposits afterward, in markets where many people had kept their savings at home rather than trust a bank. Its global platform now runs at an efficiency ratio below 20%, compared with a U.S. norm near 60%. That gap is the story. It lets Nubank pay depositors more than a typical U.S. bank or credit union can, and still earn a stronger margin, using deposit rates as an acquisition channel the way it did with Cuenta Nu in Mexico, where the yield went from 9% to 15% and pulled in $3.8 billion in 18 months. The exposure for American institutions shows up as margin, not attrition. Nubank does not have to reprice every deposit in the country. It only has to reset the price of the next dollar you need to keep or replace, and with a national average savings-account rate under half a percent against the best rates near ten times that, your customers are already comparing. Jim Marous is co-publisher of The Financial Brand and host of the Banking Transformed podcast. This Banking Insights episode covers what Nubank built in Brazil, why Chime’s track record shortens Nubank’s path, the one fair-lending question that could slow its rollout, and three moves banks and credit unions should make before someone else sets their deposit floor. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Banks and credit unions have never known more about their customers. So why does so much of banking still feel impersonal? In this episode, David Acevedo, Vice President at Abrigo, joins Jim Marous to examine the gap between what an institution knows about a customer and what it actually does about it. They get into why more customer data has not led to better personal service, what separates the banks and credit unions that build lasting relationships from those that do not, and how to move from customer data to customer action at the front line. The conversation also covers the real advantage community banks and credit unions hold over the largest institutions, where AI strengthens the human relationship instead of replacing it, the most common and most expensive mistakes banks make when they try to get closer to their customers, and the one move David would tell any executive to make first. Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and owner of the Digital Banking Report. New episodes of Banking Transformed are published multiple times each week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

We can have all the trust in the world, but still lose the moment. Consumers aren’t asking many of their first financial questions in a bank branch anymore. They’re asking them on YouTube, social media, Reddit, podcasts, and increasingly through AI. New eMarketer research shows nearly 40% of adults under 45 now research banking products on social platforms, compared with about 10% of adults over 45. Financial institutions remain among the most trusted sources of financial guidance, yet many are missing from the platforms where consumers begin researching mortgages, savings accounts, investing, debt, budgeting, and everyday financial decisions. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous explains why YouTube has become banking’s new front door, why attention now precedes trust, and how banks and credit unions can combine credibility with engaging financial education to reach consumers before someone else shapes the conversation. Drawing on new consumer research and his own experience transforming his YouTube strategy, Jim explains why YouTube rewards watch time, why Google and AI increasingly surface clear, credible content, and how financial institutions can build discoverable expertise without becoming social media influencers. An audit of 150 financial videos with more than 100,000 views each found three quarters of the people giving advice never stated a credential. If banks and credit unions want to become the primary financial relationship, they need to be present where the first financial question is asked. Hosted by Jim Marous, internationally recognized banking strategist, co-publisher of The Financial Brand, owner of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast.

The five biggest U.S. banks just cleared more than $49 billion in a single quarter, and most coverage treated it as a record profits story. The more important signal sits underneath. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous digs into what the Q2 2026 megabank earnings mean for banks and credit unions that will never match a Wall Street technology budget, and why that gap is about to matter far less than it used to. The cost of using these tools is collapsing, so owning AI stops being an advantage and readiness becomes the moat. Two of the largest bank CEOs, Jamie Dimon and BNY's Robin Vince, said as much on their calls, from two directions. The institutions that build the inner workings now, clean data, fixed processes, clear ownership, and the guardrails set in advance, will absorb each new tool faster than the last. The catch is that the window rewards the few willing to move before it feels safe.

What if the biggest myth in banking is that customers don’t need branches anymore? Because every time Bank of America opens a new financial center, digital sales in that market jump by 50 percent. Physical presence isn’t competing with digital — it’s accelerating it. Now, Bank of America is putting $750 million behind a bet the rest of the industry walked away from too soon, opening 150 new financial centers across 60 markets by 2027 at more than $5 million per location. Bold? Yes. Contradictory? Maybe. But the timing suggests something deeper: after shrinking from 6,000 branches to about 3,700, they now believe the future isn’t fewer branches… it’s smarter ones. These next-generation centers aren’t transaction factories. They’re advisory hubs staffed by 12,000 relationship bankers, designed to anchor communities and handle the conversations digital can’t — at least not yet. My guest on the Banking Transformed podcast, Will Smayda, leads this transformation. He’ll explain why Bank of America is expanding while others retreat and what these new financial centers reveal about how clients actually want to bank. So, here’s the question we all need to wrestle with: Is this the future of the branch — or the most expensive contradiction in banking?

A charter can take your products. It can't take your relationships — unless you let it. In the first half of 2026, two dozen companies lined up to become banks, nearly matching last year's total, but almost none of these filings mean the same thing. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous hands financial institutions a decoder ring: the type of charter a company chooses tells you exactly which part of the business it's coming for, from stablecoin settlement to the whole customer relationship to the point of purchase. Using Circle, Nubank, Klarna, and Mission Lane as illustrations, Jim explains why the regulatory door swung open, why the charter is the least valuable thing these companies are actually buying, and the three moves every bank and credit union must make now to remain the primary financial institution a charter can never grant. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Your dashboard says you are their primary bank. You may only be their vault. More than half of the new checking accounts opened today are additional accounts. The direct deposit lands with you. The relationship lives somewhere else. Primacy no longer begins with the transaction. It begins earlier, at the moment a customer asks their first financial question. Last year, 10% of Americans took that question to an AI. This year it is 55%, and 77% among Gen Z. Those conversations are not happening with their bank, even though consumers still trust their financial institution far more than they trust an AI with their money. Jim Marous covers the four questions customers are already asking, and how banks and credit unions can answer them first: instant access to cash with no application and no credit bureau, a payday message that says what is safe to spend, subscription alerts with a one-tap cancel, and an open-ended question bar with a human at the bottom of every answer. Featuring Huntington, Regions, Bank of America and Erica, Fifth Third, and the implementation gap that keeps good ideas from ever reaching a customer.

What actually mattered in banking during the first half of 2026 — and what was just noise? Jim Marous welcomes Ron Shevlin, Chief Research Officer at Cornerstone Advisors, back to Banking Transformed for a mid-year review that cuts through the hype. The conversation covers why agentic AI is both overweighted and underweighted by banks and credit unions; Ron Shevlin’s three-part framework for AI’s impact, and the pivotal question of how work gets done versus who does the work; the stablecoin and tokenized-deposit debate, and the evolving role of core providers including Fiserv, FIS, and Jack Henry. They also discuss bank and credit union consolidation driven by capabilities and digital maturity rather than geography, and the fintechs Ron is watching most closely — SoFi, Robinhood, and Coinbase. At the heart of the episode is the decline of primacy: why a single “primary bank” no longer exists for consumers under 40, and why direct deposit no longer signals a growing relationship. The episode closes with each guest’s top priority for the second half of 2026. Ron Shevlin publishes the Fintech Snark Tank on Substack (ronshevlin.substack.com) and LinkedIn. Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report.

Your bank has a birth date for every customer and almost no idea who any of them really are. In this Banking Insights Video, Jim Marous argues that age-based segmentation is failing at both ends of the range, the 72-year-old living on his phone and the 22-year-old who wants a human for her first loan, and that the way forward is a better question. He traces how a date of birth became banking's most overused shortcut, what Bank of America's Erica reveals about expressed need at scale, and why the future of segmentation is a conversation. The episode covers why within-generation differences now run deeper than those between generations, how a compliance requirement became a customer-strategy crutch, and a repeatable loop any bank can run: Ask, listen, deliver value, and earn the next question. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and host of Banking Transformed. Follow the show so the next one finds you. #Banking #Fintech #CustomerExperience #DigitalBanking #BankMarketing

A six-minute loan process comes down to a handful of decisions any institution can make. Jim Marous talks with Adam Cadmus of The Atlantic Federal Credit Union and Benjamin Conant of Alkami about how a $240 million credit union rebuilt consumer lending from the ground up, cutting account opening from two days to six minutes with most loans closing document-free. They walk through the moves that made it work: bringing membership enrollment and lending into one flow, involving risk and compliance from day one, replacing document collection with trusted data sources, and rethinking legacy workflows instead of layering new technology on top of them. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes published multiple times each week. #BankingTransformed #DigitalLending #CreditUnions #LoanOrigination #Alkami

On June 25, 2026, Google launched a new Google Finance app. It looks like a market-data tool. It is the opening move in Google’s banking reset, and Google doesn’t need to become a bank to pull it off. In this Banking Insight video, Jim Marous makes the case that for a decade, Google has reached into banking, with checking accounts, payments, and comparison, and retreated every time, and that this time is genuinely different. Google isn’t chasing the banking product anymore. It is after the decision that comes before the product, the moment your customer decides where her money goes. In that moment, the app quietly becomes what Jim calls a primary financial companion: the source a customer trusts first to understand, compare, and decide about money, even when another institution still holds the account and moves the funds. Google needs no charter, branch, or balance sheet to win it. Jim breaks down why this is a reset rather than another retreat, why banks can’t out-trust or out-friction a source that customers already use all day, why the runway most banks think they have is already spent, and the two honest paths left for institutions that want to remain the place their customers decide. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report.

There is a quiet danger in banking. You get very good at one thing, and you keep doing it right up until the market shifts under you. Barclays built one of the largest card businesses in the US without a single branch, reaching customers through trusted brands like JetBlue, AARP, and General Motors rather than its own name. Peter Gasparro, Chief Development Officer at Barclays US Consumer Bank, joins Jim Marous to talk through moving a model-line credit card company into deposits and lending, building around customer journeys rather than product silos, and the discipline of running just 22 partnerships rather than hundreds. The conversation covers what separates a strategic partnership from a distribution deal, how customer expectations set by Netflix and Amazon are reshaping banking, why making products discoverable to AI agents is now a major project, and the one question Peter would ask first if he ran a community or regional bank: Do you really need to own everything end-to-end? Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

The next bank run will not look like a run. No crowd, no panic, just balances leaving quietly as customers’ AI agents move money to a better rate while everyone sleeps. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous explains why the agentic era changes the physics of deposits, and why the money you assume is loyal may only be waiting for software to notice the spread. Jim reframes deposit stickiness as friction rather than loyalty, revisits the sweep account as the automated money-movement machine banks built decades ago and now face pointed at the whole market, and draws on FDIC, Forrester, and McKinsey data to size the risk. He introduces agent-exposed deposits as a new way to read the balance sheet, and lays out the three categories every institution needs to separate: relationship-protected, rate-sensitive, and agent-exposed. The real question is no longer whether your customer keeps an account with you, but whether they still let you make a single decision on their behalf. Jim Marous is Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. Banking Transformed publishes multiple times weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

A newly opened account usually starts in third place. Here is how banks turn new customers into primary relationships in the first 90 days.   The average checking customer now uses three banks (J.D. Power), so most new accounts land behind two institutions the customer already trusts. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous breaks down the primacy window, the short stretch after account opening when a bank can still become the one a customer’s financial life runs through, and the ladder every new account has to climb: from available, to useful, to trusted, to primary.   You will hear what high-performing banks do differently: winning the paycheck first through direct deposit, since accounts with a direct deposit stay open about twice as long; running a seven-to-nine-touch onboarding cadence when more than half of institutions still stop at two or fewer; measuring primacy instead of satisfaction scores; and meeting customers inside the AI tools where they now decide where to bank, before the account is ever opened.   A practical playbook for any banker who wants new accounts to become primary relationships, not deposit hotels. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for more on the future of banking.

Ron Johnson created the Apple Store and the Genius Bar. Here is what banks can learn from him about trust, branch design, and the future of human experience in banking. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous talks with Apple Store creator Ron Johnson about his new book, Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius, and why the branch becomes more important, not less, as AI and mobile apps absorb routine banking. Ron explains what Apple understood about earning trust one experience at a time, and how banks can turn the branch from a fortress that signals security into a transparent place built for advice. You will hear his Launching, Deepening, and Restoring framework for customer relationships, the case for a Genius Bar for the bank, why Apple hired from bookstores instead of tech stores, and his take on AI as omni-intelligence, the pairing of human judgment with machine knowledge. A practical conversation for any banker rethinking the branch and the role of people in it. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for more on the future of banking.

SoFi is not winning by cross-selling harder. It is building a bank where members reach for the next product on their own.In this episode, Jim Marous breaks down how SoFi moved from a single-product student loan company to a full-service digital bank with a powerful customer growth engine. The key insight is the shift from cross-sell to cross-buy: instead of pushing another product, SoFi creates daily engagement, useful experiences, and timely options that make members want to expand the relationship.The discussion explores SoFi’s 43% product growth from existing customers, its national bank charter, its use of Galileo and Technisys, and the behavioral design principles behind its member experience. For banks and credit unions, the challenge is clear: the future of growth may depend less on selling harder and more on being useful when customers are ready to act.A must-listen for leaders focused on digital banking, customer engagement, fintech strategy, and relationship growth.

The best banking innovation isn't about budget. It's about the distance to the customer.Jim Marous unpacks the 16th Edition Innovation in Retail Banking Report from Infosys Finacle and Qorus and explains why most retail banking innovation never reaches scale. Only 31% of initiatives are deployed at scale and delivering, and fewer than 4% of banks have agentic AI running at full scale. The innovations that win share one trait. They become invisible, embedded so naturally into how customers get paid and save that no one even notices the technology. That advantage comes from proximity to the customer moment, not spending power, which is why community banks and credit unions can out-innovate institutions many times their size.Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report, with new episodes published multiple times weekly.

The relationship managers who resisted AI the hardest became its biggest advocates the first time it made them a hero in front of a client. Recorded live at nSight in Charlotte, Jim Marous talks with Jillian Boyle, SVP at WaFd Bank, and Will Jung, CTO of nCino, about arming front-line bankers rather than automating them. WaFd, with nearly $30 billion in assets, put an app in its bankers’ hands and gave them back the time they used to lose to administrative work. Boyle believes that while change management was an important part of the journey, banker adoption accelerated once teams saw how AI could help them better serve clients. In this episode:• Why WaFd gave its bankers AI tools and data instead of trying to replace them• The moment skeptical bankers flip from resistance to adoption• Why every banking problem does not need a large language modelRecorded at nSight, sponsored by nCino, with research access linked below. Banking Transformed, hosted by Jim Marous, publishes multiple times each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Most banks know far more about their customers than the customer ever feels. In this Banking Insight Video, I look at why relationship banking often feels programmed, from the quarterly business banker check-in that goes to voicemail to the small human moments customers actually remember.Using examples from Ritz-Carlton, Delta, Nordstrom, Disney and TD Bank’s Automated Treat Machine, this episode explores what banks can learn from companies that make ordinary interactions feel personal. The point is not to copy those examples. It is to rethink how banks use customer data, technology, frontline judgment and employee empowerment to make customer experience feel more human.For bank executives, retail banking leaders, marketers, digital teams and frontline managers, this is a practical conversation about relationship management, personalization, customer loyalty, surprise and delight, and the human moments banks keep missing.

"The banking industry spends billions competing for deposits, loans, and new accounts. But what if the real competition starts much earlier? In this episode of Banking Insights, Jim Marous explores why attention has become one of the most valuable assets in banking and why many financial institutions are losing the battle without realizing it. Using the FIFA World Cup as a lens, Jim examines how organizations earn attention, why visibility is not the same as relevance, and what banks and credit unions can learn from brands that consistently stay top of mind. You'll discover: • Why customer attention is the leading indicator of future growth • How silent attrition often begins long before balances leave • Why AI search, digital engagement, and financial insights are changing the rules of competition • How institutions can earn attention without increasing marketing budgets • Practical strategies to become more relevant in the moments that matter most Before customers give you their money, they give you their attention. The institutions that understand that difference will be positioned to win the next decade. #Banking #DigitalBanking #CustomerExperience #Marketing #FinancialServices #BankingTransformation #RetailBanking #CreditUnions #AI #BankingInsights"

Traditional financial institutions often view the credit-underserved market as a liability. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Michael Coleman, CMO of Credit One Bank, joins me to demonstrate how that mindset is shifting. We explore the actionable strategies banks can use to reach millions of underserved households by moving from fear-based risk avoidance to purposeful risk management.We break down the pathway to inclusion:• Targeted Outreach: How to leverage pre-approved offers and data-driven insights to lower barriers to entry for millions.• Empowering Through Education: Why proactive, digital-first credit education turns potential risks into loyal, long-term card members.• Transparency as a Tool: Using clear fee structures and open communication to build trust with populations that have been historically excluded. Download the full Digital Banking Report, The Ultimate Subscription: Fees That Unlock the System for Millions, at DigitalBankingReport.com. This episode is sponsored by Credit One Bank #BankingTransformed #FinancialInclusion #CreditOneBank #Fintech #RetailBanking #ConsumerFinance

Only 13% of banks and credit unions are operating at the highest level of digital maturity. They are growing revenues at 5X the rate of their less mature peers, and they are not the largest institutions.In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous draws on new research from Alkami and the Emerald Research Group to explain what digital maturity actually means today, why it no longer correlates with asset size, and the three factors separating the institutions pulling away from everyone else. He walks through the four-segment maturity model, the cost of standing still in the AI era, and what every banking executive should do Monday morning, with a closer look at one community bank that committed early and what its experience tells the rest of the industry.Take the Digital Maturity Model and Assessment Tool. Download the full research report.Banking Transformed publishes multiple times weekly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Sixty-five million Americans cannot fully participate in the economy that most people take for granted. For many, the issue is not irresponsibility. It is a medical crisis, divorce, job loss, thin credit file, or temporary setback that pushed them outside the traditional credit system. In this Banking Insights episode, I examine why more banks and credit unions are retreating from consumers with credit scores below 670, even as the need for responsible credit access continues to grow. Based on Digital Banking Report research, this episode challenges industry assumptions about risk, regulation, fees, and financial inclusion. The opportunity is not simply to approve more applications. It is to build a better credit model around access, education, and financial momentum, where consumers are given the tools, transparency, and a clear path to improve their financial future. I also share the story of Taeisha Jamison, whose credit score improved by more than 150 points after gaining access to a product that combined responsible credit, embedded education, and a clear path forward. Her story shows what happens when financial inclusion moves beyond messaging and becomes a working business model. In this episode: - The data behind the retreat from lower-score borrowers. - How fees can fund responsible access. - Why education without access, or access without education, falls short. - How banks can create financial momentum through smarter product design, alternative data, behavioral tools, and transparency. Download the full Digital Banking Report, The Ultimate Subscription: Fees That Unlock the System for Millions, at DigitalBankingReport.com. This Banking Insights episode is sponsored by Credit One Bank. #BankingInsights #CreditAccess #FinancialInclusion #FinancialHealth #CreditOneBank #BankingTransformed

How will bankers and AI agents be working side by side five years from now? For most banks, that is no longer a hypothetical. New global research from nCino (link below) finds that 89% of banking executives expect their organization to be a combination of humans and AI agents within five years, and 84% say agentic AI has already changed how most banking roles operate. Leaders frame this as a move toward higher-value work. 91% say AI lets their people spend more time on the customer-facing tasks that matter most. In this episode of Banking Transformed, host Jim Marous sits down with Sean Desmond, President and CEO of nCino. Sean's view is that the real question is no longer whether to adopt AI but how to turn that activity into measurable outcomes. The research backs him up. Four in five executives say their organization prioritizes AI adoption over return on investment. Sean walks through how nCino moved past experimentation, including a personal agent stack he scoped in a single evening, and why he believes the goal is to raise up what bankers can do rather than take work away from them. In this conversation: The dual workforce: how humans and AI agents are beginning to share the workload, and what shifts when they do. Adoption to impact: why so many banks can point to AI activity but not yet to AI return, and how Sean thinks they close that gap. Beyond the sandbox: moving AI from test environments onto live production data without breaking governance. The data reality: why 94% of executives want one end-to-end AI solution while 93% still struggle with siloed or inconsistent data. Sponsored by nCino:nCino's inaugural AI in Banking Benchmark surveyed 150 senior banking executives and the results tell a story of high confidence with a striking blind spot. Nearly 9 in 10 say AI agents are the future, but only 1 in 5 are tying it to revenue. #BankingTransformed #nCino #DualWorkforce #AgenticAI #AIinBanking #FutureOfBanking #Fintech

Americans are saving less than they have in years, and the banking industry is partly to blame.Jim Marous argues that the savings crisis is partly a design failure. Banks spent decades making spending effortless while leaving saving to willpower, and the programs that actually changed behavior, from Christmas Clubs to round-ups to retirement auto-enrollment, all worked the same way: they built a system and removed the decision. The uncomfortable part is why the industry never automated everyday saving behaviors.This episode covers the difference between a knowledge problem and a behavior problem, what Bank of America, Ally, SoFi, and Acorns understood that most institutions ignored, why the clearest signal a customer can send so often goes unanswered, and the single change that would do more than any new technology.Subscribe for new Banking Insights each week as part of the Banking Transformed podcast.#BankingTransformed #Banking #DigitalBanking #FinancialWellness #BehavioralEconomics #Fintech #Saving

The U.S. banking industry is about to enter the largest consolidation cycle in a generation, and the institutions most at risk may not be the ones with the weakest balance sheets. They will be the ones that waited too long to modernize. Drawing on conversations with executives running institutions with $2 billion in assets to over a trillion, and research in conjunction with Alkami Technologies, this episode reframes what resilience means in 2026 and what it requires of leadership.Topics covered: • Why this consolidation cycle is structurally different from the 1990s wave or the post-2008 wave • Why digital maturity now predicts revenue performance more reliably than scale does • What separates the institutions positioned to acquire from the ones positioned to be acquired • Why the grace period banks used to have for technology adoption is gone • The new definition of resilience that determines who survives this cycle #BankingConsolidation #DigitalMaturity #BankingAI #BankingLTransformed #Banking

Why do the same financial brands keep showing up inside ChatGPT recommendations while many traditional institutions barely appear at all?New research from EMARKETER found that brands including Capital One, Klarna, Coinbase, PayPal, and Discover consistently rank among the most visible financial companies in AI recommendations.In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous speaks with Tiffani Montez, principal analyst for financial services at EMARKETER, about what the AI Visibility Index reveals about consumer trust, digital marketing, and the changing dynamics of financial brand discovery.The discussion explores why fintechs dominate some categories while legacy institutions still lead others, how consumer behavior is shifting in the AI era, and what today's financial marketers may still be underestimating about visibility and relevance.#Banking #AI #DigitalMarketing #Fintech #ChatGPT #BankingTransformed

Chime now opens more new checking accounts than Chase, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America. And the company’s fastest-growing customer segment is no longer financially stressed households. It is higher-income consumers looking for a banking experience that feels simpler, faster, and less frustrating.In this Insight Video, Jim Marous breaks down the Chime flywheel and explains why the company’s growth is not really about fintech technology. Most of the tools driving Chime’s success already exist inside traditional banking today.The difference is operational focus, product innovation, and a willingness to remove customer friction that many institutions still defend economically.This episode explores direct deposit primacy, engagement-driven economics, referral growth, product innovation, and why Chime may be exposing a much larger leadership challenge across retail banking.#Banking #DigitalBanking #Fintech #Chime #BankingStrategy #CustomerExperience #BankInnovation #BankingTransformed

Your bank may already be invisible.Not on Google. Invisible inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, where your customers now ask which bank to choose, which credit card to trust, and which financial app is worth their time. The AI gives them three names. Yours may not be one of them.Jim Marous breaks down the eMarketer AI Visibility Index data, the five specific moves a bank marketer can start this week, and the Monday Morning Test every banking leader should run before their next executive meeting. Featuring data from Tiffani Montez at eMarketer and David Evans of The Financial Brand.#BankingInsights #AIinBanking #GenerativeEngineOptimization #DigitalBanking #JimMarous

Banking transformation is rarely limited by technology. More often, it breaks down when teams lose trust, momentum, or clarity during change. In this live conversation from The Financial Brand Forum, Pinnacle Financial Partners Chief Digital and Product Solutions Officer Liz Wolverton discusses what leaders get wrong about mergers, AI adoption, and digital transformation. We explore how to reduce uncertainty during disruption, how AI should be introduced as a teammate instead of a threat, and why urgency without empathy can derail even the best strategy. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. #Banking #AI #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #ChangeManagement

Most banks and credit unions say growth is the top priority heading into 2026. At the same time, fintechs are winning the relationships that drive future deposits, payments, and engagement. In this episode, Lee Wetherington from Jack Henry joins me to break down the findings from their 2026 Strategy Benchmark Study and explain why many financial institutions still struggle to act on signals already sitting in their own data. We discuss silent attrition, payment flow analytics, Gen Z deposit growth, AI investment priorities, and why payments have become the control point in the accountholder relationship. This conversation is not just about technology. It’s about how the game of banking is changing. This episode is sponsored by Jack Henry®. At Jack Henry, we believe the world is a better place with community and regional banks and credit unions. For 50 years, we’ve put financial institutions at the center of our modernization. We’re here to help you innovate faster, differentiate strategically, and compete successfully – with one goal in mind: to improve the financial health of the people you serve. To learn more about the findings discussed in today's episode, download the full Strategy Benchmark study here: https://discover.jackhenry.com/strategy-benchmark-study-2026 Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes published multiple times weekly. #BankingTransformed #Banking #DigitalBanking #Fintech #AIinBanking #Payments #BankStrategy #CustomerExperience #FutureOfBanking #GenZBanking

If you earned your marketing degree more than five years ago, you are already playing catch-up. Most banks are mailing in their response to AI. I break down the four AI moves the best banking marketers are running now: targeting that finds micro-cohorts of one, personalization built around the customer instead of the account, predictive analytics that tie marketing to revenue, and whether AI search tools even mention your bank. Each move draws on Banking Transformed interviews with Raja Rajamannar of Mastercard, Andrea Brimmer of Ally, and Olly Downs of Curinos. Using AI is no longer the goal, because every bank will get that far. The marketers who win refuse to mail it in and build something a competitor cannot copy. AI marketing has no finish line. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast. #BankMarketing #AI #marketing #Banking #BankingTransformed #FinancialServices

Most banks still treat AI as a faster way to do the same work. Citibank believes the entire operating model of banking is about to change. Recorded live at the Financial Brand Forum, Driss Temsamani, Head of Digital at Citi and author of The Agentic Bank, explains why the next phase of AI is not about chatbots or isolated use cases. It is about rebuilding how banks deploy software, organize teams, serve customers, manage operations, and create decisions at scale. We discuss why software development costs are collapsing, why subject matter expertise becomes more valuable in an AI-driven organization, how agentic systems could reshape customer engagement, and why technologies like blockchain may become foundational to the future of financial services infrastructure. This conversation goes well beyond automation. It looks at what banking may become once intelligence is embedded into every part of the organization. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. #Banking #AI #AgenticAI #DigitalBanking #BankingTransformed #Citi #Fintech #CustomerExperience

Banks are collecting more customer data than ever before. Yet most institutions still do not understand the customer any better. In this Banking Insights episode, I explain why that gap is widening, what Bank of America has built with Erica over 3.2 billion conversations, and why the real advantage in banking is shifting from collecting information to learning from it in real time. Drawing from my conversation with Jorge Camargo, Head of Digital Platforms at Bank of America, I explore why most personalization strategies still fail, why transaction histories are not customer insight, and why the institutions that win will be the ones that ask better questions and act on what they learn. #Banking #DigitalBanking #AI #CustomerExperience #BankingTransformed #Fintech #Erica #BoA

Most banks still treat AI as a chatbot or efficiency tool. Bank of America built something much bigger. In this live conversation from the Financial Brand Forum, Jorge Camargo, Head of Digital Platforms at Bank of America, explains how Erica evolved from a simple virtual assistant into infrastructure supporting 65 million clients across consumer banking, wealth management, and treasury services. Today, Erica is becoming the foundation for how Bank of America approaches agentic banking. We discuss what 3.2 billion customer conversations revealed about consumer behavior, why proactive engagement matters more than reactive service, and how Bank of America is moving from AI as a destination to AI embedded throughout the customer experience. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week. #Banking #AI #AgenticAI #DigitalBanking #BankingTransformed #BankofAmerica #CustomerExperience #Fintech

Is your bank being unbundled without realizing it? Most banking leaders are still watching the obvious disruptors. But the bigger threat may be happening behind the scenes, as software platforms, embedded finance, and agentic AI begin to reshape how financial services are delivered and who owns the customer relationship. In this episode, Rex Salisbury, founder of Cambrian, joins me to discuss what these shifts mean for traditional banking, why legacy moats are weakening, how seriously bankers should take Nubank's long-term U.S. potential, and what leaders need to do now to stay relevant. In this episode: • Why financial risk often shows up in strategy long before it shows up in earnings • What Nubank's model signals for the future of competition in banking • Why banks need to think beyond products and toward platforms, ecosystems, and execution #BankingTransformed #Fintech #RetailBanking #DigitalTransformation #AgenticAI #EmbeddedFinance #Nubank #BankStrategy #FutureOfBanking #Cambrian #RexSalisbury

Most banks think they have an attrition problem under control because the closure numbers still look healthy. But customers are not leaving the way they used to. They are opening accounts at Chime, SoFi, Robinhood, Cash App, and Acorns while keeping their old bank relationship open. The direct deposit stays, and the account stays active, and even the dashboard says everything is fine. Meanwhile, more spending, more engagement, and more deposits quietly move somewhere else. In this episode, I break down what I call “silent attrition” and why the first outbound transfer matters more than the eventual account closure. Using data from J.D. Power, Cornerstone Advisors, Accenture, and a real-world engagement with a $10 billion institution, I explain why traditional retention metrics no longer reflect customer reality, how challenger brands are winning share of wallet without triggering alarms, and what banks can do right now to identify customers who are already halfway out the door. Because by the time the account closes, the relationship has usually been gone for years. #Banking #DigitalBanking #Fintech #CX #AI #CustomerRetention #attrition #BankTransformation

Most banks are losing customers after they have already decided to open an account, and it has nothing to do with pricing or competition. The breakdown occurs during the account-opening process itself. If you want to see it clearly, try it on your own mobile app. Start an application and time how long it takes to complete. In many cases, the experience is slow, repetitive, and built around steps that were never designed for a phone. In this episode, I walk through what changes when that process is simplified. One institution reduced account-opening time from more than 20 minutes to under 5 and saw new account growth triple in less than 90 days. The shift did not come from a new marketing strategy or a major brand campaign. It came from removing friction, aligning the front and back ends, and ensuring the experience works the same way across mobile, online, and the branch. For most institutions, this is one of the fastest ways to improve growth. The real question is whether you are willing to change the process behind it. #BankingTransformed #DigitalBanking #AccountOpening #RetailBanking #CustomerExperience

Ryan Bailey spent 20 years at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, TD Bank, Fifth Third, and USAA. Then he took over Cambridge Savings Bank, a 190-year-old, $7 billion mutual community bank in Massachusetts. In this Executive Leadership Series episode of Banking Transformed, recorded live at the Financial Brand Forum, Jim Marous and Ryan get into how community banks actually win against the giants. They cover the strategy behind Ivy Bank, Cambridge Savings’ national digital deposit brand, and why Ryan believes half of the smaller banks in the country won’t be here in 10 years. They also dig into closing the analytics gap with a JPMorgan Chase, using AI to improve customer experience instead of just cutting cost, bringing legacy employees along on a fast digital agenda, and what USAA taught Ryan about loyalty. Ryan closes with one Monday morning move every community bank CEO can act on right away. In this episode: • Why scale no longer guarantees dominance • Gathering deposits nationally, lending locally with Ivy Bank • Ryan’s prediction on community bank consolidation • Closing the data gap without an enterprise budget • The Monday morning move every CEO should make #BankingTransformed #CommunityBanking #DigitalTransformation #Fintech #BankingPodcast #FinancialBrandForum #IvyBank #CambridgeSavingsBank

James Clear's Atomic Habits is the blueprint for professional change, but most banks are applying it incorrectly. In this episode of the Banking Insights series, I unpack the 1% daily compounding math that dictates why some banks quietly lose competitive ground while others compound forward. I share my personal journey of losing 80 pounds and rebuilding this video series using the same system. Then I introduce the compounding gap framework, the invisible force that explains why so many strategic plans never become customer behavior. If your institution feels stuck, this episode provides the four-law framework to identify where your system is breaking down and what to do about it tomorrow morning. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for weekly insights on the future of financial services, and tell me in the comments: which of the four laws is breaking down inside your bank right now? In This Episode • The 1% daily compounding math applied to institutional banking strategy • The difference between goals and the systems that actually produce them • The compounding gap: the invisible force behind declining growth • Identifying which of the four laws of behavior change is failing in your organization Referenced Episodes Insight Video #9: Agentic AI in Banking Insight Video #6: The Oura Ring Business Model #AtomicHabits #BankingTransformed #DigitalBanking #RetailBanking #CompoundingGap

The biggest threat to your bank isn’t a fintech, a stablecoin, or the next Elon Musk venture. It’s the executive who already knows what needs to change and still isn’t changing it. At the Financial Brand Forum, Ron Shevlin and I took the stage for a live Pardon the Finterruption session focused on what actually matters right now. No long runway. No polished conference script. Just a fast-moving exchange where we pushed back and forth on 10 of the most pressing issues facing banking. We disagreed on plenty: the role of branches, whether the deposit war is really about wealth transfer or product design, and how super apps fit into the U.S. market. But on the underlying diagnosis, we landed in the same place. This industry has an execution problem. AI is constantly discussed, while most deployments remain buried in the back office. Customer experience tops every priority list, but funding and data investment don’t follow suit. Growth is the goal, yet opening an account still takes fifteen minutes when it should take three. And while the industry debates what to do, deposits keep moving across fintech platforms, ecosystems, and new rails. The gap between what we say matters and what we actually fund continues to widen. The organizations that close that gap will win. The ones that don’t will keep explaining why they didn’t, until the decision gets made for them by a customer who already left. This conversation covers AI, deposits, branches, personalization, embedded finance, and innovation, but it all comes back to one thing: look in the mirror. The threat is closer than you think. Hashtags #BankingTransformed #RetailBanking #DigitalTransformation #AgenticAI #BankStrategy #FutureOfBanking #EmbeddedFinance #Fintech #CustomerExperience #BankingInnovation

Banks have spent three years experimenting with generative AI. Most of those pilots are quietly dying. Not because the technology failed, but because no one could prove the return, govern the risk, or scale what worked. In this episode of Banking Transformed, I sit down with Derek White, founder and CEO of Primitive, and Ryan Caldwell, founder and CEO of MX. Primitive launched as the complete AI agent operating system purpose-built for regulated financial institutions. The MX partnership powers a new AI-native Growth Agent for banks and credit unions. In this conversation: • Why Derek believes banks will soon have more AI agents than employees • Agent Capital and Return on Agent Capital as the new language for the bank P&L • The Growth Agent will identify opportunities in real time and automate campaigns • Where banks should actually start If you lead strategy, digital, data, or AI at a bank or credit union, this is the conversation that will reshape how you think about the next 24 months. #BankingTransformed #AgenticAI #DigitalBanking #FinancialServices #AIAgents #Primitive #MXTechnologies #DerekWhite #RyanCaldwell #JimMarous #FutureOfBanking #BankingInnovation #AIStrategy #BankingAI

The loudest thing in banking right now is not on the agenda. Leaders are waking up to headlines and uncertainty that shape decisions before the day even begins. Many institutions are stuck on a treadmill, showing plenty of effort and motion without enough real forward progress. The leaders widening the gap are doing it with stronger internal clarity. In this Insight Video, I explore why digital maturity is really about the speed and quality of decisions while the ground is moving under you. I also explain why geopolitics is very much a community bank issue and why external pressure can no longer be treated as a disclosure item instead of a decision input. Key insights: • The Decision Gap — In a volatile environment, a slow decision can cost more than a wrong one. • The “Why” as a Filter — Strong institutions use a shared sense of purpose to decide what belongs on the roadmap and what does not. • Budget Realities — Efficiency has moved ahead of growth as the top strategic priority for community and regional banks. • The Three-Year Test — The winners will be leaders who can keep making sound decisions when visibility is low, pressure is high, and the environment refuses to settle down. The real test starts Monday. #BankingInsights #JimMarous #RetailBanking #BankingStrategy #Leadership #DigitalMaturity #BankingTransformed #FinancialServices #CommunityBanking #CreditUnions #TheFinancialBrand #Alkami #LeadingThroughTheFog

The era of the reactive bank is over. Whether you’re ready or not, leading institutions have moved beyond responding to customers and are now using AI to drive real-time decisions and outcomes. In this Insight Video, Jim Marous explores the massive structural gap in the industry: 96% of institutions say they are engaged with agentic AI, yet only 19% have anything in production. Why is the "self-driving bank" still just a pilot for most? We dive into the data from Deloitte, MIT, and McKinsey to reveal that the real barrier isn't regulation, it’s internal readiness and the failure to move from "passive" chat interfaces to "autonomous" agents that execute work. What You Will Learn: The Definition Shift: Why agentic AI is about taking action, not just answering queries. The 20-Year Relationship Fail: Why a tool used for 2 years knows more about serving customers than a bank that has held their data for 20. The Erica Blueprint: How Bank of America handles 2 million daily conversations, with 60% initiated by the AI. 3 Leadership Mandates: How to move AI from the "innovation roadmap" to a board-approved strategic mandate. Download the full research report linked below and take these insights into your next leadership meeting. #BankingInsights #AgenticAI #JimMarous #DigitalBanking #SelfDrivingBank #Fintech #RetailBanking #AIStrategy #AutonomousFinance #BankOfAmericaErica #DigitalTransformation https://www.digitalbankingreport...

Your bank might be winning the battle for the transaction. It is losing the attention war for the customer. Live from Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas, host Jim Marous is joined by Alex Johnson (Fintech Takes) and Mary Wisniewski (Cornerstone) to unpack the most critical shift in retail banking today: the move from a utility-based model to an attention-based economy. Traditional institutions are relying on customer inertia. Fintech leaders like NuBank are hiring out of TikTok to capture daily engagement. This episode explores how banks can fight back by using their data and modern infrastructure to become an indispensable part of a customer’s daily routine. In this episode, we dive into: • The Attention Economy: Why dollars now follow attention, and how banks are failing to compete for daily active users. • The NuBank Playbook: What a TikTok executive hire signals about the next generation of bank growth strategy. • Overcoming Complacency: Shifting from a legacy mindset to the hunt-and-kill urgency found in the top fintechs. • Infrastructure Upgrades: How FedNow, open banking, and AI are finally making real-time, personalized experiences possible. • Agentic AI: The rise of personal finance agents and why the industry must experiment with these tools today. • The Monday Morning Test: Why the executives who put in the reps on these tools now will be the ones still relevant in five years. As Alex Johnson put it on the show: "If you don’t have a strategy to acquire and retain your customers’ attention, you cannot count on inertia to keep them with you". #Fintech #DigitalBanking #AttentionEconomy #BankingTransformed #AIinBanking

The data exists. The technology exists. What's missing is the will to act. In this Insight Video, Jim Marous explores why a $300 health ring is out-innovating the banking industry. With an $11B valuation and $1B in annual revenue, Oura has mastered the Platform over Product strategy that most financial institutions are still struggling to commit to. Jim breaks down his personal experience with the Oura Ring and translates its success into 6 executable strategies your team can scope, pilot, and launch right now — moving from reactive transactions to daily proactive intelligence. Key Strategies Covered: Strategy 1: The Financial Readiness Score — Moving beyond credit scores to daily financial health signals. Strategy 2: Proactive Cash Flow Alerts — Intervening before a crisis hits, not after the fee posts. Strategy 3: The Wellness Subscription — Shifting the business model to incentive-aligned intelligence. Strategy 4: Platform over Product — Connecting data sources into a single, useful guidance engine. Strategy 5: Workplace Wellness — Taking financial wellness into the workplace through existing commercial relationships. Strategy 6: Designing for Daily Life — Being present in the 95% of daily moments, not just occasional transactions. The Monday Morning Test: Jim closes with three critical questions every FI leader must answer to determine if their organization will still be relevant in ten years. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for weekly insight on the future of financial services. #DigitalBanking #BankingTransformed #Fintech #BankingInnovation #CustomerExperience #AIinBanking #Personalization #RetailBanking #FinancialWellness #JimMarous #OuraRing #BankingStrategy #FutureOfBanking #CreditUnion

In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous is joined by Amy Hysell, President and CEO of Arizona Financial Credit Union, live from the organization’s new Biltmore Branch in Phoenix. Built from the conversion of a former top-five bank location, this branch was designed to do more than serve members. It was built to create visibility, generate word of mouth, and become a true showcase for the brand in the community. Jim and Amy discuss why Arizona Financial made this investment, how the branch was designed to differentiate itself in a competitive market, and what metrics matter most when proving the value of a physical location. From design choices and member experience to business case and breakeven expectations, this is a conversation about what modern branch strategy really looks like when done with purpose. If you lead a bank or credit union and are reconsidering what a branch should be, this episode provides a timely look at how one institution is turning physical presence into conversation, community impact, and growth. #BranchStrategy #CreditUnions #RetailBanking #BranchROI #MemberExperience #BankingTransformed #DigitalBanking

For more than a decade, banks have been told that digital channels would replace the branch. In many parts of the world, that has proven true. But the U.S. market is different—and the data tells a very different story. When Bank of America opens a new branch, digital sales in that market increase by 50%, reinforcing a critical shift in thinking: physical presence doesn’t compete with digital adoption—it accelerates it. In this episode, recorded on location at Arizona Financial Credit Union, Jim Marous explores the future of bank branches using new research from the Digital Banking Report and insights from leading institutions. Drawing on his chapter in Brett King’s Branch Tomorrow, Marous makes the case that branches are not disappearing—but must evolve into advisory-driven, relationship-focused environments that justify their cost while strengthening digital engagement. The challenge is no longer whether to invest in branches. It’s whether your branches generate more value than they cost.

The convergence of artificial intelligence, real-time payment rails, open banking, and embedded finance is creating both unprecedented opportunities for innovation and significant competitive pressures. Banks must navigate the delicate balance between embracing cutting-edge technologies, such as generative AI, and maintaining the trust and security that customers demand. In this episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, we delve into the rapidly evolving payments ecosystem with Rich Clow, Head of Innovation and Strategy at Global Payment Solutions, Bank of America. With over 25 years of experience spanning from the early days of branchless banking to today's AI-powered financial services, Rich provides unique insights into the transformative trends reshaping how we think about money, payments, and banking relationships. Join us as we explore these critical trends with one of the industry's most experienced innovators, who has been at the forefront of digital payments evolution for over two decades.

Most banks say they're customer-centric, but very few are customer-obsessed. And that gap shows up directly in the numbers: obsessed customers are 88% likely to repurchase, and 42% have already recommended the company 5 or more times in the past year. Marbue Brown led customer experience at JPMorgan Chase's Consumer Bank, built Amazon's AI-driven CX operation, and has done the same at Microsoft and Cisco. His book, Blueprint for Customer Obsession, lays out nine practices across three pillars that define what the best companies actually do differently. Today, we discuss the practices where banks keep falling short, and what financial institutions of all sizes can do TODAY to elevate their customer obsession scores.

Most banks still treat lending as a point-in-time decision. Pull a score. Make a call. Wait. In today’s environment, that model limits growth and weakens earnings durability. In this episode of Banking Transformed, I speak with S. P. “Wije” Wijegoonaratna, Co-Founder and CEO of Aliya, about how AI-powered operational intelligence is transforming lending from episodic approvals into continuous, governed opportunity exploration. Aliya’s platform connects bank-account data, marketing intelligence, risk decisioning, and post-origination monitoring into a closed loop designed to improve efficiency without increasing balance-sheet risk. Are you operating episodically — or intelligently? #Banking #Lending #DigitalTransformation #AI #CustomerExperience

For the past decade, financial institutions have poured billions into improving customer experience. Digital journeys. Frictionless onboarding. Personalization. Higher satisfaction scores. But according to Joe Pine, that era is over. In this episode of Banking Transformed, I sit down with Joe, the author of The Transformation Economy and co-author of the landmark Experience Economy, to explore what comes after customer experience in banking. If experiences are now expected rather than differentiating, where should banks compete next? Joe argues that the next stage of value creation is transformation. Not better moments, but better outcomes. Not engagement metrics, but measurable progress in customers' financial lives We discuss what transformation really means for banking, why most institutions are still optimizing for the wrong thing, and why banks that fail to evolve risk becoming irrelevant in the most important conversations their customers are actually having. If your strategy still centers on CX as the competitive moat, this conversation will challenge your assumptions. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for weekly conversations with the leaders reshaping the future of financial services.

Credit unions entered 2026 with more digital ambition than any segment of the banking industry. Yet 60% are still in early stages of transformation or lack clear goals. That’s not a strategy issue. It’s an execution issue. In this episode of The Experience Factor, sponsored by Q2, Jim Marous sits down with Jesus Garcia, Chief Experience Officer at OceanAir Federal Credit Union, to examine what the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report reveals about the credit union sector and how one institution is moving beyond ambition to measurable results. This conversation covers: * The execution gap * The branch expansion paradox * The talent contradiction * Fintech partnerships that actually drive impact * The open banking blind spot * AI: substance vs optics This discussion isn’t about strategy decks. It’s about what’s actually working and what must change. The Experience Factor is sponsored by Q2. Download the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities Report here.

If your bank is still competing on features, you don’t have a strategy. There was a time when products and features made a difference. That time is gone. Digital is now expected. Rates are aligned. Features are replicated. And AI can compare them instantly. If you're leading with just what you offer, you're competing in a race where everyone looks the same. Allison Netzer's "Think Like a Brand, Not Like a Bank" Version 2 shares three years of implementation data from banks and credit unions that stopped competing on features. Her framework explains why leading with product specs is mistaken. Customers first decide emotionally, then justify rationally. This edition includes a reflection on which principles have remained valid and which ones need rethinking. The institutions winning today treat brand as their strategic operating system, not a marketing exercise. They solve customer pain through counterintuitive thinking that violates industry patterns. In this episode, we discuss what’s changed since 2022, what surprised Allison in the real-world execution of these ideas, and why moving beyond product thinking may be the only way to avoid becoming invisible in a marketplace defined by sameness.

For decades, banks have forced customers into frustrating phone trees and rigid IVR systems—all in the name of efficiency. But what if automation could actually strengthen customer relationships instead of eroding them? In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous speaks with Isaiah Granet, Co-Founder and CEO of Bland, to explore how voice AI is transforming banking relationships, modernizing call centers, and delivering measurable operational results. They explore which workflows truly reduce call center costs, how to automate without sacrificing trust, what compliance guardrails must be in place before scaling voice AI, and what community and regional banks can realistically implement in the next 12 months. If your institution wants to modernize call center operations, improve service quality, and increase conversion opportunities, this discussion outlines a practical, defensible path forward. #Banking #ConversationalAI #Chatbots #VoiceAI #DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience #AI This episode of Banking Transformed is sponsored by Bland Bland is a voice AI platform that helps companies transform customer experience and business operations with AI phone, SMS, and chat agents. We serve enterprises across healthcare, insurance, financial services, and other highly regulated industries, and have dispatched more than 60 million AI-powered phone calls to date. Visit https://www.bland.ai/?utm_source=financialbrandpodcast&utm_campaign=financialbrand for more information.

About 25% of Americans can’t get a credit card from a major bank, and more than half are one or two missed paychecks from a credit crisis. Yet most financial institutions still design their products for prime borrowers and pretend the rest of the market doesn’t exist.In this episode of Banking Transformed, I sit down with Steve Min, Chief Credit Officer at Credit One Bank, who has built a business around the customers most banks would rather turn away. We talk about why two-thirds of consumers don’t understand the basics of how their credit score is calculated, why the stigma around imperfect credit keeps people from getting help, and what it actually takes to rebuild a credit profileSteve explains how Credit One approaches risk differently, why its Credit Wreckers program teaches people what not to do with their credit, and how building financial momentum can help borrowers qualify for better products over time. If your institution claims to serve the underserved, this conversation will challenge whether you’re actually doing it.Resources:CreditWreckers.comForWhatsAhead.comThis episode of Banking Transformed is sponsored by Credit One Bank Credit One Bank is a financial services company and one of the fastest-growing credit card issuers in the U.S. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Las Vegas, Credit One Bank offers a full spectrum of credit card products including cash back and points-based cards as well as high-yield certificate of deposit and savings accounts. Credit One Bank is also an official partner of the Las Vegas Raiders and the Official Credit Card of NASCAR, the Vegas Golden Knights and Best Friends Animal Society. Learn more at CreditOneBank.com, in our Newsroom or on social media (@CreditOneBank) on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Liquid Death reached a $1.4 billion valuation selling water in cans. Meanwhile, banks spent $500 billion on transformation last year and still struggle to stand out. The gap isn't money - it's courage. Most banks are still designed to protect the status quo. Risk avoidance dominates, small changes are called progress, and true creativity rarely makes it through the internal process to reach customers. Challenger brands like Liquid Death don’t win because they spend more or market louder. They win because they decide who they’re for, what to stand for, and how to build a culture that supports being a challenger, even when it creates discomfort. I’m joined by Eric Fulwiler, co-founder and CEO of Rival. We discuss their recent study of the top 50 challenger brands and what makes them distinctive. We also uncover what has to change if financial institutions want to stand out instead of blending in.

Download the free 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities sponsored by Q2: https://tinyurl.com/2yrce223 Retail banking leaders have never had more clarity about what needs to change, yet execution continues to lag. In this video, discussing the most critical insight from the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities research, Jim Marous examines where transformation efforts stall across digital experience, payments, AI, and partnerships, and why incremental progress is no longer enough to keep pace with customer expectations or non-bank competitors. This discussion challenges leaders to move beyond pilots and roadmaps, confront the trade-offs they’ve been avoiding, and focus on the few decisions that actually drive meaningful change. If you’re responsible for strategy, digital transformation, or growth in 2026, this discussion offers a clear-eyed look at what’s holding the industry back and what it will take to move forward.

With over $2 trillion in deposits already lost to digital banks and fintechs, incremental banking improvements are no longer a strategy; they’re a liability. Today, I'm joined by Benjamin Conant, Chief Product Officer at Alkami and Co-founder of MANTL, to discuss insights from their new 2026 Banking Predictions Report and what it reveals about why banks and credit unions are quietly falling behind. The discussion focuses on unifying systems that have operated in silos for decades, turning branches into profit engines, finally making AI deliver results, and consolidating vendors who can create solutions at speed and scale. Institutions that endure the next three years won't be the ones making minor updates to failing systems. They'll be the ones willing to take bold actions and operate with the urgency and resilience that the future demands. This isn’t a debate about following trends. It’s about how you execute.

Your Gen Z strategy is putting your organization’s growth at risk. New research from Primax, shows that only 12 percent of Gen Z consider a community or regional bank their primary financial institution. Will these Gen Z consumers move their parents' relationship out of your institution? By 2035, Gen Z will be the largest and wealthiest generation in history. And 72 percent say they face financial challenges unlike those of any other generation. They're seeking a financial partner who understands their reality far beyond a simple transaction. The bottom line is that customer loyalty is thin, opening accounts at new institutions is easy, and growth is no longer guaranteed. Today on Banking Transformed, I'm joined by Carrie Stapp, Vice President of Marketing at Primax. We're unpacking what the Banking in Focus research report reveals about what's broken in how banks approach Gen Z – and what you need to fix now before future growth moves elsewhere. This episode of Banking Transformed is sponsored by Primax Primax provides banks with payment processing services and an expansive array of value-added technology and solutions. Primax’s customizable solutions, including risk management, mobile and online card management, data and analytics, loyalty programs, marketing, strategic consulting, delinquency management and contact center services, help banks profitably grow their portfolios and deliver an unparalleled experience to their accountholders. With a longstanding commitment to service excellence, Primax has been designing and providing support services for banks throughout the U.S. and the Caribbean for over 40 years. For more information, visit www.primax.us.

Banking executives know their industry is being disrupted. What they don't know is how much of their balance sheet they've already lost control of. According to Accenture, more than $200 trillion in global bank deposits and loans are now at risk, and that threat isn’t coming from another bank. It’s coming from stablecoins, AI agents that can automatically optimize finances, and platforms that can quickly move cash, often outside the traditional banking system. Today's guest is Mike Abbott from Accenture. His team's new report on the top banking trends for 2026 reveals some uncomfortable truths. Seventy percent of IT spending still goes to maintaining outdated systems. Margin compression could reduce US bank pre-tax income by 22%. And many of those loyal customers who've stayed with their bank for seven years? The research calls them "lazy loyalists." The real question for banking leaders isn’t whether this shift is happening, but how much of the balance sheet they’ll still control when it does. Mike joins us to discuss how banks can respond to threats moving faster than their modernization efforts.

Banks have spent billions building digital customer experiences. But most are doing it on top of back-office infrastructure built for a different era. That gap has quietly become one of the biggest drags on growth, pricing power, and profitability in banking. Today's competitive edge isn't just about what customers see upfront. It's about how efficiently a bank operates, how smartly it prices on an individual basis, and how quickly it can turn data into action. That's why modernizing the back office has moved from an IT discussion to a strategic imperative. I'm joined on the Banking Transformed podcast by Richard Ullenius and Brandon Sailors from CSG International to discuss what modernization truly means, how banks can progress without tearing everything down, and how smarter infrastructure is becoming the key to efficiency, engagement, pricing, and risk management. This episode of Banking Transformed is sponsored by CSG CSG delivers banking and financial services solutions to help banks reimagine pricing, billing and customer engagement across retail, commercial and institutional banking. By unifying smart pricing, customer and transaction data and accurate, flexible billing, CSG enables banks to modernize complex, multi-product relationships without rip-and-replace. As a result, banks can reduce risk and complexity, protect margins and power trusted, real-time experiences that drive growth. https://www.csgi.com/industry/financial-services/