Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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 q...

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...

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 mos...

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 ma...

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...

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, jo...

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 stic...

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...

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 mo...

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 d...

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 innovat...

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...

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...

"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 o...

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 bre...

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 correlat...

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 c...

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...

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...

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, t...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 alread...