Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

A bank or credit union can make regular saving as easy to start and keep going as Acorns does. Acorns says its customers have invested more than $7.3 billion from spare change alone. Acorns isn't a bank, yet customers have invested more than $7.3 billion through it from spare change alone. Jim Marous has used an Acorns account since 2018 and says his existing banks never asked to help him build a...

Brett King says the primary financial relationship will belong to an AI agent. Brett King, author of Bank 5.0, returns to Banking Transformed to explain why he believes the banking system of the future will be built for AI agents before it is built for people. He and Jim Marous start with the restrictions JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi have placed on agent access to customer accounts, and why...

Get the 2026 State of Financial Marketing report, sponsored by Vericast: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-state-of-financial-marketing/?IV61 A bank or credit union product page that states who the account is for, what it costs and how to avoid the fee gives a customer, or an AI tool helping her, something to compare. Deloitte found that 58% of customers who use gen AI have already...

Dr. Lamont Black explains how stablecoins could cost banks and credit unions interchange, data and deposits. This Flashback Friday revisits one of our most popular interviews, recorded in January 2026 with Dr. Lamont Black, a former Federal Reserve economist and finance professor at DePaul University. Dr. Black placed the shift in 2027, once the GENIUS Act takes effect. Since then, the OCC finaliz...

A Coinbase-commissioned study by The Block Research found that 7 of the 10 largest U.S. banks have tested stablecoins or tokenized deposits for settlement, and the other 3 have signaled plans to follow. The same study found that 73% of screened stablecoin transfer volume over a 12-month period took place outside U.S. banking hours. For a bank or credit union, those numbers raise a direct question...

Download the Innovation in Retail Banking report: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/innovation-in-retail-banking-2025/?IV60 U.S. Bank gets customer improvements from idea to launch by tying the work to business priorities, bringing risk in early and setting success measures before work starts, and banks and credit unions of any size can copy the method. Jim Marous is often asked which U....

Financial institutions should make it easy to do business with them their first priority. One community bank got account opening to 2 minutes and 13 seconds and increased conversion rates to almost 70%. Derek Corcoran spent 25 years working on customer experience in financial services, including time as chief experience officer at Temenos. His new book, Designing for Need, argues that the industry...

Download the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report from the Digital Banking Report: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-retail-banking-trends-and-priorities/?YouTubeIV59 Money 20/20 showed banks and credit unions what to prepare for: AI agents that move money, new payment rails and rules that are still being written. The OCC finalized its first federal rule for stablecoin i...

Victor Alexander explains how a $185 billion bank takes on giants and fintechs by funding fewer priorities and finishing them. Flashback Friday: In this 2025 interview from The Financial Brand Forum, Head of Consumer Banking Victor Alexander explained why KeyBank says no to good ideas. A $185 billion bank could invest in almost anything, he said, but it cannot aim at everything, so some great idea...

Get the 2026 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report from the Digital Banking Report: https://digitalbankingreport.com/?YouTubeIV58 Banks and credit unions can compete with digital-first organizations by finishing nine specific tasks, from a clear North Star to opening an account in 3 to 5 minutes. Our research shows that 93% of institutions have not fully reached their digital transformation...

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...

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, wit...

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...

Hear the full conversation with Jorge Camargo of Bank of America on Banking Transformed: https://evergreenpodcasts.com/banking-transformed/what-3-2-billion-ai-conversations-taught-bank-of-america 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 shar...

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 la...

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 I...

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. Mo...

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...

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...

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 challe...

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 acro...

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 depo...

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 credi...

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 mo...

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 acqui...