Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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...

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....

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 legitim...

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 ac...

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 st...

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;...

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 experi...

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 fas...