Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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...

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 advantag...

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...

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...

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...

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 f...

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,...

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 w...

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,...

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 p...

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 acti...

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, a...

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 regu...

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...

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...

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...

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 custo...

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...

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 4...