Banking Transformed with Jim Marous
Hosted by top banking and fintech influencer Jim Marous, this podcast explores the leadership and cultural challenges facing the banking industry due to digital disruption. Featuring interviews with industry leaders, it discusses how financial institutions can embrace change, take risks, and innovate to prepare for the future of banking.
Episodes
Your Rewards Program Secret Weapon
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 legi
Bank of America's Loyalty Rewards Reset
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
Marketing is Still Not AI Ready
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 i
The Technical Debt Your Vendors Control
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 deb
Fifth Third Succeeds Through Empowered Employees
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
Banking’s AI Gap: Faster Tasks, Same Results
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
How to Find Real Differentiation in Banking
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 advan
Customer Experience, Straight Up, with Jay Baer
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
→ Caz
The Growth Your NPS Can't See
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 tha
Serving the Businesses Hiding in Your Portfolio
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. T
Building the AI-Forward Bank
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 sam
The Hidden Cost of Your KYC Process
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 poin
Organic Growth is Within Your Daily Reporting
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,
What Technology Can't Fix
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 Off
The Credit Moment Banks Keep Missing
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 g
Why Your Next CEO Needs More Than Tenure
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 a
How to Maximize Relationship Depth
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
The Insight Gap Inside Your Bank
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 r
The Branch as a Digital Growth Engine
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
Banking 2050: Who Owns the Customer?
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
What You Can't Buy From a Solution Provider
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
How Nubank Could Reprice U.S. Deposits
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 c
Banks Have More Data But Still Can't Get Personal
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 separate
YouTube: Banking's New Front Door
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 ove
Why Readiness Beats AI in Banking
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
Why BofA Is Betting on Branches
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 fi
Understanding the New Fintech Charter Race
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 exac
Winning the New War for Banking Primacy
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
2026 Mid-Year Review with Ron Shevlin
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 fo
Future of Bank Segmentation Is Conversational
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
How to Build a 6-Minute Loan Process
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 t
Google Finance App: Why Google Doesn’t Need to Become a Bank
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 th
Building a Modern Bank Around Partnerships
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,
The Bank Run That Won’t Look Like One
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 depos
Turning New Accounts Into Primary Relationships on Day 1
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 accou
What the Apple Store Can Teach Retail Bankers
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
The SoFi Cross-Buy Engine Fuels Amazing Growth
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 da
The Best Banking Innovation Doesn't Need a Huge Budget
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 innovati
Arming Front-Line Bankers with AI Tools That Win Clients
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 an
Why Banks Miss Human Customer Moments
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
How to Earn Attention in an Age of Distraction
"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
Reaching the Underserved: Strategies to Scale Financial Inclusion
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 brea
How Digital Leaders Grow Revenues 5X Faster
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 correlate
Unlocking Credit Access for Millions
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
The Path to Banking's Dual Workforce, with nCino CEO Sean Desmond
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
How Banks Can Fix the Real Reason Americans Aren't Saving
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 s
Hidden Driver Behind Banking's Next Consolidation
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 Capital One, Klarna & Coinbase Win AI Search
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 M
How Chime Beat All Banks at Account Growth
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
What is GEO and Why Does it Matter
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 we
Leading Through Banking's Next Normal
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 r
Jack Henry's 2026 Benchmark: Why Banks Lose Deposits to Fintechs
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
Four AI Moves Every Bank Marketer Needs Now
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 se
Building the Agentic Bank With Citi’s Driss Temsamani
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 tea
Why Banks With More Data Still Don't Understand the Customer
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
What 3.2 Billion AI Conversations Taught Bank of America
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
What Bank Executives Miss About the Fintech Threat
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 discus
The Silent Attrition Crisis in Banking: How to Detect It Early
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.
Mea
Triple New Account Growth in 90 Days
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 step
Competing With Giants: How Community Banks Win
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.
Atomic Habits for Banking: How Small Changes Separate Winners
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.
Banking's Reality Check: The Real Threat Is You
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
Primitive & MX are Building an AI Agent Operating System
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
Why External Noise Is Slowing Banking Decisions
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
Agentic AI: The End of Reactive Banking
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-d
Winning The Attention War That's Reshaping Banking
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 rely
6 Digital Strategies Banking Must Learn from the Oura Ring
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 t
How Branches Can Win Attention and Generate Growth
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 th
Bank Branches Must Earn Their Place
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 adop
From Cash and Cards to Invisible Banking
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 Ba
10 Ways to Become a Customer Obsessed Bank
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 a
AI is the Operating System of Modern Lending
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, g
Beyond Customer Experience with Joe Pine
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 w
Why Credit Union Transformation Is Stalling and How to Fix It
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 t
Banks Must Move Beyond Product Parity
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,
Why Banks Can't Afford to Wait on Voice AI
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, modernizi
Credit One Bank Serves Those Who Others Won’t
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
What Liquid Death Can Teach Banks
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 custo
2026 Banking Trends Reveal a Dangerous Execution Gap
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
Why Incremental Banking Improvements No Longer Work
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 behin
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