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 savings plan, despite regular transfers to Acorns several times a month. Bank of America introduced a round-up program in 2005, seven years before Acorns was formed...

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 Brett sees them as the earliest stage of a larger change. Jim adds what he heard at Sibos and Money20/20, where the talk moved from...

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 used it to research banking products.

Customers still trust their bank's own website more than any other source when they research a product, with 79% saying so...

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 finalized its stablecoin rule on October 21, 2026, and the Act takes effect January 18, 2027. Other regulatory work remains, but banks and credit unions now have a date to prepare for.

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 about what stablecoin payments mean for deposits and interchange revenue, and how long an institution can wait.

Recorded at Money 20/20 in Las Vegas, this conversation is with Pavel Kashuba, Strategic...

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.S. banking organization has the most impressive innovation culture, and he never hesitates to say U.S. Bank. Anyone who has changed banks knows the autopayments are what...

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 copied its playbook from businesses selling things people enjoy. Banking is something people need to do, and the best version of a need-to-do experience gives the customer their time back. He makes the case with...

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 issuers during the show, and several large banks were reported to be restricting third-party AI agents in customer accounts within days of its close.

At Money 20/20 in Las Vegas, American Express shared research showing 59% of...

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 ideas are not today's idea. He also described how that focus shapes client experience and why he would rather do fewer things better.

Victor described how KeyBank...

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 goals, so the gap is in execution.

Most banks and credit unions know what to do, and few of them do it. Our research shows that 93% of institutions have not fully reached their...

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 lens. Inclusion, fast digital adoption, real-time payments, and a wave of new competitors, from Nubank to Revolut to Mercado Pago, have forced Colombia's largest bank to innovate at a pace...

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, within a base of 28.4 million funded customers. About 40% of Banking customers had signed up for direct deposit. Those figures show traction, and they leave open how much income is arriving and whether Robinhood has...

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 name at any hour. He estimates call centers cost companies more than $1 trillion a year worldwide, says that...

Hear the full conversation with Jorge Camargo of Bank of America on Banking Transformed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KibFqG47KzQ 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 share what matters when someone asks.

Amazon now gives shoppers a page where they can view, change or remove the preferences behind their recommendations, and even ask its shopping assistant what it knows about them. Most banks and credit unions...

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 largest banks is narrowing while the execution gap keeps getting wider, and what it takes for community institutions to keep pace.

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 Insights episode, Jim Marous breaks down what Venmo's debit card economics, Teen Accounts, and a rejected $53 billion buyout bid actually say...

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. Morris admitted he had never lived through an inflection point like it, then got specific. He described AI as a copilot to a human pilot who stays responsible for every output...

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 less than their existing share.

Millennials and Gen Z are the customers who will replace the baby boomers most banks and credit unions rely on today. Yet J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Millennial & Gen Z Checking...

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 authentication straight into account opening and funding. Esteban Guerra explains why a batch email and a trip to the branch would have lost a large share of those members along the way, and why...

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 challenged people to see whether Muse can find them $1,000, and the Muse Money Challenge gives customers a low-risk reason to connect their accounts. A forgotten subscription or a lower bill is...

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 across eight industries, with banking and financial services among the largest groups of executives. On every customer frustration the study compared, executives came in lower than customers. The widest gap was unclear explanations of processes and...

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 deposits, she argues that acquisition, retention and relationship deepening have to work as one strategy. Too many institutions still stop after the first few onboarding messages instead of...

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 credit unions have their best chance to help before the first missed payment.

The Financial Health Network's 2026 Financial Health Pulse finds financially vulnerable households rose...

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 most advanced systems have started saying out loud that the pace needs to slow. Pew found that 63% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, against 2% who think it is...

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 acquisition first among priorities, with retention and cross-sell well behind. The priority order and the return order point in opposite directions, and most institutions have not noticed.

Satin Mirchandani, Chairman and CEO...

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. Jim Marous opens this Banking Insights episode by explaining what the mechanic really does, and that most banks and credit unions...

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 legitimate reason to talk about his whole relationship with the bank, what he would receive right away, and what would change if he brought...

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 account, making 30 million clients eligible immediately. More than 5 million have enrolled since, with 1.5 million of those in the first month.

Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at...

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 straight line through the study. Generative AI raised production capacity, while thin data and almost no predictive decisioning keep the output from being relevant. 55% are not using predictive AI at all. 1...

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; it changed the relationship to it: a large bank can inspect its own and decide what to repair, while a smaller institution can only live with the consequences.

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 experience a bank as a marketing campaign. They experience it as the colleague who answers the question and solves the problem, and she has...

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 faster than almost anything Jim has watched in his career. Over the same period, the share of organizations that...

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 advantage was built somewhere no customer will ever see or feel it.

The spine of the episode is an exercise Jim ran with a...

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 Extra Añejo

Each tequila opens a different discussion: first impressions, disconnected experiences across channels, the role of AI and automat...

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 industry's favorite metric records what customers say they might do, while the number that actually connects advocacy to growth records what they did...

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 industry treats this as a detection problem, to be solved by moving these owners onto a business account. The research points somewhere else. When a small business...

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 failure that has consumed digital transformation. Their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, published by Wiley in 2026, draws a line between an AI-enabled company that u...

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, and some institutions decline 70% of the applications they receive. Meanwhile the average cost to acquire a member runs around $489.

Most of that gets treated as a KYC and compliance requirement, and...

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 which parts of the relationship are being served somewhere else. It won't tell you everything a customer owns or owes, but it will show you where money is going, how often...

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, took the interim CEO seat during the worst of it, and returned the credit union...