Banking Reinvented

Banks no longer have a monopoly on financial guidance. Nearly as many consumers now ask ChatGPT about their finances as ask their bank’s own assistant, yet most banks still score their assistants on calls deflected. That metric can’t tell them whether customers got what they came for or whether those customers are quietly drifting elsewhere.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten chats with guest speaker Aurélie L’Hostis, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who has tracked conversational banking since she wrote one of the first reports on chatbots in banking a decade ago. Drawing on that history, she explains how banks should measure conversational AI now that it’s moving from answering questions to helping customers actually complete tasks.

The conversation covers the four types of metrics she recommends, spanning customer outcomes, operations, business results, and risk; why governance belongs in the design from day one and works as an accelerator; how to organize ownership across a bank; and why, in 2027, banks will need to make their products visible and trustworthy to the AI agents customers use to find them.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

Nvalaye Kourouma spent his early career at Coca-Cola, managing territory operations and brand strategy across 21 African countries, before he ever worked in banking. Today, he serves as Group Chief Digital Officer at Ecobank, the leading Pan-African banking group operating across 35 sub-Saharan markets and serving tens of millions of customers across consumer, commercial, and corporate banking. In 2025, Euromoney named Ecobank Africa's best digital bank.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Nvalaye joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that when it comes to AI, the technology itself is already proven, viable, and out of the lab, so the "pilot" phase belongs to the organization, not the tool. Instead, he sees that AI is now a capital allocation decision, and the institutions still treating it as a pilot are behind the ones already treating it as a budget line.

The conversation covers how Ecobank runs one digital strategy across 35 different regulators, currencies, and infrastructures on a single common platform; why most digital and AI transformations fail for governance reasons rather than technology reasons; and how AI is helping Ecobank reach customers who never qualified for a formal loan.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, recorded live at ENGAGE Americas in Nashville, host Tim Rutten sits down with Steven Redden, Partner at McKinsey and Company and leader of McKinsey Digital's data and AI practice for the US and Canada. Steven brings ten years of experience at the intersection of data transformation and AI strategy, and a builder's instinct from founding a telecom startup before consulting.

The conversation covers why banks are trapped between two urgent mandates - fix your data foundations and show AI results now - and why most are solving both problems wrong. Steven makes the case that the banks getting real value from AI are picking a domain, reimagining the process end to end, and deliberately capturing the efficiency rather than redistributing it.

Steven also gets into the LLM dependency question - whether banks are ceding competitive ground by building on top of models they do not own. The competitive advantage, he argues, will never come from the model, but from the proprietary data and business context that sits on top of it.

The episode closes with a question about what comes next: AI-native bank startups, the divide between tier-one institutions and regional banks, and why Steven is more optimistic about smaller institutions than most expect.

Jennifer Jefferson spent her career as a banker before moving into consulting. She grew across all three lines of defense in commercial banking - credit officer, credit MRM, and credit risk reviews - before joining PwC's transformation team, where she now leads gen AI banking transformation.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, recorded live at ENGAGE Americas 2026, Jennifer joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that commercial banking is finally having its moment - and that AI is the reason why.

The conversation covers why treasury management onboarding is the use case PwC has been pushing hardest, what the concept of agent-to-agent interactions could mean for how corporations will interact with their banks in the future, and why the banks asking AI to fix one small pain point are solving the wrong problem.

Jennifer also gets into the tension between C-suite enthusiasm and frontline skepticism, zero touch operations, and what it takes to lead an AI transformation credibly - including building a snake game at home on a Tuesday night.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

Commercial onboarding runs on a compliance tax. Every new client pays it before the relationship even starts.

In this episode, Arun Ramamoorthy, Head of Commercial Banking at Backbase, moderates a panel built for anyone rethinking the commercial playbook. He's joined by Christine Martin of EverBank, Shannon Lambert-Habermehl of BOK Financial, Tom Collins of West Monroe, and Patricia Hines of Bank Tech Strategy.

The conversation opens on that compliance tax and doesn't slow down. Hear why the relationship manager's role is shifting, from transaction coordinator to trusted adviser. Tom Collins explains why banks need to choreograph digital and human interactions together.

From there, the discussion widens to cover client expectations and payments modernization, along with where AI adoption actually helps frontline teams do their jobs better. They get into fraud and risk alongside relationship forensics, closing on what working-capital management looks like once data moves in real time.

Five commercial banking leaders, one wide-ranging conversation about what changes next. If you work in commercial banking, this episode gives you the questions worth asking at your own institution.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten talks with Fabiano Lewis, Global Head of Digital Trust at Feedzai. Feedzai is the native risk operations platform working with the world's leading financial institutions on fraud prevention.

Fabiano brings 17 years of experience at the intersection of real-time risk, AI, and banking transformation. He explores how the fraud landscape has become industrialized.

The conversation covers why the democratization of digital banking has opened the door to a new generation of fraud. Fabiano explains how deepfakes and AI-generated documents have made traditional onboarding verification dangerously unreliable. He argues that banks treating fraud prevention as a point-in-time check are losing a fight measured in milliseconds.

Fabiano also tackles the agentic question no one in financial services has fully answered. When AI agents transact on behalf of customers, how does a bank tell the good ones from the bad? And why business banking - higher limits, shared account access, fewer controls - is becoming the next major frontier for financial crime.

Kelvin Chen built the Federal Reserve's Innovation Policy Team, setting the initial frameworks for AI in supervised institutions before most regulators had settled on the right questions to ask. He held senior regulatory roles at Capital One and Barclays before becoming Head of Policy in the US at the Consumer Bankers Association.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Kelvin joins host Tim Rutten to unpack the regulatory blind spot sitting at the center of agentic payments. The Electronic Fund Transfer Act, the law that still governs how consumers are protected from unauthorized transactions, was written in 1978 for a world where a human authorizes every transfer. That world is ending, and the liability rules for what happens when an AI agent moves money on a customer's behalf haven't been written yet.

The conversation covers why banks will get pulled into agentic commerce whether they choose to or not, the regulatory vacuum left behind after recent model risk management guidance was updated without addressing generative AI, and why stablecoin rails create a new category of consumer risk with no chargeback protection.

Kelvin also walks through the framework the Consumer Bankers Association is building to help close that gap, and why he believes ongoing monitoring, not upfront explainability, is the more realistic path to governing AI agents that behave probabilistically.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

As Principal and Partner leading Next-Gen Banking and Payments Tech at EY, Mitch Siegel spends his days with CIOs, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Architects, and heads of retail and commercial banking - the full committee of people trying to move banks forward in the age of AI.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Mitch joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that the AI gap in banking is not a model problem or a compute problem. It is an architecture problem, a data problem, and an operating model problem. A study he co-led with MIT Technology Review across 250 banks put a number on it: only 16% have agentic AI in production, and even that figure, Mitch suggests, might be generous.

The conversation covers why AI transformation in banks is governed by committee and why that is precisely what slows it down, how the regulatory framework banks have treated as a drag is about to flip into a competitive advantage, and what workforce displacement due to AI looks like in organizations.

Mitch also walks through how EY itself is reshaping from a pyramid to a diamond structure as AI absorbs the junior work and the premium shifts to people who can navigate complexity at the top.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

Tom Collins is a Senior Partner and National Commercial Banking Practice Lead at West Monroe, a consulting firm with 250 banking professionals working across commercial lending, credit and risk, treasury management, and payments.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Tom joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that advancements in AI are pushing commercial banking to an inflection point, and the distance between the banks moving and the banks watching is compounding.

The conversation covers the generational shift in commercial client expectations that most banks are still underestimating, the growing competition to find and own the white space in client relationships, and the cautionary tale of banks that convinced themselves strong relationship management was a reason to move slower on technology.

Tom also gets specific about what AI looks like in production: continuous portfolio monitoring that catches emerging risk and attrition signals before they become problems. He also walks through why banks that get the technology right but leave their people unprepared for what comes next are only solving half the problem.

Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

92% of bank leaders feel prepared for agentic AI, but only 36% have funded strategies to act on it. Meanwhile, 87% of AI-related projects never make it to production.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, recorded live at ENGAGE Americas in Nashville, host Tim Rutten sits down with Eugene Deeny, Principal Industry Advisor at Endava, to explore what stands between banks and AI at scale.

Eugene argues that the gap between strategic intent and operational readiness is an architectural problem that decades of incremental improvement within fragmented operational silos have made significantly harder to close.

The digital transformation journey of the last decade and the AI journey share the same prerequisites, but the difference is that AI is not giving anyone a decade to get there.

The conversation also covers what it takes to organize a bank for AI adoption, why governance and transparency matter more than organizational structure, and why the institutions that will lead are the ones addressing the constraints that have always been there.