Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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.

Greg sees the institutions that end up acquired as the ones that waited too long or chose not to invest. The way forward starts with data. As Greg puts it, nobody has more data than a bank or a credit union, and the flow of funds shows where customers and members are moving money long before an account closes. He and Jim discuss turning that insight into a better experience, and why no provider can be the best at everything.

That makes partner choice critical. Institutions need partners that work openly with others and can help them deploy at speed and scale. On AI, Greg's advice is to protect what community institutions were built on- service, relationship, and trust - by taking cost out of the back office and putting those savings into people on the front line. He closes on the opportunity he'd act on first: Gen Z.

About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed explores the people and ideas changing retail banking. New episodes multiple times each week.

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 about where that trust is headed next, and what it would cost your bank or credit union if a customer's paycheck lands there first.

Inside the episode:

• → 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.

• → PayPal CEO Enrique Lores has told investors he wants Venmo to become a one-stop shop for money management, crypto, and investing, modeled directly on SoFi and Chime.

• → Venmo Teen Accounts let kids 13 to 17 receive direct deposit tied to a parent's Venmo, meaning a first paycheck can land in Venmo before it ever touches a bank or credit union.

• → Stripe and private equity firm Advent offered a 28% premium to buy PayPal in July, and reporting says Venmo, not Braintree, was the real prize behind the bid.

• → Zelle still moves nearly three times as much P2P money as Venmo, but Venmo wins on frequency, identity, and brand pull, the real foundation of a banking super app.

• → A Fiserv marketing executive's own teenage daughter got her Venmo debit card before anything arrived from her traditional bank account, a preview of the customer banks are losing first.

• → Every dollar that sits in Venmo and gets spent on a Venmo debit card earns your own debit card nothing, while Venmo builds a map of customer spending you'll never see.

Institutions and research referenced: PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Zelle, Stripe, Advent, Chime, Nubank, SoFi, and Fiserv.

Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

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, speeding up first drafts, summaries of long documents and search across large content libraries. For compliance and documentation-heavy work in banking, he said, the early value was simply spending less time reading what nobody needed to read.

He pointed to CarMax, which used OpenAI models to summarize customer reviews for every car it sells and cut work it estimated would take years down to a few months, with its own team approving the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with knowledge systems that hold verified facts, and called a professional human in the loop the strongest safeguard against errors reaching customers. That pairing, now widely known as retrieval-augmented generation, became a common pattern for enterprise AI.

On jobs, Morris argued generative AI would show which parts of knowledge work are repetitive and which depend on creativity and people, changing roles and creating new kinds of work. This is the first Flashback Friday, a replay of one of our most-viewed conversations tested against what has happened since. Morris has since become SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Listen for which of his calls held up, and how far your own bank or credit union has moved since 2023.

About the guest: Charles Morris was Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft when this conversation was recorded in February 2023. He is now SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.

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 Satisfaction Study shows midsize banks, community banks and credit unions hold 26% of these relationships while winning only 21% of new ones. Fintech customers rate their accounts higher on fee fairness, real-time balances and help making progress, and J.D. Power found many of the gaps come down to design and policy choices.

Jim Marous uses his own son's banking to show where these relationships go: $200 a paycheck left at a top-5 bank to cover automatic payments, direct deposit at Chase after a rewards card he found through AI and search, daily spending on Venmo, and a credit union checking account that only makes the mortgage payment. As Jason Dorsey, who led new research for Alkami, puts it, a primary banking relationship is no longer a promise of exclusivity.

Jim then lays out six moves for product, marketing and contact center teams: being named when customers ask AI or search where to bank, a 3-minute mobile account opening, no fees on small overdrafts, available balances that update the moment a purchase is approved, goal-based onboarding with a progress tracker and short money lessons, and helping customers discover the right feature at the moment it fits. The customers who will sustain a bank or credit union's growth may already have an account there.

About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

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 the targeting kept the money from behaving like hot money.

The method behind it starts with members. Chartway surveys them, builds its roadmap from what they ask for, then searches Q2's Innovation Studio and checks references with credit unions on a similar stack before choosing a partner. With 85% of members on the mobile app and roughly 1.7 million logins a month, any partner that adds friction to mobile doesn't make the cut. And the feedback flows both ways: Chartway takes what members tell it back to its partners, and it often ends up on their roadmaps.

Speed has changed the math for smaller institutions. Work that took six to nine months now takes weeks, and Chartway had ScribeUp subscription management in a production pilot in under two weeks. During a fraud spike it added background authentication rather than friction and cut manual reviews by 40%. Esteban, whose credit union was named Q2's 2026 Credit Union of the Year, closes with advice for banks and credit unions earlier in the journey: start with your members, invest in your people, and do the due diligence.

About the series: The Experience Factor is a special Banking Transformed series with Q2, recorded at Q2 CONNECT 2026 in Austin, Texas, featuring consumer banking experts and financial institution leaders on how account holder experience and engagement drive long-term success.

Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

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 a small win, but small wins build a habit. Each useful result makes it easier for a customer to bring the agent a bigger question, from which credit card to use to where to borrow for a major purchase, and none of that requires moving a single deposit.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous builds on his earlier video, The Agentic Bank Run. Many observers, including the chief economist at Apollo, are now warning that AI agents could pull low-cost deposits out of checking accounts. Jim argues that deposit flight may be the last thing to move. The earlier exposure is influence over the decisions that grow a relationship, including the lending side of the balance sheet, where Plaid's liabilities data gives an agent a view of card and loan balances.

Jim closes with five practical moves for a bank or credit union: testing Muse internally, alerting customers when a recurring bill increases, reviewing customer borrowing before an agent does, giving branch and contact center staff the tools and authority to respond to an agent's comparison, and running a 30-day money challenge that puts a real person behind the help. Most of these moves rely on data the institution already holds, and the episode is candid about what that data can and cannot tell you about a customer's next financial decision.

About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

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 policies, which in a bank or credit union means fee notices, disclosures, and letters that leadership teams write and approve. Meanwhile, reps spend less than half their time on customers and juggle three to five systems to solve one problem.

Jim Marous argues that distance keeps this gap open. He shares what happened when he asked a large credit union's board and senior leaders who had spent time on the front line in the past year why his own management trainee rotation taught procedures rather than customers, and how Delta resolved his complaint without a handoff. Marbue Brown, who led customer experience for Chase's consumer bank, adds the banking version: broad employee authority within compliance.

The episode closes with five practical steps for bank and credit union leaders: hear customers before approving a fee notice or letter, spend a day each quarter in a branch, the contact center or a back office area with a change to own, trace one recurring problem through every handoff with AI carrying the context, give employees the authority and training to resolve issues on first contact, and look for needs customers never bring to you.

Banking Transformed explores the changes reshaping banks and credit unions, with practical insight for the leaders responsible for what comes next. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

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 using their data to decide what comes next. In her view, the work can't stop once the account is open, because relationship growth is a continuum.

Data is the biggest barrier Megan sees. Institutions sit on more customer data than they know how to use, even though a bank or credit union can see a customer's full financial picture while other providers see only a slice. Her standard is that data only has to be directional, and she shares how Fiserv itself relies on partners like Snowflake to connect its own data. She also explains why disciplined growth beats retreating, and where AI is actually working: fraud prevention and marketing personalization.

Megan's daughter turned 16 and opened her first account at a bank that doesn't allow Zelle under 18. Her babysitting money moved to Venmo, which had a debit card in her hands within 2 days, and she now treats it like a checking account. Megan's point is that the competitor to worry about is whoever owns the customer's daily financial activity. Her advice for every CEO finishing a 2027 plan is to start with the customer and answer one question first: why would someone bank with us?

About the guest: Megan Pannier is Head of Bank and Adoption Marketing at Fiserv, where she works with banks and credit unions on growth, onboarding and customer engagement. She and Jim Marous first worked together at Zions Bank.

Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

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 from 15% to 17%, matching the highest share on record, while nearly 1 in 4 households moved up or down a level of financial health in one year. The pressure reached homeowners, business owners and auto loan borrowers, 40% of whom now say their overall debt is more than they can manage. Many of these households are customers most banks and credit unions would call safe, and most still look fine on paper.

Jim Marous tells the story of a friend who has banked with the same institution for decades and was rarely late on anything, until an unexpected medical bill changed several things in his account at once. Each change on its own meant little. Together, they told a story. Jim explains why portfolio averages hide customers like this, why financial wellness programs often sit apart from the account where the slide shows up, and why the stress of that moment decides whether customers see their institution as being on their side.

The episode closes with four specific moves: watch for combinations of change against each customer's own history, prepare help that fits a timing problem or an ongoing shortfall with costs explained upfront, reach out through a named person the customer can call, and measure whether customers were still doing better six months later and felt supported. For more on putting the data you already have to work, listen to Jim's Banking Transformed conversation with Rachel O'Neil of Alkami, "Turning Insights into a Competitive Advantage."

About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thedigitalbankingreport.com.

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 moving too slowly. Inside banking, that atmosphere has begun functioning as permission to wait. Jim Marous opens this episode with a board director who asked the question directly: should the institution slow down because of everything he had been reading?

Jim argues the answer was settled months ago in a quieter moment. Surveyed by their own trade association, banks described themselves as cautious about AI and still concluded that inaction carries the higher cost, through deeper vendor dependence, internal expertise that never develops, and ground lost as AI becomes part of everyday banking. Nothing in the recent wave of warnings touches any of those three, because the argument at the top of the industry is about how quickly to build the next generation of models, and retail banking is not building them.

The episode then does something unusual with the year's scariest AI story. Read closely, the recent disclosures of unexpected model behavior describe a governance failure any banker would recognize: systems rewarded for the wrong things, tasks that could not be completed, errors nobody wrote down. That reframes the whole debate as operating guidance, and it leads into a plain answer to where AI belongs in next year's plan, which use cases to deploy today, which one to pilot where the customer can see it, and what to hold until an approval step exists.

About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive.