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. Only about 15% of customers ever produce a new customer, yet referred customers generate the vast majority of new customer profit, at a time when the cost of acquiring a customer has nearly doubled since 2019.

The episode covers why the score inflates on its own, the sampling problem nobody names, why the man who invented NPS built an accounting-based counterpart to it and why almost nobody adopted it, and five moves for building referral measurement as a permanent capability rather than another refer-a-friend campaign.

#Banking #CreditUnions #NPS #CustomerExperience #Referrals #FinancialServices

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 owner has a real question about running their business, 48% call another business owner.

Jim Marous makes the case that the largest unmet need in this segment is connection to other owners at the same stage and to specialists who understand a business of that shape. The neobanks built for gig workers compete on tax buckets, invoicing and fee-free checking, and none of them competes on this. The capability to deliver it already sits inside every institution's own portfolio, unused, because the data was never structured in a way anyone could act on. That is what makes this an AI problem rather than a product problem.

The episode closes on three actions: point the model at the portfolio rather than the credit decision, give the banker a briefing built from internal affinity and external context, and make the introduction personally, with both sides' permission. Home services is the vertical to pilot first.

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.

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 uses AI to do what it already did and an AI-forward company that uses AI to do what it could never do before. By their own research, only about 5% of companies have reached the second group.

In this conversation with Jim Marous, Solis and Wright explain why an organization chart hides the handoffs where value stalls and why a work chart exposes them, how savings from iterative AI should fund the innovative AI that grows revenue, and what a chief executive should put in front of a board that has never approved an investment without a payback period. Wright describes a government delegation that planned to deflect 90% of its citizen calls and could not answer why. Solis describes 75 chief executives who admitted, privately, that they are expected to know what to do and do not.

Marous brings the discussion back to banking throughout, from the quarterly reporting cycle that rewards cost-cutting to the risk avoidance culture that new bankers are trained into on their first day. He closes with his own prediction that the next wave of consolidation among banks and credit unions will be decided by readiness rather than by size, with the sharpest question in any acquisition being how much friction the acquired institution brings.

About:

Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week, and subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

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 most of the time it is not. The customer identification program rule is risk-based. It permits non-documentary verification, allows identity to be verified within a reasonable time after an account is opened, and expects your procedures to define what someone can do while verification is still underway. Most systems only have approved and declined.

Jim Marous looks at what the identity decision is costing banks and credit unions at the new account desk and in digital account opening, why the same gate gets run again on customers who have been with you for years, and what a risk-based verification path looks like in practice. Featuring research from Cornerstone Advisors, FICO and Debbie.

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

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 it moves, and which outside relationships are active.

Deposits and investments held elsewhere leave a trail as outbound transfers, and no credit bureau reports them, so your bank or credit union may be the only one positioned to see them. Loans held elsewhere show up as recurring debits. Every one of those is a form of credit somebody else underwrote for a customer you had already acquired and already paid for.

Acquisition costs are rarely fully loaded, and roughly a third of new accounts leave within the first year. That's what makes this an organic growth argument rather than a reporting exercise, and it's growth you can begin sizing before you spend, because the volume, the frequency and the timing are already visible.

Jim Marous shares his own money movement across two top 5 institutions, neither of which has ever offered him an alternative to what they can see him doing elsewhere. Some institutions have never assembled this view. Others have assembled it and attached no action to it. Different starting points, and the same result for the customer.

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

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 to profitability within 11 months.

In this episode, we talk about what that took. Exiting a merger after staff had already been told about it, and the trust that cost. The layoffs. The habit of softening hard news that he had to unlearn in his first month. Why he'd rather be respected than liked. And the thing he wants every institution buying its way out of trouble to hear: new technology on top of bad people and bad process only lets you do bad faster.

We also get into the board he inherited, the reverse mentoring that changed it, why he's building branches while others close them, and why he'd rather choose a merger partner than be chosen by one.

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

Banks and credit unions rate higher than the fintechs on buy now, pay later.

J.D. Power scores bank programs at 704 for customer satisfaction, compared with 603 for fintechs. Almost none of the spending is ours.

The gap is timing.

Our pay later arrives after the purchase, the fintechs own the purchase itself, and the moments a customer needs money the most, the emergency repair or the gap before payday, arrive without a checkout button at all. Meanwhile, Affirm and Klarna have both applied for industrial bank charters.

Jim Marous lays out 3 levels of response based on when your institution shows up, from the card installment plan after the purchase to money already waiting in the mobile app before the customer knows what they will need it for. And he makes the case that the real advantage is not approving faster. It is the cash flow context that lets a primary financial institution structure the right answer, or say no when that is the better answer.

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

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 action, down from 17% a year earlier. Most succession plans are built to replace the person already in the seat rather than to prepare for the job that is coming.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous argues the job now resembles a barbell. One end is credit judgment, relationships known by name, and having run the institution through a cycle where things went badly. The other is fluency in data and AI, command of partnerships, and a temperament that can carry bets, some of which are supposed to fail. The failure falls in the middle, and one person rarely holds both ends, which makes this a team question rather than a hire.

Darius Wise of Red Rocks Credit Union shows what that looks like. He spent 15 years in pastoral leadership and arrived with no banking experience, then rebuilt the senior team around people who knew what he did not. His board runs on reverse mentoring, where the credit union's own employees teach the directors how the institution operates. The episode closes on custodian versus builder, and why that has nothing to do with age.

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 thefinancialbrand.com.

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, and how "reboarding" the existing base surfaces value institutions already own. He shares the results behind the approach, from a 5% portfolio-wide lift in direct deposit to a 71% increase in account openings with no added ad spend, and makes the case that activation is self-funding and that "silent attrition," not weak account opening, is the real threat to loyalty and profitability.

Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new conversations on account activation, onboarding, primacy, and the future of banking.

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 regularly draw on the data assets their organization has already built, and that employees who do reach data spend 61% of that time finding and preparing it rather than learning anything from it.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous examines the gap between data creation and data use inside financial institutions. He argues that the industry measures one kind of risk carefully and never records the other: the relationships lost, the avoidable fees nobody questioned, and the marketing dollars spent acquiring customers who quietly went dormant, all because a signal never reached a person who could act on it.

Drawing on the MIT research, the Digital Banking Report study of agentic AI in banking sponsored by OpenText, and examples from Fifth Third and Bangor Savings Bank, he shows why fraud teams have already solved this problem and why far fewer institutions have done the same work for the employee desktop.

The episode closes on a question every leader can answer this week. What would change if the person handling your next important customer conversation could see what your institution already knows, and had the authority to act on it?

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 thefinancialbrand.com.