Travillian Next

At most community banks, cybersecurity sits with an IT manager who already owns hardware, software, vendor risk, and board reporting. AI agents are now exploiting the same access control and segmentation gaps the industry has known about for twenty years, and that job has outgrown one desk. Amber Buker, Chief Research Officer at Travillian, sits down with Chris Bedel, Founder, President and CEO of Bedel Security, and Cyrene Wilke, COO of Verve, a Credit Union, to work through what security leadership needs to look like inside a $1 to $10 billion institution, and how to tell whether yours needs a full-time CISO, a fractional partner, or something else.

Many niche banking initiatives rely more heavily on tailored messaging and distribution than on fundamentally differentiated financial products. But building a real growth engine requires a clean slate, a willingness to innovate at the product level, and deep research into the customers a bank wants to serve.

Amber Buker, Chief Research Officer at Travillian, sits down with Mary Kate Loftus, President, Impressia Connect, CNB Bank, to break down the tactical playbook for truly serving women entrepreneurs. They unpack how to spot hidden gaps in your commercial loan book, build bespoke products like fertility financing, and scale high-touch relationships using sharp digital discipline.

Chris Marinac, Director of Research at Brean Capital, breaks down Q2 2026 bank earnings with Brian Love of Travillian. Why margin is just a statistic, why deposits still win, where M&A goes next, and how banks are rebuilding their talent pipeline.

Capital is flowing again for community banks but deploying it well is the hard part.

Bridgewater Bank's Joe Chybowski, AllianceBernstein's Michael Howard, and Performance Trust's Matt Shields join Travillian's Brian Love for a roundtable on capital structure, what investors reward, bank M&A, deposits, and succession in 2026. A candid look at what earns investor confidence and whaterodes it fast.

Everyone's talking about Banking-as-a-Service. Almost no one has actually built it — and even fewer have done it twice. Patrick Slain has.

In this episode, the Stearns Bank fintech lead sits down with host Amber Buker to get real about what building a BaaS program takes: why it's a six-year commitment, how to keep it aligned with the bank's risk appetite, what separates a great fintech partner from a deal you should walk away from, and why the industry's loudest debates miss what customers actually want.

A candid look at doing BaaS the patient way.

Stablecoins are moving from the headlines into the banking system, and community banks are paying attention. In this episode of Travillian Next, Alex Treece, CEO and Co-Founder of Stablecore, and Branden Hansen, President at Bank of Utah, join Travillian's Keith Daly to discuss why now is the moment for community banks to act. They cover the GENIUS Act and clearer regulation, a stablecoin market that's grown from about $30 billion to $330 billion with trillions projected ahead, real-world use cases like cross-border payments and smart contracts, the risk to low-cost deposits, and why community banks may be better positioned to win than they think.

Bank regulation has shifted fast over the last 18 months, and Ian Maloney, Chief Policy Officer at the American Fintech Council, joins Keith Daly on Travillian Next to break down what it means for bank compliance and risk teams. They get into why the prudential regulators are more coordinated, how reputation risk left the exam handbooks in favor of material financial risk, and the first CAMELS rating rewrite since 1996. Ian also lays out where AI governance, model risk, and fair lending stand for banks, how AI is reshaping fraud detection, and what the 2026 midterms could mean for bank supervision. A clear status check for anyone working in banking, fintech, compliance, or risk.

Steve Plunk was the OCC examiner at the center of the Penn Square Bank collapse, one of the most consequential bank failures in American history. He sits down with Travillian's Amber Buker to revisit the oil-fueled bank that fooled the biggest names in banking, the one line on the balance sheet that brought it down, and where that same blind spot is hiding in banks today.

A special conversation from the collaboration series between Travillian Next and Maxfield on Banks.

Brent Beardall, President and CEO of WaFd, Inc., joins Brian Love to tell the story of his rise from a bank file room to the CEO seat. Partway through, he gets surprised on camera by Simone Lagomarsino, the former CEO of Luther Burbank Savings, the bank WaFd acquired. The two cover leadership, the WaFd and Luther Burbank merger, surviving the 2023 banking crisis, and why banking is still a noble profession. A good listen for anyone thinking about leadership, succession, or M&A in community banking.

Travillian's bank & fintech recap from May 2026: Amber Buker, Chief Research Officer, and Brian Love, Head of Banking & Fintech Search, recap the month's biggest banking and fintech conferences (Finovate, D.A. Davidson, S&P Global, and Alloy Labs in Nashville). The honest, occasionally goofy conversation covers young bank executive talent, succession planning, stablecoin and tokenized deposits, AI in the boardroom, bank-fintech partnerships, and the Wild West of bank M&A ahead in H2 2026.

Take the Travillian Bank-Fintech Fault Line Diagnostic: https://travilliangroup.com/fault-line-diagnostic/

Reach Brian at [email protected] or Amber at [email protected].