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, and as far as Marous can tell, most banks and credit unions still haven't made regular saving as easy as it can be.

Marous walks through what Acorns gets right in the order a customer experiences it: a first step of a few cents, a commitment through a paycheck split and Money Manager, and visible progress along the way. Acorns charges $4, $8 or $12 a month, and Marous leaves the fee as a decision for each bank and credit union. He explains what makes customers trust automation enough to leave it on, including knowing how much will move and when, and he points to Ally's Surprise Savings as an example.

Marous offers three questions for any savings tool: how many customers turn it on, how many are still contributing six months later, and how much their balances have grown. He notes that a transfer inside one institution creates no new deposit, so retention, additional money, and engagement are the outcomes to measure, and he suggests starting with customers who already send regular amounts to Acorns, Robinhood, or Ally. He cites Chime's automatic 10% transfer from direct deposits and Casco Federal Credit Union's partner-built investing as proof the pieces already exist.

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.

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 know your customer to know your agent.

Brett describes how a customer's agent will research credit, ask only for amount, duration, monthly payment, cost and penalties, and eventually take over the decision. Jim asks whether a primary financial institution can exist once the customer delegates the choice. Brett says the primary relationship will belong to the agent, which pushes cost-to-income ratio, with Nubank and WeBank as the benchmarks, ahead of deposit and loan margin as the measure that matters.

The conversation then turns to know-your-agent identity, the regulatory infrastructure Brett proposes in the book, and why he ranks the US well behind Singapore and China on readiness. Jim asks who is furthest ahead and furthest behind among the partners that have to work together. Brett closes with his prediction that banks unable to connect to the new infrastructure will be acquired by the mid-2030s, and with how a personal AI money coach could widen access to financial education.

About Brett King: Brett is a futurist, the founder of Moven and the author of Bank 5.0 and the Bank X.0 series. He hosts Breaking Banks and The Futurists.

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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 in Deloitte's survey of almost 2,600 U.S. banking customers. At the same time, 58% of customers who use gen AI have used it to research banking products. A product page now serves a person and an AI tool at once, and many pages were written like the brochures that used to sit in every branch.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous follows a freelancer paid in lumps through two versions of the same checking account page. The generic page says flexible banking and low fees, so she cannot tell what the account costs or how to avoid the fee. The more useful page states the fee, how to waive it without a payroll direct deposit and how to reach a person, so she can compare the terms with her income.

The episode separates transparency, fit and proof, and explains why clearer copy can reveal an advantage but cannot create one. It lays out four checks for three product pages, looks at what a site that asks a few questions up front could do next, and ends with an exercise for leadership: each executive writes down who each product is for and why it fits, then the team compares the answers.

About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, 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.

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.

Dr. Black says interchange loss could reach 5, 10 or 20% in 2027, starting slowly and then building quickly like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. Merchants like Amazon could accept a stablecoin for about 1% when a card costs closer to 3%, and he suggests checking how much interchange your institution collects on Amazon Prime Day, which he calls material for many institutions. The risk extends to transaction data and to deposits, as customers sweep spending money from checking accounts into stablecoin balances.

He also discusses where to start. Dr. Black explains why a wallet that works with existing stablecoins like USDC is a better first experiment than issuing your own coin, which he does not necessarily recommend for most smaller institutions. He recommends education at the board and executive level, then an internal working group across payments, deposits and IT, and argues that small is nimble because you do not have to be big to play in this space.

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

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 Leader at CoinsPaid Solutions, which runs the back office of stablecoin payments. Pavel explains that cross-border settlement, replacing correspondent banking, is the biggest use among financial institutions today, and why he believes they can do much more. He also describes how differing regulatory definitions across countries slow adoption, and why legacy operations hold progress back, which is why CoinsPaid invests in educating the people who work with the technology every day.

Pavel expects AI agents to partner with particular blockchains and to choose which blockchain and token a payment runs on. He says the biggest institutions already have strategic plans, with some hiring people and building software while others sit and wait, and he sees waiting as a strategy too. Jim compares the moment to instant payments, when a group of the largest banks in the country had nobody ready on day one, and asks what every bank or credit union should do today.

About Pavel Kashuba: Strategic Leader at CoinsPaid Solutions, which runs the back office of stablecoin payments.

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