Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

Bank of America dropped the $20,000 minimum. 5 million clients enrolled.

For most of the last decade, a large bank rewards program was something a client earned their way into. Bank of America’s preferred rewards program required $20,000 in balances, making loyalty a benefit of affluence rather than a feature of everyday relationships. BofA Rewards moved the entry point to any eligible checking account, making 30 million clients eligible immediately. More than 5 million have enrolled since, with 1.5 million of those in the first month.

Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America, joins Jim Marous to explain why checking was the non-negotiable anchor, how the higher tiers were made better rather than diluted, and why the lifestyle benefit threshold came down from $1 million in assets to $100,000. She also details what a primacy shift actually looks like in the data: direct deposits moving over, more card transacting, and a change in the top-of-wallet card.

The most useful finding for other banks and credit unions is about channels. 80% of enrollments happen digitally in two taps, but Narula is clear that digital is the fulfillment channel and financial center associates are the catalyst. Roughly 20,000 new-to-bank clients open a checking account and enroll every week, 2.5 times the pre-launch rate. Narula closes with her advice to any leader planning a change at this scale, starting with associate education long before launch.

Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe for new episodes multiple times each week.

2026 State of Financial Marketing report is available for free at https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-state-of-financial-marketing/?YouTube

More than half of the banks and credit unions in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research have generative AI operational or better inside marketing. Not one of them describes its customer data as real-time and AI-ready.

That gap runs in a straight line through the study. Generative AI raised production capacity, while thin data and almost no predictive decisioning keep the output from being relevant. 55% are not using predictive AI at all. 1% rate AI-driven content and creative as effective, the lowest score on the tactics chart, against the largest planned budget increase in the research. We funded the layer that produces marketing and held flat the layer that decides who should receive it, when it should arrive, and whether it worked.

It also explains the distance between what this industry says about personalization and what it does. 83% sit at segment-based personalization or below and 1% call themselves hyper-personalized. Two-thirds of what we call personalization is choosing which audience receives a message, which is list selection under a newer name. Jim walks through what that looked like when he ran marketing at a bank, sorting a core tape by ZIP code and balance tier, and what has genuinely improved since.

None of it is a reason to wait. Good solution providers build strong targeting on imperfect data every day. Imperfect data can't recognize what just happened to a customer and respond while it is still happening. Personalization and decisioning is also the least outsourced marketing function in the study at 13%, even though a lack of internal talent is the second-largest barrier, which means this industry outsources its strengths and protects its weaknesses.

ABOUT: Jim Marous is Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast.

Your vendor may own the technology debt. Your institution owns the consequences.

Technical debt is usually discussed as a money-center bank problem, so community banks and credit unions hear it and go back to work, because they don't write code. But institutions still contracting with a legacy core are paying the maintenance on that provider's accumulated debt. Outsourcing didn't remove the debt; it changed the relationship to it: a large bank can inspect its own and decide what to repair, while a smaller institution can only live with the consequences.

In this episode, Jim Marous argues that the real difference is ownership. At a large bank the problem has a department, a register and a budget line. At a community institution it has no owner, no number and no seat at the strategy table, so it surfaces every 5 to 7 years as a procurement conversation about price per account. He puts the argument inside a scene every banker will recognize: a small product change, a room that likes it, an estimate that comes back at 9 months, and an idea that goes on a list nobody reads again.

The stakes have changed, because AI is the first technology whose value depends almost entirely on whether the institution can absorb it. The answer is selective decoupling rather than core replacement: hundreds of single-solution providers now run alongside a large core, so the core can remain a stable system of record while the capabilities that need to move fast are free to do so. With a guardrail, because collecting providers badly trades core debt for integration debt. Stop making your core the answer to every technology question.

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. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Melissa Stevens has a rule at Fifth Third: your employees are your brand.

The chief marketing officer of one of banking's strongest regional brands joins Jim Marous to explain how Fifth Third grows relationships from the inside out, by giving its people the data, the insight, and even the influencer status to become the bank's most trusted voices.

Stevens makes the case that customers never experience a bank as a marketing campaign. They experience it as the colleague who answers the question and solves the problem, and she has built her whole approach around that. That means letting employees post about the bank on social media without fully scripting what they say, because you can't script authenticity. It means arming bankers with insight, not just data, so a conversation is about the customer rather than the product. And it means watching for the quiet signals of a customer drifting away, like a direct deposit that suddenly splits in two, and reaching out before they're gone.

She's also candid about the tradeoffs. Fifth Third deliberately kept generative AI away from its customers, choosing accuracy over personality, after growing its Jeanie assistant from barely 20 percent accuracy in its early days to the low 90s. She talks through carrying 500,000 Comerica customers into a new brand without breaking their trust. And she grades herself an honest C-minus on the one thing she worries about most as the company grows.

For any bank or credit union trying to grow relationships in a crowded market, this is a clear look at what works and what most institutions get wrong about their own people.

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

We won the adoption argument. Every hand in the room. And the income statement didn't notice.

Four years ago, Jim Marous asked a room of bankers how many had used an AI tool in their work, and fewer than one in four hands went up. Last week he asked the same question and nearly every hand in the room went up, many of them belonging to bankers over 50. Adoption in the banking industry has moved faster than almost anything Jim has watched in his career. Over the same period, the share of organizations that can point to any impact of AI on their earnings has not changed.

This episode opens with a recurring pragmatic check-in on where banking actually is with AI, and it locates the gap elsewhere than in the technology. Banking has digitized the same way three times: paper became PDF, PDF moved behind a portal, and now the work inside the queue has been sped up. Every round improved the surface the work sits on. None of them touched the space between two departments. Mortgage lending shows the result on the income statement, where closings have come down roughly two weeks since 2021 while the cost to originate at a bank or credit union has stayed flat and pull-through has declined.

Retirement rollovers show the same failure landing on the customer, where an IRA application takes five minutes, and the transfer still runs on a paper check in the mail, during which about a third of job changers cash out instead.

The argument lands on ownership rather than tooling. Every step inside a department has an owner, a budget line, and a number. The space between two departments has none of the three, which is why three waves of digitalization kept landing on documents and never on the gaps. Jim closes with three moves: picking a process instead of a task, assigning one owner across the whole span, and measuring end-to-end.

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.