Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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.

Lifecycle campaigns beat acquisition by 2 to 6 times. Acquisition still gets the budget.

Marquis analyzed thousands of campaigns across more than 100 banks and credit unions and found that lifecycle programs, the work an institution does with the account holders it already has, run 2 to 6 times more efficient than acquisition and prospecting. Our 2026 State of Financial Marketing report puts acquisition first among priorities, with retention and cross-sell well behind. The priority order and the return order point in opposite directions, and most institutions have not noticed.

Satin Mirchandani, Chairman and CEO of Marquis, joins Jim Marous to get specific about what an institution's own data already knows. An auto loan at month 32 of a 36-month term. An account holder whose transaction frequency has quietly dropped. A household whose product mix has fallen behind the cohort that looks just like it. Each is a signal the institution already owns, and each one has a campaign attached to it that mostly never runs.

The conversation also covers what counts as a response versus a funded account, why purchased intent data can spook the people it is aimed at, why messy data is a poor excuse for waiting, and why the explosion in side businesses is breaking the way most banks and credit unions group a household. Satin brings an outside perspective on why our industry keeps funding its lowest-returning work while the higher-return work sits untouched in the core system.

Download Marquis 2026 FI Trend Report here: https://mktg.gomarquis.com/2026-marketing-trend-report

About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed brings banking and credit union leaders the perspectives shaping the future of financial services. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.