Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

A six-minute loan process comes down to a handful of decisions any institution can make.

Jim Marous talks with Adam Cadmus of The Atlantic Federal Credit Union and Benjamin Conant of Alkami about how a $240 million credit union rebuilt consumer lending from the ground up, cutting account opening from two days to six minutes with most loans closing document-free.

They walk through the moves that made it work: bringing membership enrollment and lending into one flow, involving risk and compliance from day one, replacing document collection with trusted data sources, and rethinking legacy workflows instead of layering new technology on top of them.

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

#BankingTransformed #DigitalLending #CreditUnions #LoanOrigination #Alkami

On June 25, 2026, Google launched a new Google Finance app. It looks like a market-data tool. It is the opening move in Google’s banking reset, and Google doesn’t need to become a bank to pull it off.

In this Banking Insight video, Jim Marous makes the case that for a decade, Google has reached into banking, with checking accounts, payments, and comparison, and retreated every time, and that this time is genuinely different. Google isn’t chasing the banking product anymore. It is after the decision that comes before the product, the moment your customer decides where her money goes.

In that moment, the app quietly becomes what Jim calls a primary financial companion: the source a customer trusts first to understand, compare, and decide about money, even when another institution still holds the account and moves the funds. Google needs no charter, branch, or balance sheet to win it.

Jim breaks down why this is a reset rather than another retreat, why banks can’t out-trust or out-friction a source that customers already use all day, why the runway most banks think they have is already spent, and the two honest paths left for institutions that want to remain the place their customers decide.

Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report.

There is a quiet danger in banking. You get very good at one thing, and you keep doing it right up until the market shifts under you.

Barclays built one of the largest card businesses in the US without a single branch, reaching customers through trusted brands like JetBlue, AARP, and General Motors rather than its own name. Peter Gasparro, Chief Development Officer at Barclays US Consumer Bank, joins Jim Marous to talk through moving a model-line credit card company into deposits and lending, building around customer journeys rather than product silos, and the discipline of running just 22 partnerships rather than hundreds.

The conversation covers what separates a strategic partnership from a distribution deal, how customer expectations set by Netflix and Amazon are reshaping banking, why making products discoverable to AI agents is now a major project, and the one question Peter would ask first if he ran a community or regional bank: Do you really need to own everything end-to-end?

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

The next bank run will not look like a run.

No crowd, no panic, just balances leaving quietly as customers’ AI agents move money to a better rate while everyone sleeps. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous explains why the agentic era changes the physics of deposits, and why the money you assume is loyal may only be waiting for software to notice the spread.

Jim reframes deposit stickiness as friction rather than loyalty, revisits the sweep account as the automated money-movement machine banks built decades ago and now face pointed at the whole market, and draws on FDIC, Forrester, and McKinsey data to size the risk. He introduces agent-exposed deposits as a new way to read the balance sheet, and lays out the three categories every institution needs to separate: relationship-protected, rate-sensitive, and agent-exposed.

The real question is no longer whether your customer keeps an account with you, but whether they still let you make a single decision on their behalf.

Jim Marous is Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report. Banking Transformed publishes multiple times weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

A newly opened account usually starts in third place. Here is how banks turn new customers into primary relationships in the first 90 days.

 

The average checking customer now uses three banks (J.D. Power), so most new accounts land behind two institutions the customer already trusts. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous breaks down the primacy window, the short stretch after account opening when a bank can still become the one a customer’s financial life runs through, and the ladder every new account has to climb: from available, to useful, to trusted, to primary.

 

You will hear what high-performing banks do differently: winning the paycheck first through direct deposit, since accounts with a direct deposit stay open about twice as long; running a seven-to-nine-touch onboarding cadence when more than half of institutions still stop at two or fewer; measuring primacy instead of satisfaction scores; and meeting customers inside the AI tools where they now decide where to bank, before the account is ever opened.

 

A practical playbook for any banker who wants new accounts to become primary relationships, not deposit hotels. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for more on the future of banking.