Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

Banks can give each customer a VIP on the phone with voice AI, if trust comes first.

Bland CEO Isaiah Granet says his AI already handles more than 3 million phone calls a week.

At JPMorgan Chase, a great customer gets a private wealth banker. Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, believes voice AI can give everyone else a version of that relationship: a contact in their phone that answers by name at any hour. He estimates call centers cost companies more than $1 trillion a year worldwide, says that spending is already about as lean as it gets, and argues the bigger opportunity is customer lifetime value. He also sees savings in cutting the phone tree, hold time and drop-off friction.

Granet is direct about what it takes to deploy conversational AI in a regulated institution. Bland does not build on the large frontier AI labs and will run on premise so customer data stays inside the bank or credit union. He recommends starting slowly, with a first interaction that simply routes the call, and says Bland's average time to go live is under 30 days. He also explains why internal notes need rules, since an unflattering comment about a customer could surface in a call.

The conversation gets practical on the details that shape the customer's experience. Granet explains warm transfers, where one AI keeps a caller company while a second AI briefs the call center agent, and citations, which pull policy or reference numbers from a call and write them back to a system of record. He also covers mortgage calls, the pathways approach that lets a language model follow an institution's procedures, why one brain should serve voice, text and chat, and why Bland trains a voice that competitors cannot use.

About Isaiah Granet: Granet is the co-founder and CEO of Bland, which began in health tech, went through Y Combinator and pivoted to voice AI. Bland builds conversational voice AI for large enterprises.

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

Hear the full conversation with Jorge Camargo of Bank of America on Banking Transformed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KibFqG47KzQ

Banks and credit unions can let customers see and correct what the institution assumes about them, the way Amazon's About You page does for shoppers. Bank of America's experience shows customers will share what matters when someone asks.

Amazon now gives shoppers a page where they can view, change or remove the preferences behind their recommendations, and even ask its shopping assistant what it knows about them. Most banks and credit unions still decide what a customer needs from transaction data the customer never sees. When that guess is wrong, the customer gets an offer that doesn't fit and quietly concludes their financial institution doesn't really know them.

Jim Marous draws on his conversation with Jorge Camargo, who runs digital platforms at Bank of America. Erica, the bank's virtual assistant, has handled more than 3 billion conversations that came down to about 700 consumer banking topics, and one overarching concern customers bring to the relationship: am I good? By 2023, Life Plan users had scheduled more than 2.3 million follow-up appointments with the bank's financial specialists.

Jim lays out three questions any institution can ask: what's your biggest financial challenge, how can we do better, and where else do you do business? The follow-up that matters most is "Did we get this right?" This isn't a big bank story. A community bank or credit union can start this week with one financial need, one channel it already has, and a promise to respond.

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 thefinancialbrand.com.

Community banks and credit unions keep pace by putting their own data to work for customers.

Many community banks and credit unions already have the technology, data and insights they need, and are waiting too long to put them to work. That execution gap is what customers and members feel. Greg Adelson, President and CEO of Jack Henry, joins Jim Marous to explain why the technology gap with the largest banks is narrowing while the execution gap keeps getting wider, and what it takes for community institutions to keep pace.

Greg sees the institutions that end up acquired as the ones that waited too long or chose not to invest. The way forward starts with data. As Greg puts it, nobody has more data than a bank or a credit union, and the flow of funds shows where customers and members are moving money long before an account closes. He and Jim discuss turning that insight into a better experience, and why no provider can be the best at everything.

That makes partner choice critical. Institutions need partners that work openly with others and can help them deploy at speed and scale. On AI, Greg's advice is to protect what community institutions were built on- service, relationship, and trust - by taking cost out of the back office and putting those savings into people on the front line. He closes on the opportunity he'd act on first: Gen Z.

About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed explores the people and ideas changing retail banking. New episodes multiple times each week.

PayPal and Venmo already have brand recognition and a huge customer base. Can they become your customers' primary bank in the future?

PayPal's CEO has shared their plan for the future.

PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous breaks down what Venmo's debit card economics, Teen Accounts, and a rejected $53 billion buyout bid actually say about where that trust is headed next, and what it would cost your bank or credit union if a customer's paycheck lands there first.

Inside the episode:

• → PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger.

• → PayPal CEO Enrique Lores has told investors he wants Venmo to become a one-stop shop for money management, crypto, and investing, modeled directly on SoFi and Chime.

• → Venmo Teen Accounts let kids 13 to 17 receive direct deposit tied to a parent's Venmo, meaning a first paycheck can land in Venmo before it ever touches a bank or credit union.

• → Stripe and private equity firm Advent offered a 28% premium to buy PayPal in July, and reporting says Venmo, not Braintree, was the real prize behind the bid.

• → Zelle still moves nearly three times as much P2P money as Venmo, but Venmo wins on frequency, identity, and brand pull, the real foundation of a banking super app.

• → A Fiserv marketing executive's own teenage daughter got her Venmo debit card before anything arrived from her traditional bank account, a preview of the customer banks are losing first.

• → Every dollar that sits in Venmo and gets spent on a Venmo debit card earns your own debit card nothing, while Venmo builds a map of customer spending you'll never see.

Institutions and research referenced: PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Zelle, Stripe, Advent, Chime, Nubank, SoFi, and Fiserv.

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

Microsoft's financial services data chief forecast in 2023 how banks would use generative AI.

Charles Morris now leads agentic enterprise strategy at Truist, and his early calls are worth revisiting.

In February 2023, barely two months after ChatGPT reached the public, Jim Marous asked Charles Morris, then Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft, where generative AI was headed. Morris admitted he had never lived through an inflection point like it, then got specific. He described AI as a copilot to a human pilot who stays responsible for every output, speeding up first drafts, summaries of long documents and search across large content libraries. For compliance and documentation-heavy work in banking, he said, the early value was simply spending less time reading what nobody needed to read.

He pointed to CarMax, which used OpenAI models to summarize customer reviews for every car it sells and cut work it estimated would take years down to a few months, with its own team approving the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with knowledge systems that hold verified facts, and called a professional human in the loop the strongest safeguard against errors reaching customers. That pairing, now widely known as retrieval-augmented generation, became a common pattern for enterprise AI.

On jobs, Morris argued generative AI would show which parts of knowledge work are repetitive and which depend on creativity and people, changing roles and creating new kinds of work. This is the first Flashback Friday, a replay of one of our most-viewed conversations tested against what has happened since. Morris has since become SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Listen for which of his calls held up, and how far your own bank or credit union has moved since 2023.

About the guest: Charles Morris was Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft when this conversation was recorded in February 2023. He is now SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.