Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

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.

Download Alkami's 2026 Generational Trends in Digital Banking research: https://www.alkami.com/resources/research/2026-generational-trends-in-digital-banking-report/?YouTubeIV54

To win over millennials and Gen Z, a bank or credit union has to win their primary checking account. J.D. Power finds these generations open 67% of all new primary checking accounts, and community institutions are winning less than their existing share.

Millennials and Gen Z are the customers who will replace the baby boomers most banks and credit unions rely on today. Yet J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Millennial & Gen Z Checking Satisfaction Study shows midsize banks, community banks and credit unions hold 26% of these relationships while winning only 21% of new ones. Fintech customers rate their accounts higher on fee fairness, real-time balances and help making progress, and J.D. Power found many of the gaps come down to design and policy choices.

Jim Marous uses his own son's banking to show where these relationships go: $200 a paycheck left at a top-5 bank to cover automatic payments, direct deposit at Chase after a rewards card he found through AI and search, daily spending on Venmo, and a credit union checking account that only makes the mortgage payment. As Jason Dorsey, who led new research for Alkami, puts it, a primary banking relationship is no longer a promise of exclusivity.

Jim then lays out six moves for product, marketing and contact center teams: being named when customers ask AI or search where to bank, a 3-minute mobile account opening, no fees on small overdrafts, available balances that update the moment a purchase is approved, goal-based onboarding with a progress tracker and short money lessons, and helping customers discover the right feature at the moment it fits. The customers who will sustain a bank or credit union's growth may already have an account there.

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.

A $3.2 billion credit union chooses its digital partners from member surveys, and the results show.

Chartway Credit Union runs $3.2 billion in assets and serves 265,000 members, yet it brought in $2 million in CD deposits in under 45 days without leading on rate. It segmented members with known excess liquidity, reached them with a personalized Pulsate push, and took them through one-tap Entersekt authentication straight into account opening and funding. Esteban Guerra explains why a batch email and a trip to the branch would have lost a large share of those members along the way, and why the targeting kept the money from behaving like hot money.

The method behind it starts with members. Chartway surveys them, builds its roadmap from what they ask for, then searches Q2's Innovation Studio and checks references with credit unions on a similar stack before choosing a partner. With 85% of members on the mobile app and roughly 1.7 million logins a month, any partner that adds friction to mobile doesn't make the cut. And the feedback flows both ways: Chartway takes what members tell it back to its partners, and it often ends up on their roadmaps.

Speed has changed the math for smaller institutions. Work that took six to nine months now takes weeks, and Chartway had ScribeUp subscription management in a production pilot in under two weeks. During a fraud spike it added background authentication rather than friction and cut manual reviews by 40%. Esteban, whose credit union was named Q2's 2026 Credit Union of the Year, closes with advice for banks and credit unions earlier in the journey: start with your members, invest in your people, and do the due diligence.

About the series: The Experience Factor is a special Banking Transformed series with Q2, recorded at Q2 CONNECT 2026 in Austin, Texas, featuring consumer banking experts and financial institution leaders on how account holder experience and engagement drive long-term success.

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

Agentic AI: Powering the Self-Driving Bank: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/agentic-ai-powering-the-self-driving-bank/

A bank or credit union that judges Meta's Muse by whether it moves deposits is watching the wrong risk. Within about 10 days of launch, Muse was the most downloaded free app on the iPhone, and it reads customer accounts through Plaid.

Meta's chief AI officer has challenged people to see whether Muse can find them $1,000, and the Muse Money Challenge gives customers a low-risk reason to connect their accounts. A forgotten subscription or a lower bill is a small win, but small wins build a habit. Each useful result makes it easier for a customer to bring the agent a bigger question, from which credit card to use to where to borrow for a major purchase, and none of that requires moving a single deposit.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous builds on his earlier video, The Agentic Bank Run. Many observers, including the chief economist at Apollo, are now warning that AI agents could pull low-cost deposits out of checking accounts. Jim argues that deposit flight may be the last thing to move. The earlier exposure is influence over the decisions that grow a relationship, including the lending side of the balance sheet, where Plaid's liabilities data gives an agent a view of card and loan balances.

Jim closes with five practical moves for a bank or credit union: testing Muse internally, alerting customers when a recurring bill increases, reviewing customer borrowing before an agent does, giving branch and contact center staff the tools and authority to respond to an agent's comparison, and running a 30-day money challenge that puts a real person behind the help. Most of these moves rely on data the institution already holds, and the episode is candid about what that data can and cannot tell you about a customer's next financial decision.

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.

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.