Banking Transformed with Jim Marous

There is a $1.7 trillion blind spot sitting inside your bank or credit union right now.

The Census Bureau counts 29.8 million businesses in the United States with no employees at all, taking in $1.7 trillion in annual receipts, about 6.8% of the economy. Almost all of that money runs through a personal checking account at a bank or credit union that has never asked what the owner is building. The industry treats this as a detection problem, to be solved by moving these owners onto a business account. The research points somewhere else. When a small business owner has a real question about running their business, 48% call another business owner.

Jim Marous makes the case that the largest unmet need in this segment is connection to other owners at the same stage and to specialists who understand a business of that shape. The neobanks built for gig workers compete on tax buckets, invoicing and fee-free checking, and none of them competes on this. The capability to deliver it already sits inside every institution's own portfolio, unused, because the data was never structured in a way anyone could act on. That is what makes this an AI problem rather than a product problem.

The episode closes on three actions: point the model at the portfolio rather than the credit decision, give the banker a briefing built from internal affinity and external context, and make the introduction personally, with both sides' permission. Home services is the vertical to pilot first.

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.

Only 18% of banks have integrated AI workflows. Everyone else is automating the past.

Most banks and credit unions are using artificial intelligence to make yesterday’s work faster, then measuring the result with yesterday’s numbers. Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, and Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow, call this the iteration trap and argue it is the same failure that has consumed digital transformation. Their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, published by Wiley in 2026, draws a line between an AI-enabled company that uses AI to do what it already did and an AI-forward company that uses AI to do what it could never do before. By their own research, only about 5% of companies have reached the second group.

In this conversation with Jim Marous, Solis and Wright explain why an organization chart hides the handoffs where value stalls and why a work chart exposes them, how savings from iterative AI should fund the innovative AI that grows revenue, and what a chief executive should put in front of a board that has never approved an investment without a payback period. Wright describes a government delegation that planned to deflect 90% of its citizen calls and could not answer why. Solis describes 75 chief executives who admitted, privately, that they are expected to know what to do and do not.

Marous brings the discussion back to banking throughout, from the quarterly reporting cycle that rewards cost-cutting to the risk avoidance culture that new bankers are trained into on their first day. He closes with his own prediction that the next wave of consolidation among banks and credit unions will be decided by readiness rather than by size, with the sharpest question in any acquisition being how much friction the acquired institution brings.

About:

Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week, and subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Your institution is spending real money to bring people to the front door, and most of them never get through it.

Cornerstone Advisors found 3.36 digital checking applications abandoned for every one completed, or nearly 9,000 potential accounts at the average institution. Research from Debbie puts average application completion around 15%, with the ID upload as the single biggest drop-off point, and some institutions decline 70% of the applications they receive. Meanwhile the average cost to acquire a member runs around $489.

Most of that gets treated as a KYC and compliance requirement, and most of the time it is not. The customer identification program rule is risk-based. It permits non-documentary verification, allows identity to be verified within a reasonable time after an account is opened, and expects your procedures to define what someone can do while verification is still underway. Most systems only have approved and declined.

Jim Marous looks at what the identity decision is costing banks and credit unions at the new account desk and in digital account opening, why the same gate gets run again on customers who have been with you for years, and what a risk-based verification path looks like in practice. Featuring research from Cornerstone Advisors, FICO and Debbie.

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

Organic Relationship Growth is Easier Than Prospecting and Available Daily

Your cheapest growth engine is the customer whose transaction history you're already holding.

Every month, your customers' accounts send money out to banks, brokerages, mortgage companies, auto lenders and installment lenders. At the customer level, that's a flow of funds analysis: where money enters, where it leaves, and which parts of the relationship are being served somewhere else. It won't tell you everything a customer owns or owes, but it will show you where money is going, how often it moves, and which outside relationships are active.

Deposits and investments held elsewhere leave a trail as outbound transfers, and no credit bureau reports them, so your bank or credit union may be the only one positioned to see them. Loans held elsewhere show up as recurring debits. Every one of those is a form of credit somebody else underwrote for a customer you had already acquired and already paid for.

Acquisition costs are rarely fully loaded, and roughly a third of new accounts leave within the first year. That's what makes this an organic growth argument rather than a reporting exercise, and it's growth you can begin sizing before you spend, because the volume, the frequency and the timing are already visible.

Jim Marous shares his own money movement across two top 5 institutions, neither of which has ever offered him an alternative to what they can see him doing elsewhere. Some institutions have never assembled this view. Others have assembled it and attached no action to it. Different starting points, and the same result for the customer.

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

Lay a new core over a broken process, and the process just runs faster.

Darius Wise told his staff the credit union was not good at what it did. Red Rocks was coming off two years of net losses, a core conversion was underway, a merger had just fallen apart, and the board was turning over.

Darius spent two decades as a pastor before financial services. He joined Red Rocks as Chief Impact Officer, took the interim CEO seat during the worst of it, and returned the credit union to profitability within 11 months.

In this episode, we talk about what that took. Exiting a merger after staff had already been told about it, and the trust that cost. The layoffs. The habit of softening hard news that he had to unlearn in his first month. Why he'd rather be respected than liked. And the thing he wants every institution buying its way out of trouble to hear: new technology on top of bad people and bad process only lets you do bad faster.

We also get into the board he inherited, the reverse mentoring that changed it, why he's building branches while others close them, and why he'd rather choose a merger partner than be chosen by one.

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