Banking Transformed with Jim Marous
Are you prepared to embrace change, take risks and disrupt yourself in response to the digital disruption in banking? If not, this podcast is for you. Hosted by top 5 banking and fintech influencer, Jim Marous, Banking Transformed highlights the leadership and cultural challenges facing the banking industry. Featuring interviews with some of the top minds in business, this podcast explores how financial institutions can prepare for the future of banking.
Episodes
September 23, 2026 • 8 mins
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 sta...
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September 22, 2026 • 47 mins
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, w...
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September 21, 2026 • 10 mins
Somebody is going to walk an extra lap around the block tonight because the ring on their watch isn't closed. Nobody is paying them to do it.
That is gamification, and it is the most reliable behavior change tool built in the last 20 years. It also runs on a number somebody invented. 10,000 steps was never a medical standard. It was the name of a pedometer sold in 1965, and no study sat behind it. Jim Marous opens this Banking I...
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September 16, 2026 • 10 mins
The most valuable thing a rewards program does has almost nothing to do with the reward.
Bank of America reopened its rewards program this year and has enrolled more than five million people since May. Jim Marous opened a checking account at one of its branches specifically to hear how the associate would explain it, and what he got was not a product pitch. The program gave that employee a legitimate reason to talk about his who...
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September 15, 2026 • 29 mins
Bank of America dropped the $20,000 minimum. 5 million clients enrolled.
For most of the last decade, a large bank rewards program was something a client earned their way into. Bank of America’s preferred rewards program required $20,000 in balances, making loyalty a benefit of affluence rather than a feature of everyday relationships. BofA Rewards moved the entry point to any eligible checking account, making 30 million c...
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September 14, 2026 • 11 mins
2026 State of Financial Marketing report is available for free at https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-state-of-financial-marketing/?YouTube
More than half of the banks and credit unions in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research have generative AI operational or better inside marketing. Not one of them describes its customer data as real-time and AI-ready.
That gap runs in a straight line through the study...
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September 9, 2026 • 10 mins
Your vendor may own the technology debt. Your institution owns the consequences.
Technical debt is usually discussed as a money-center bank problem, so community banks and credit unions hear it and go back to work, because they don't write code. But institutions still contracting with a legacy core are paying the maintenance on that provider's accumulated debt. Outsourcing didn't remove the debt; it changed the relationship to i...
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September 8, 2026 • 46 mins
Melissa Stevens has a rule at Fifth Third: your employees are your brand.
The chief marketing officer of one of banking's strongest regional brands joins Jim Marous to explain how Fifth Third grows relationships from the inside out, by giving its people the data, the insight, and even the influencer status to become the bank's most trusted voices.
Stevens makes the case that customers never experience a bank as a marketing ca...
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September 7, 2026 • 10 mins
We won the adoption argument. Every hand in the room. And the income statement didn't notice.
Four years ago, Jim Marous asked a room of bankers how many had used an AI tool in their work, and fewer than one in four hands went up. Last week he asked the same question and nearly every hand in the room went up, many of them belonging to bankers over 50. Adoption in the banking industry has moved faster than almost anything Jim has...
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September 2, 2026 • 11 mins
Most institutions aren't undifferentiated. Their differences are unwitnessed.
Cover the logo on the mobile app, the website and the branch sign, and most leadership teams cannot pick their own institution out of a lineup. Jim Marous opens this episode with that test, then turns it around: the problem is rarely that a bank or credit union has nothing worth choosing. The problem is that the advantage was built somewhere no custome...
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September 1, 2026 • 59 mins
Customer experience expert Jay Baer is stepping away from the keynote stage after 17 years and moving deeper into the world of tequila. He joins Jim Marous for a Banking Transformed conversation centered on five pours and five customer-experience questions for banks and credit unions.
Tequilas tasted, in order:
→ Nosotros Blanco
→ Lost Lore Joven
→ Arette Reposado
→ Wild Common Añejo
→ Cazcáñes #7 Extra Añejo
Each tequil...
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August 31, 2026 • 10 mins
Your NPS went up again last quarter. It still can't tell you which customers actually sent you somebody.
Gallup studied more than 24,000 banking customers. Run the standard formula and the score came out at 11. Change only how a 9 and a 7 get counted, and the same answers from the same people produce negative 14. Nobody was resurveyed. Nobody changed their mind.
Jim Marous makes the case that the industry's favorite metric re...
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August 26, 2026 • 12 mins
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 detect...
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August 25, 2026 • 51 mins
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 cons...
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August 24, 2026 • 11 mins
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...
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August 19, 2026 • 9 mins
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 relationshi...
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August 18, 2026 • 50 mins
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 dur...
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August 17, 2026 • 9 mins
Banks and credit unions rate higher than the fintechs on buy now, pay later.
J.D. Power scores bank programs at 704 for customer satisfaction, compared with 603 for fintechs. Almost none of the spending is ours.
The gap is timing.
Our pay later arrives after the purchase, the fintechs own the purchase itself, and the moments a customer needs money the most, the emergency repair or the gap before payday, arrive without a ...
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August 12, 2026 • 11 mins
Deep institutional experience isn't enough for the job ahead. New thinking alone isn't either. Your next CEO has to bring both.
CEOs in financial services stay in the seat about 9 years, longer than almost any other industry, at the exact moment AI, data, and new competitors are rewriting what the job requires. Yet only 9% of banks have identified a CEO successor with a timeline and a plan of action, down from 17% a year earlier...
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August 11, 2026 • 42 mins
A new account costs a bank or credit union over $400 to win, yet more than 40% go inactive within the first year. In this episode of Banking Transformed, Jim Marous talks with Har Rai Khalsa, co-founder and CEO of Swaystack, about closing the gap between account opening and account activation.
Har Rai explains why the first 30 to 60 days decide primacy, why onboarding has to be product-specific, and how "reboarding" the existing...
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