Jim Marous 💯✓

I had the great honor of speaking at the Majlis Mohamed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi, on the grounds of the Grand Mosque on The Future of Finance in the Age of Intelligence. In attendance was His Highness Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Thank you to my family and the teams from Majlis Mohamed Bin Zayed, @provokemgmt, @StreamEvergreen and @FinancialBrand for the ongoing support.

Every payments executive I raise B2B acceptance with names the same objection: complexity. Too resource-intensive. Too disruptive. Too hard to prioritize when the consumer roadmap is already crowded. The complexity is real. It is also not as insurmountable as it looks from the outside. Here is what the objection is costing. Mastercard research puts the average B2B payment at about $40,000. The average acquirer underwrites a supplier at a ceiling closer to $10,000. That is not a rounding error. That is a decision your institution has been making by default, and it is costing you transaction volume inside relationships you already own. Set against an $80 trillion commercial payments market, that gap is not missed volume. It is a growth opportunity sitting inside portfolios that already exist. The institutions making progress did not rebuild everything. They started with one vertical or one supplier segment where client demand was already visible, proved the model, and expanded from there. 💡 The next layer of revenue is not about new customers. It is about capturing the transaction flows your current clients are already running through other channels. ❓ What is your ceiling, and when did anyone last look at it?

For years, my own perspective on financial wellness argued that customers want their institution to know them deeply and guide them proactively, which sounds like the exact opposite of designing an experience to disappear. But as @cxofficer and I discussed on this episode of Banking Transformed, true digital convenience means solving financial friction before the customer even notices it is there. When an automated notification arrives warning a customer about an impending overdraft just in time, followed by an immediate savings sweep that prevents the fee entirely, that is an experience the customer never has to stress over. They do not want a delightful conversation about a penalty fee; they want the system to handle the problem quietly in the background and give them their time back.  When necessary financial tasks are executed with invisible perfection, brand loyalty follows naturally.  ❓ What invisible background automations is your institution building to remove friction from your account holders' daily financial lives? 📌 Watch the full conversation here:

The prediction was the same for years. The branch disappears. It didn't. In the new research, more than 70% of institutions say branches are mission-critical or very important to long-term growth. Only a small minority plan to reduce their networks. Reduction isn't the branch strategy. Redefinition is. What is changing is what a branch is for. Success used to be measured in transactions and foot traffic. Now it is advisory engagement, relationship building, and the moments that matter most to the customer. Smaller footprints. Flexible layouts. Technology-enabled staffing. Self-service for the routine, people for the decisions. And customers no longer grade us against other banks. They compare us to the best experience they have anywhere. Across the industry, the gap between what leaders envision and what customers actually experience at the branch level remains significant. That gap is the competition. Close it and the network becomes an advantage. Leave it and you are maintaining a legacy channel that no longer delivers. Which one are you funding in 2026? 📌 Download your free copy of the 2026 Future of Branch Banking Report:

For decades, the retail banking industry has defined customer delight through reactive gestures. We train frontline staff to empower employees, waive overdraft fees as a one-time courtesy when an account holder makes a mistake, and celebrate when customer service successfully resolves a complaint. But during my conversation with @cxofficer on this episode of #BankingTransformed, we challenged whether that traditional definition of delight is entirely backwards. True digital convenience should mean that the customer never has to call for a fee waiver in the first place. Instead of waiting for an account holder to overdraw and then refunding the fee as a goodwill gesture, real digital empathy looks like an automated notification arriving before the overdraft happens, paired with an instantaneous savings sweep that prevents the shortfall entirely.  💡 The best experiences in category-defining industries are the ones that quietly solve problems in the background and give customers their time back.  ❓ Does your leadership team define customer experience around reactive firefighting or proactive, invisible problem prevention? 📌 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐝:

Only 50% of organizations have even close to a true onboarding process. I've been talking about onboarding since I got into this business. It's not one touch. It's not one channel. You need seven to nine touches to have an impact. As consumers, we already expect it. I get a thank you note or a call from Nordstrom. I get it from Amazon on an ongoing basis. Yet in our research, 30% of organizations say they're going to have an onboarding process next year. The rest say it's not in the plans. That number has been the same for over 10 years. So if 30% say they're going to do it, and 50% are doing it, why does the number stay the same? 💡 At the end of the day, we have to make it easier for organizations to say yes to. What's stopping yours? I talked about this with Satin Mirchandani of @Go_MARQUIS on Banking Transformed. 📌 Watch the full conversation here:

The best chance a bank or credit union has to help a struggling customer happens long before the first missed payment or collections call ever occurs. On this Banking Insights episode, I discuss practical ways financial institutions can operationalize early warning data into empathetic, timely outreach. Combinations of change matter more than any single isolated signal: loan payments arriving later in the cycle, balances trending downward for three consecutive months, and new alternative credit payments appearing in transaction histories. When outreach does happen, it works best when it comes from a named, reachable person rather than an automated mass email. 💡 Proactive, human-centric support turns your institution into a trusted financial partner during difficult moments. ❓ What outreach strategy does your bank use to contact customers showing early signs of financial distress? 📌 Watch this Banking Insights episode here:

I get in a room with 2,000 bankers and ask two questions. First: how many of you have closed a primary financial relationship in the last five years? Virtually nobody raises their hand. Then: how many of you have opened an account at a fintech, a neobank, or an organization that didn't exist 10 years ago? Virtually everybody. That gap is silent attrition. Our attrition rate still reads 1 to 2%, so we say we're okay. The account didn't close. It just isn't used the way it was. I haven't closed my account either. I'm sending money to Acorns, to Robinhood, to SoFi. You won't see it unless you measure it. The good news is it's available today. Funds flow analysis can be close to turnkey through various vendors if you ask for it. Then you have to understand what you're looking at. ❓ How many of your "primary" customers are still primary? I broke this down with Lee Wetherington of @JH_Fintech, walking through their 2026 Strategy Benchmark Study, on Banking Transformed. Link in the first comment. 📌 Full episode:

When building next year's technology plan, financial leaders must direct AI capital toward high-impact operational use cases rather than speculative experiments. On this episode of Banking Insights, I break down where bank and credit union AI dollars should actually be spent. The smartest institutions are deploying AI aggressively on fraud detection, automated document handling in lending and account opening, and contact center assist tools designed to empower employees. Meanwhile, complex personalization pilots and autonomous decisioning engines should include mandatory human review steps. 💡 Aligning your AI deployment strategy with actual consumer comfort levels ensures high operational return on investment without eroding trust. ❓Which operational department at your institution is capturing the highest ROI from AI automation today? 👉 You can watch this Banking Insights episode here:

Most account opening is designed to control risk. Very little of it is designed to measure what that control costs us. One credit union stopped asking every applicant for an identity document up front and asked for it only when a risk signal warranted it. Completion went from 5% to more than 60%. Same technology. Same regulatory environment. Those figures come from Frida Lebowitz, CEO of Debbie, on Banking Transformed. That gap was always there. It just never showed up on a report. We know what acquisition costs. We know what fraud costs. We don't know what unnecessary friction costs. So we keep optimizing the two numbers we can see, and we keep paying the one we cannot. 💡 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐦 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐦 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. ❓ What would your completion rate look like if you only asked for that document when something actually warranted it? 📌 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝:

James Clear wrote that every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you want to become. The same is true of institutions. Every seemingly small decision a bank makes is a vote for the kind of bank it is becoming. Nobody loses to a challenger in one dramatic moment. The challenger gets 1% better at onboarding every day for two years. Your bank holds three meetings about it. That is the compounding gap. Invisible while it forms, painful once it lands in your numbers. Most banks already know what needs to be done. Our research shows it, time and again. What repeats is not the insight. It is the routine around it. The same meetings, the same approvals, the same priorities, the same results. 💡 Until the daily habits underneath the strategy shift, your strategy will keep looking more ambitious than your results. Agentic AI does not fix that. It accelerates whatever direction your habits are already pointing. ❓ What did your bank vote for this week?

Bank of America removed the $20,000 balance requirement from its checking rewards program, and 30 million checking customers became eligible overnight. More than 5 million have enrolled. Roughly 20,000 new-to-bank customers now open a checking account and join each week, 2.5 times the rate before the program launched. Good numbers. Also the easy ones. Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America, said on a recent episode of Banking Transformed that opening the app is not the measure. A customer has to activate a deal and receive cash back. Activity is not necessarily engagement. The signals she watches sit further down: direct deposits moving to the bank, card transactions rising, a top-of-wallet card coming across from another institution. If the objective is deeper relationships, enrollment alone is a weak endpoint. The point for the rest of us is not to copy Bank of America's numbers. It is to connect the behavior a loyalty strategy is meant to influence with the measures used to judge it. Deposit behavior, payments, card usage, product adoption, investment balances. Those tell you whether the relationship changed. ❓ What is your loyalty program measured on? 📌 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞:

For years, most financial institutions treated artificial intelligence as an internal IT experiment meant for back-office efficiency. On this episode of Banking Transformed, I sat down with Fidel Vargas, CIO of @Bancolombia, to discuss why they shifted their AI strategy two years ago to put generative and agentic AI directly in front of customers. Instead of hiding AI behind internal processes, Bancolombia brought it to the front lines to better understand customer needs, provide more accurate responses, and anticipate personalized next-best actions. By deploying GenAI directly into customer interactions, they successfully reduced their contact center budget by more than 20 percent. 💡 AI is no longer a technology experiment; it is a core operational capability. ❓ How is your institution transitioning AI projects from internal IT experiments into customer-facing value drivers? 📌 Watch this episode of Banking Transformed:

Published with @Vericast: Each finding in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research is defensible alone. Together, they show an industry upgrading language faster than its plumbing. 💡 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐠𝐚𝐩: We fund content production at 44% and data at 20%. 💡 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲: 1. Fix the data sequence before adding another tool, since decisioning capability, not content capacity, is what is missing. 2. Build one honest holdout group, so personalization has to prove itself. 3. Point the capability we already have at the customers we already own, starting with onboarding, dormant balances, and the people who left. 💯 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠. 📌 Download this report for free:

The most dangerous threat to a financial institution is not a sudden mass exodus of customers. It is the slow, silent erosion of primary relationship status. When an institution offers products designed in the 1980s, charges higher fees, and delivers slow, impersonal service, customers eventually adapt. They keep their old checking account open for legacy bills, but they reach for a digital-first competitor when they need a new loan, a credit card, or an investment account. Your institution still sees an open account on paper, but the customer's financial life has moved elsewhere. ❓ How does your bank or credit union determine whether an account holder still considers you their primary financial partner?

Ask a banker how the experience is going and you get a number. Ask a customer and you get a feeling. That mismatch is the thing I keep running into. We describe our products in the technical language we built them in. Customers never describe them that way. They tell you how it felt. Easy. Frustrating. Stressful. Helpful. Banks often measure efficiency operationally. Customers measure it emotionally. What closes that distance is almost never one bold move. It is a run of unremarkable decisions, none of which would carry a board slide on its own, that together change what banking with you feels like every day. One institution I looked at has built enormous growth on exactly that gap. And the moment customers trusted it with their paycheck, the economics of the relationship changed completely. 💡 Here is the part worth sitting with. No operational metric will tell you how your bank feels to bank with. Your customers already know, and they are telling each other either way. 𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠?

Traditional financial institutions have historically organized their operations around isolated banking products. But as Fidel Vargas, CIO of @Bancolombia, explained on this episode, customer needs have evolved beyond legacy product silos, requiring banks to transform into a connected ecosystem of specialized value propositions. Instead of trying to force every digital-first customer into a traditional branch checking account, Bancolombia built targeted brands like Nequi for digital banking and financial inclusion, Wompi for digital commerce and payments, and Wenia as a gateway for digital assets. These specialized businesses share core capabilities while catering to distinct customer behaviors. ❓ How is your institution restructuring its digital roadmap to transition from isolated products into a comprehensive lifestyle ecosystem? Drop your perspective in the comments. 📌 Watch the this episode of Banking Transformed:

The person sitting across from your customer this morning may be flying blind. Your systems already know that customer's deposits have declined three months in a row. Your employee may not. She owns the relationship and she is measured on whether it grows. MIT surveyed more than 300 senior executives and found only 28% of employees regularly draw on the data assets their organizations have already built. The rest sits in silos. We have good reasons for access controls. Customer information has to be protected. But somewhere along the way, least privilege became least insight. There is an important distinction between making data available and making a decision possible. Hand a banker a dashboard with 40 fields and you have asked her to become an analyst. What she needs is a sentence: deposits down three months, similar businesses showed this pattern before moving their operating account, here is the call to make today. And the authority to make it. Give an employee an insight but no ability to act and you have created a better-informed spectator. 💡 We measure what goes wrong when an employee sees what they should not. We barely measure what goes wrong when they never see what they need. 📌 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰:

In this latest Digital Banking Report, brought to you in collaboration with @Vericast, a striking pattern emerges: in November 2023, research told the industry that data infrastructure was its largest challenge, and that marketing and data analytics were its largest planned investments. The diagnosis was correct and widely shared. Three years later, fragmented data remains at the top of the barrier list. The data budget has fallen to 20%, and not one institution in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research describes its customer data as real-time and AI-ready. Three years of accurate diagnosis have produced almost no change in the foundation. The cost of repeating that cycle is not theoretical. The competitors named in this research take one behavior at a time, and 56% of first-place threats are already non-traditional. Every payment that moves is a signal that stops arriving, so the personalization program that finally gets built will have less to work with than it would today. Three moves would change most of the charts in this report, and none of them requires a new strategy. Name one person accountable for the customer record. Move a visible share of the generative AI increase into the data foundation. Hold back 10% of the audience in the next campaign and report the difference. None of this is comfortable. The 2023 comparison proves that the years pass either way. 💡 Start with one thing, and let the next one be easier because the first one is done. 📌 Get your free copy of this report now:

Too many banking executives treat stability and transformation as opposing forces, believing that protecting core operations means slowing down innovation. On this episode of Banking Transformed, Fidel Vargas explains why a 150-year-old institution must view them as mutually dependent. You need stability in order to transform successfully, and you need continuous transformation in order to remain resilient against modern competitors like Nubank, Mercado Pago, and global fintechs. 💡 @Bancolombia proves that traditional banks can modernize legacy systems, bring core IT talent in-house, and deploy generative AI to cut contact center budgets by over 20 percent without risking stability. ❓ How is your leadership team balancing day-to-day operational resilience with aggressive digital transformation? Share your take in the comments section. ❗Special thanks to @Finacle and Qorus for making this conversation possible as part of our ongoing work on innovation in retail banking. 📌 Watch this episode on the Banking Transformed Podcast channel:

If your organization is treating AI implementation like a standard IT project with a clear end date, you are already falling behind. The tools, algorithms, and capabilities are changing every quarter, sometimes every week. There is no finish line in modern financial marketing. Simply adopting AI is no longer the goal, because access to these tools has become table stakes across the industry. The real advantage belongs to the leadership teams that refuse to mail it in. 💡 Winning requires taking the same generative technology available to every competitor on the block and continuously refining how you deploy it to serve your account holders. ❓ Is your leadership team viewing AI as a project to finish or as an ongoing, evolving discipline?