Correspondent Blog

Times are tough. Banks are under pressure to find ways to increase earnings against a backdrop of slower increases in earning assets and quickly rising deposit and credit costs. As such, bank budgets have come under scrutiny. We recently conducted a small sample poll, and out of 21 banks, budgets were down an average of…

You engage an app and speak your mind about a financial task. You are agnostic about which one of your many relationships accomplishes the task, only that the task gets done. Where traditionally, you might use an interface such as Siri or Alexa to pay your Verizon bill on time, now you tell your virtual…

While technology has always been important in banking, it has yet to drive the essential functions of banking. Up to this point, if you could speak to a human, banking was easier. In the last year, this has started to change. With the rise of data, generative AI, personalization, instant payments, embedded banking, and traditional…

When banks talk about a “sidecar,” they speak about a modern, lightweight, real-time core system alongside a traditional core. The concept is that a “big bang” type conversion will never happen, so a slower, controlled transition is the path to getting a more modern core architecture. In this article, we argue why banks should consider…

ISO 20022 is an international standard, a language for electronic data exchange between financial institutions, and was developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It’s a way for banks to speak with each other, and it started to be phased in during the first quarter of this year with the goal of a complete…

No doubt you have heard other bankers talking about ChatGPT. This AI-powered digital assistant, technically called “generative AI,” has taken banking, and society, by storm. In three months, it has become the primary tool of many bankers, helping make banks more efficient across the organization. Our innovation working group, called Spark, has been playing with…

Our teams just returned from back-to-back weeks at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando and Money 20/20 in Las Vegas. Gartner focused on technology infrastructure, while Money 20/20 was around fintech and payments. Every day we walked 8+ miles, talked to countless vendors, sat through PowerPoints, had our share of EDM piped into our ears, and…

Banks are full of documents. Each document contains an extensive array of data. Just keeping track of non-disclosure agreement terms is a huge task. Then there are vendor contracts, employment agreements, statements of work, loan documents, financial statements, tax returns, deposit account documents, policies, and an array of similar applications. The challenge is that most…

In wrestling, there are hundreds of thousands of moves to learn. You will fail if you try to learn them all early in your wrestling career. Moves come with experience. Concepts come first. To start, what is essential is conditioning and learning about angles. Defending your angles and using angles to attack. When it comes…