Correspondent Blog

If you are conducting bank strategy or marketing around demographic information, at best you are being lazy and ineffective. At worst, you are being sexist, ageist and a bunch of other names that can hurt your culture and reputation while wasting your marketing budget. In this age of data, getting to the Holy Grail of…

As we near the final stages of strategic planning and budgeting, several bank technology trends are emerging that will play out over the next several years. This list isn’t necessarily for bank technologists but for business line executives who make decisions on products and services. In this article, we highlight these investments, put them in…

Intelligent agents, or “agentic AI,” are poised to change the face of bank operations. At the same time, banks are striving to figure out how to employ generative AI (gen AI) in their operations; part of the answer lies in the intelligent agent. Like how the Internet and smartphones changed banking, these autonomous reasoning models…

Is Copilot for Microsoft 365 (M365) worth it for banks? Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into its suite of apps has created a set of productivity tools that some bankers will instantly use. However, Copilot does come with a set of risks, one of which is that some bankers will only reluctantly use the product. This…

You might need a new digital banking platform. Chances are your bank chose your current digital platform because it was easy. Maybe your core vendor provided it, or perhaps you were sold a platform by a vendor you happened to meet at a conference. Likely, your vendor has little relationship to your strategic needs and…

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…