Data, Trust & The Death of Product-Centric Banking | FinovateFall 2025

Hello out there. This is Sam Kilmer, managing director at Cornerstone Advisors and your host of the Fintech Hustle podcast.

Good to be with you.

My rock-star crew here, who I will introduce in just a second, we’ve all assembled here in the hall, literally in the hall.

We normally try to find some other places, but it’s very busy here.

We’re in the hall at FinovateFall in New York City, the Marriott Marquis.

We’re right outside the Wilder Room.

I’m assuming that’s not the Gene Wilder room, but I’ll get some background on that later.

It’s been a great Finovate thus far.

We’re still in the thick of it.

Let me introduce our rock-star guests.

To my far end here, we’ve got Wayne Miller, who’s the senior vice president of ICBA, Independent Community Bankers of America, and also leads their ThinkTECH Accelerator.

I believe I have that right.

If not, you’ll correct me in a minute.

Wayne, storied in the industry, advises lots of early-stage and lots of different fintech companies.

Also, he is a part of BankTech Ventures.

He’s a GP for BankTech Ventures.

I think we’re getting a little bit dark in here, so if we go dark on you, sorry about that.

They’re turning the lights out on us.

Also, I’ve got Tiffany Montez, who is principal analyst at eMarketer.

Tiffany is a legend of the Finovate stage, one of the great presenters, and I heard that she completely crushed it today.

We’ll be hearing more about that.

Then also here to my right, CEO and co-founder of Swaystack, Har Rai Khalsa.

Har Rai and I met when he was with MK Decision, and then when Alchemy acquired them last year, the year before.

Now you’ve got a new thing.

We’ll probably hear a little bit more about that.

I guess one of the things I like to do when we get started in these discussions is just learn a little bit more about your backgrounds and what a day in the life looks like.

Wayne Miller, what’s a day in the life of Wayne Miller look like?

First of all, it’s appropriate you’re right here with Stranger Things, which is probably what the day in my life is about a little bit.

But it’s really about, I say a couple things all the time.

I’m really clear on who my customers are on a day-to-day basis, who are community banks and fintechs.

And, you know, kind of like Yente in Fiddler on the Roof, I’m here to be the matchmaker.

Also, how do I bring this amazing ecosystem of wonderful people like this together to help grow these companies and make them better and serve our banks more effectively?

So it’s all about keeping them competitive, efficient and profitable.

That’s what I spend my time doing.

Fantastic.

Good stuff.

On mission.

Very good.

Tiffany, what’s the day in the life of Tiffany look like?

The day in the life changes every day.

I would say most days we start off the day by picking the top three stories relative to banking and payments so we can cover those for our clients.

Then we spend a fair amount of time during the day sort of coming up with the narratives and answering key questions that our clients want to know.

Then in between all that, there’s some goodness that happens in the background.

The magic with copy editors, chart advisors, fact-checkers.

Can you believe that even still happens?

But it does.

And lots of other people in the background that help produce the research for our clients.

For example, our producer Ava, who you can’t all see right now, she’ll be fact-checking me later.

So fact-checkers are appreciated.

Har Rai, other than I think you’re rocking a demo here at Finovate, tell us about a day in the life of Har Rai.

Yeah, definitely.

Heavily focused on sales.

We’re in a big go-to-market push, so a lot of intro discovery calls, presentations.

But we have about seven or eight clients we’re implementing and going live with.

So jumping on those calls, making sure our clients are successful, strategic, hitting their goals.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about speed to market for our clients right now.

Excellent.

One of the things I love about Finovate, in addition to the dinners, and Wayne, you and I had an opportunity to break bread last night, but I just love all the hallway chatter in addition to whatever’s on stage.

Folks like Tiffany are crushing it.

You’re doing your demos and whatnot.

But I’m curious, in your travels through the halls here at Finovate thus far, I know we’re still kind of in the thick of it, any key themes or anything jazzing you that you’re hearing here at Finovate that comes to mind?

Feel free to grab.

This is a mic-grab moment.

Anything jumping out at you as topics or things that you’re hearing from different people?

I’ll grab right off because I think, obviously, AI and stablecoin, right?

Those are big conversations.

But more importantly, the messages that Tiffany gave today and also Alex, who just did an extraordinary job of helping people understand, look, we said it a minute ago when we were chatting a little bit.

If you’re still asking yourself the question why, it’s probably too late.

I hate to say things like that because that’s not the demise of community banking.

That’s not what I think.

They’re essential and we have to figure this out.

But we need to be working on the hows and the whats and not the whys anymore.

We can take you to the water, but you’ve got to learn how to drink.

I think all of us in the work that we do have an obligation to help our bankers understand what to do and how to do it.

So it’s just a place to start.

Yeah, and that’s been clear here.

Absolutely.

I’ll sort of piggyback off of that because I think it is an important point.

We’re at a point where consumer behavior has changed so much, and banks are losing the customer relationship.

They no longer own it anymore.

Customers are building their own financial ecosystem.

So how do you actually think about experiences differently?

You can’t own them anymore.

How do you actually go out and deliver embedded experiences when customers actually need them versus being an afterthought?

I would say stablecoin is definitely one that we hear a lot of.

What I don’t hear enough about is, why do you actually want to build your own stablecoin?

I don’t think anyone can answer that question very distinctly as to why, which I think puts the industry in a very interesting place because we’re going to all be building things that aren’t going to have interoperability.

Then money can’t be exchanged if everyone goes off and builds something where they don’t know why they’re building it or how their customers are actually going to use it.

Yeah.

I would just say the amount of institutions that are overhauling their entire tech stack, from the core to the digital banking to the origination layer, is pretty impressive.

Obviously, they’re doing that in an effort to get back to status quo and to the contemporary.

So I just feel like we’re so far behind a lot of the AI and stablecoin conversations, where folks are just still trying to get their fundamentals and their foundation in check.

Excellent.

Fundamentals makes a lot of sense to me.

Tiffany, what did you just say?

You said we can’t own it, right?

Ultimately now the customer is owning it and has the right to be able to own that.

I know you guys are all troublemakers and entrepreneurs out there.

Wayne, helping fintechs kind of find what their North Star is, what they’re trying to solve for.

I’m devilishly curious.

Is there something that you see in the industry right now, a pain point either for consumers or businesses or for banks, that’s screaming for an entrepreneur, a problem solver, to come forward with a solution?

What’s something right now that you think is broken in the industry that you think could be improved?

You want to take a shot at that one?

Yeah.

My last venture being in account opening and loan origination, nobody asked us what percentage of those accounts that were opened would be utilized.

So many folks have driven us toward solving the inactive accounts challenge.

But to what Tiffany was mentioning around the customer creating their own financial ecosystem, I think that’s largely because most banks and credit unions don’t have a clear path for their consumers to bring over the vast majority of their business.

They’re not telling them what to do to be successful with their new banking relationship.

So I think when we talk about personalization or predictive guidance to the end consumer, I really think we have to get ahead of the consumer need and show them the path to be successful.

Yeah, absolutely.

If I think, one of the things I heard yesterday from, I don’t remember which demo it was, but they put in perspective that when you start thinking about people that have mortgages, 80% of those people go to another lender to get their second mortgage.

That’s always been the case.

That is because the existing lender isn’t top of mind.

They’re not top of mind today because all they do is transact.

When I say transact, I’m going to say that really loosely because doing an automatic payment every month for your mortgage is not even really a transaction.

It’s just autopilot.

So how do you actually build tools that allow people to engage with you so then, when they are ready for that next product, they know to go to you and not to a competitor?

I think that’s one of the biggest challenges in the industry, is that we operate by product line, but we don’t look holistically at all the relationships that a consumer has today and all the relationships that they might need going forward.

Invented a new word, transrelational.

Okay, just gnaw on that one for a little bit.

But I think the other, to answer your question a little bit, what is screaming to me is we have all this data, right?

We know so much about our customers.

How do we align our strategies and that data to effectively serve our markets?

We have a digitally native group that’s coming up who have been born with cell phones in their hands.

We have bankers today who think that the big banks aren’t coming to our neighborhoods, but they’re already there.

So we can learn so much transactionally from what people are doing and what their behavior is and adapt to that, as opposed to just selling CDs and so forth, which our industry is really a commodity when you think about it.

So it’s that capacity to have that relationship in a different way than we’ve known it historically, right?

How do we leverage data to help personalize those experiences and make them more fundamentally tied to the bank, which I think potentially keeps that churn down?

Just a thought.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting point.

On the AI panel that we had yesterday with several folks, one of the things that occurred to me was there’s some hesitancy to embrace AI-generated content, for example.

I think it comes from a place, understandably, we have to be compliant.

We can’t have hallucinating types of things and errors that can get you sued as a bank.

But beyond that, I think sometimes we maybe overestimate how good our human-generated content is.

In many cases, it’s just awful.

It’s one step removed from when we took brochures and converted them to HTML.

Lame.

So I’m actually kind of excited to see what the bots come up with.

If it’s half as addictive as the Snicker Cat videos and the ChatGPT that my wife did of our dog Mabel that’s up on the bathroom, I’m thinking to myself, it could be very interesting.

We may be on the cusp of a really interesting thing where we can sort of edit out lots of crazy stuff, but end up with some really fun stuff.

Or edit in.

Yes.

Thanks, Tiffany.

Okay, so we went negative first.

Hey, I’m a consultant.

We like to go negative early, so we’ll do that.

But what about positive?

What’s something that you see in the industry right now, whether it’s here at Finovate or anywhere else, that really jazzes you right now, that makes you think, you know what, banks, credit unions or fintech or whoever, we’re really getting this right.

This is something to celebrate.

Anything that you guys think should be celebrated in the industry right now, that we’re rocking it?

Yeah.

I mean, I think it’s back to the first question.

Forget about stablecoin for a while.

We still have a long way to go there and define what it’s going to be.

But when we think about the opportunities that AI generates for us and the possibilities there, not necessarily to drive automation, which I think it has application for sure, but what about simply augmentation?

To your point, let it do 90% of the work and then add that human back into the loop.

What’s possible?

That’s the question with it.

Everybody continues to look for an ROI.

That’s a big thing, and obviously use cases are going to be important.

But I was in this other panel today and one of the things I see, sort of like autonomous cars, right?

We’re still collecting the data.

I got into a Waymo in Scottsdale.

I’m like, there’s nobody behind the wheel.

I was not comfortable with that.

I think it equates to kind of where we are as an industry.

I still want to see somebody behind the wheel for a while because we don’t know what it can do and where it can go and how it can hallucinate and so forth.

But I think the opportunities are extraordinary.

I also think it has the capacity to level the playing field with the bigger institutions to some degree, to make us more efficient.

Right.

I think probably the most exciting thing is that we are starting to understand what’s possible.

Where I would say a year ago, with ChatGPT or even just generative AI in general, people didn’t understand what was possible.

I think that is probably the most exciting part right now, seeing that people are getting it.

They’re starting to test it and recognizing that it’s not going to take over everything.

But to your point, how do you actually use it to augment?

I think we’ll start to see some really interesting things happen over the next year.

Yeah.

To both Wayne and Tiffany’s earlier points, we’re seeing a lot of people bet on using the data that they have to personalize.

Personalization is a fancy buzzword, but fundamentally it’s putting some type of recommendation in front of a consumer that is relevant to them.

For so long, all we’ve done is generic messaging to the consumer base, where 10,000 people receive the exact same message, not even with their first name in that message.

So moving from generic messaging, or even generic digital banking experiences, to one-to-one experiences that can actually delight the consumer.

We’re seeing more focus on the end consumer experience and personalization.

This one, you talked in your speech this morning about product versus personalization.

I wish you’d unpack that a little bit more because I think that was brilliant.

Absolutely.

In the conversation I had talked about how we are very product-centric today, that everything is designed around product silos.

That makes it really hard for consumers to be able to navigate through different life stages in their life, understanding how products fit into their everyday life.

Over the next five years, I believe we’re going to start to move to this customer-centric design where we organize around life stage.

As an example, you have one experience that helps someone find a real estate agent, find property, take out that mortgage, get insurance, be able to take out renovation loans, understand how to tap into the equity of their home responsibly, because we’ve had issues with that in the past.

How do you actually build this end-to-end experience?

What it will take is fundamentally stop thinking about products, but start thinking about experiences.

Don’t just think about your product experiences.

Think about what features you could integrate in to support an end-to-end journey.

That’s the type of experience that will drive engagement, and it will drive trust.

I think one of the things I said at the end is that speed wins attention, but trust is what wins relationships.

In banking, that is what you have to do.

You have to build trust and you have to build trust in the experiences that you’re offering to people.

Community banks have trust, right?

So not just, community banks have trust.

That’s the differentiator, right?

It may be three, four, even five generations’ worth of trust that they’ve built.

But it’s the next generation that’s the hard one to deal with.

Yeah.

I think the thing that I constantly come back to is, how do we codify, maybe that’s not the right word, how do we bake that trust into the digital experience that you’re talking about too, Tiffany?

I’m not trying to belittle the geographic community, the very legitimate geographical community things that community banks have just aced over the years.

But how does that translate?

How does that helpful spirit and being involved and leaning into the community, how does that translate into an environment where somebody is experiencing you first on, I don’t know, some YouTube video or something?

Or a Snicker Cat video.

I’m back to that crazy meme again.

Har Rai, were you going to make a point there?

Yeah.

To everybody’s point here, the fundamental challenge is aggregating a 360-degree view of the customer.

Before we can get to the full lifecycle engagement and lifecycle management, we actually have to know our customer.

When you’ve got card processor data here, origination data here, core data here, digital banking data here, it becomes impossible to aggregate that and truly view your customer in a simple pane of glass.

So I think until we actually have the data warehouse or data lake solid, core is not going to take us there.

Maybe Jack Henry.

But until we have that kind of 360 view of the customer on which we can create a path for them that’s 10, 20, 30, 40 years out, it’s going to be hard to have real lifecycle personalization.

But I do know that the most advanced banks and credit unions, that’s the path they’re going down.

All right, well, listen, I know you guys are all super busy professionals.

I caught you on a session break here outside the Stranger Things Theater here at the Marquis.

I know that there are still some sessions going on here.

I want you to be able to enjoy some of that and additional conversations.

I can’t thank you enough for joining me.

So glad to be here, and so glad that you could all be here.

I generally feel blessed and honored to do this kind of thing.

Wayne Miller with ICBA, Tiffany Montez with eMarketer, and Har Rai Khalsa with Swaystack.

Thank you so much.

Back to all of you, and I’ll see all of you hopefully out there on the road at a Fintech Hustle near you.

Bye-bye.