Risks, Relationships, Data, and The Fluid Future of AI and Digital

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

I’m coming here today, summer of ’26, got my summer hat on, ready for a great summer conversation with a cast of characters from the halls and boardrooms of fintech.

Glad to be here with you.

Let me jump right in and tell you a little bit about our guests.

For starters, I’m joined by my guest host with the most, Kelly Schultz, who many of you may know as a principal at Cornerstone Advisors.

Also, probably not going to get all this right, Kelly, but I know you were an executive at iPay, pre-Jack Henry.

You were at Allied Payment Network, Venminder.

So, a storied history in fintech as well.

Thanks for joining me again as co-host.

Always a pleasure, Sam.

Thanks for having me.

You betcha.

Okay, let me jump into our guests.

First off, I’ve got Mike Duncan, who is the CEO and co-founder of Bankjoy, one of the digital banking providers out there that you may have heard of.

If you haven’t, you should hear more about them, and you will today, I suspect.

So welcome, Mike.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Excited to be here.

You bet.

Also, we’re joined by Nima Ghamsari, who is the founder and head of Blend.

Blend is, many of you know, strong point-of-sale, kind of in the digital origination space.

Known originally in lending.

I know you’ve gone into some other areas, but I would just say the digital selling side of things.

Welcome, Nima.

Thanks for having me.

It’s great to be here.

You bet.

Glad to have you.

Last, and certainly not least, industry legend Paul Danola.

He’s a founding partner of Bridgeport Partners, private equity.

Let’s see, board observer at CSI, where Bridgeport’s been a major investor, CSI core processor.

Storied history with FIS and Fiserv, and I think a couple other investments that kind of interestingly had our attention here at Cornerstone.

One being an announcement, not closed yet as I understand it, with a joint venture or partnership with Fiserv on ATM and cash services.

Then also, Paul might tell you a little bit more about this later, an interesting investment in a company called Green Check in the compliance space around cannabis banking.

So we’ve just got three strong folks directly from the halls of fintech, not to mention my co-host with the most, Kelly, who’s no stranger to fintech.

Let’s just jump right in and get the conversation rolling.

I want to start by asking the folks about what a day in the life is like.

I’ll start with you, Mike.

Tell me a little bit about what a day in the life of Mike Duncan at Bankjoy looks like.

Yeah.

I’ll just kind of zoom out first and then kind of zoom in on that day in the life.

We center everything we do here and in our work here on a mission.

I’ve been in the industry for a long time now.

I think once it pulls you in, you stay in it.

I started by working at a credit union and realized there were some challenges on the digital banking side, and went to go start this company.

When we set up the company, we started with this mission really to go out and uplift communities in partnership with as many credit unions and community banks as we could.

We thought it was a great way to scale our impact.

Of course, not just building tools that showcase listed transactions and balances, but took us to the next level and really help people understand money better, help them navigate hardships.

That’s what community-based FIs are all about.

This is a mission that we have in a document called the Bankjoy Charter.

Admittedly, I stole this charter idea from the former COO of Stripe.

We took that and built out this charter that has the mission, the long-term goals in it.

Those long-term goals ladder back up to that mission.

Then we do this quarterly exercise where every quarter we set up OKRs and we set them up such that they ladder back up to the long-term goal.

So it means everybody in the company’s working on something that is aligned with that mission.

That’s obviously a quarterly exercise we do.

Once we’re past that, what I do day-to-day is really supporting the team and making sure we stay aligned and we’re executing.

Then I jump in.

I’ve been on the road, for example, with Liz Winkler.

We were traveling to a few different states and on some sales calls, and I got a chance to demo the product again myself.

So I jumped in and did some demos.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done that, but back in the early days, when you had to wear all the hats as an early founder, that’s what I did.

So it was fun to jump back in and get feedback from the clients directly.

That’s just one example.

We also have a new client success director.

We went out on the road and met with some clients.

I got to sit with him and the team, and we went through figuring out how we can help optimize the product for these clients, helping drive better conversion rates for online account opening and things like that.

It was really fun to just get out there and spend time with prospects and clients, hear feedback directly, and get on the road and see them face-to-face.

We’re all very virtual right now, and you just get a different dimension to that.

We also just recently, we’ve been really focused on partnerships as well.

So I’ve been on the road working on those.

We partnered up with, just two hours west of us, CU*Answers.

They’re a new partner on the core side.

We’re the first alternative digital banking vendor for those guys.

That was one that I worked on myself together with Jeff Johnson.

So I get to do a little bit of everything in supporting the team.

It’s a lot of fun.

That keeps me busy for sure.

I love that.

The part that really rings with me too is you never really lose that part.

You mentioned you were in the credit union.

It’s like you never lose that.

I would love to tell you that I had some grand design about being in the financial services industry, but I started working at a bank while I was in college to help pay the bills.

It’s funny, it never really leaves you.

What we used to call, will it play in Peoria, right?

I can’t take credit for that saying, but are the dogs going to eat this?

Is this really going to work, or is this going to come across as buzzword city?

That direct experience that you had out there, it never leaves you.

I view that as a very big positive for empathy.

Kelly, I don’t know if you also see that.

That comment you made, Mike, about once you get into this industry, it’s in your blood and you just keep going and keep going.

Most people don’t leave.

I saw Paul just light up.

I know you know exactly what that’s like.

I understand that now.

Yeah.

There are a lot of veterans on this call.

I’ve discovered I can’t retire.

Does it say Paul?

Paul, what about your day?

It sounds like you’ve got a lot going on.

What’s a day in the life of Paul looking like?

Yeah, my life has changed a little bit.

I’m used to, for whatever, 40-plus years, I was on Mike and Nima’s side of the space.

I’m grateful for a lot of the opportunity to do a lot of things over my career.

Fortunate that my age gave me timing early on when the industry started.

But now after I had retired from FIS, a small group of us decided to put Bridgeport Partners together.

Obviously Frank Martire and his son, who was actually the instigator when Frank had retired, asked both of us to start Bridgeport.

Obviously a different world, which was great for me because what I’ve tried to live every day with is curiosity and being open.

What I’ve learned even at Bridgeport now is one of the things I do, because I have all this long, let’s call it, experience, is I also have to make sure I don’t get prejudiced with that experience.

Being open and learning, especially where I sit now on the investment side.

It’s great for me that I’m learning stuff every day as we’re either engaging with one of the companies we have investments in.

Now we have a couple acquisition potentials going on, so advising, helping, assessing those with the team as needed.

It’s out looking at new investments.

I was just a couple days ago doing that.

Like Mike’s comment before, to me it’s great being on the ground and meeting people and being able to assess those businesses.

My whole life in this space over the years, I’ve learned to value the relationships you form.

Those relationships are great because sometimes I can help somebody in my network and a lot of times I’m looking for help, right?

I need help.

That’s kind of been the secret of what we try to bring when we invest.

We try to leverage our experience and leverage our relationships and our network.

For us, when I look at it, and I’ll just say this real quick from an investment standpoint, as it was when we were actually working directly in the businesses, it still comes down to clients and employees.

When you’re out there, regardless of whether you’re investing or, from our perspective, when we were working in the space actually delivering products and services.

Really interesting.

I think a couple things popped out at me.

Certainly the value of the network.

The further I get along in my career, I remember when I was early in my career, I remember thinking, relationships are all BS.

It’s all about the science.

What are the numbers telling you and the data?

It’s all in the data.

Sometimes data is inconsequential or it’s inconclusive.

So what are you going to do if you can’t find the answer in the data?

You have to go to who do you trust?

Trust is about relationships.

I think the other thing that pops at me, Paul, on what you were saying, is the curiosity piece, which is something Kelly and I and our team at Cornerstone are always hiring on.

It’s like when we’re looking at interns or looking, anyone junior or senior, do they run toward the uncertainty and are they genuinely curious about getting to the bottom of things?

I think that’s a fairly timeless trait to look for in people.

Certainly it’s applicable now with the AI wave.

You really have to go run with curiosity at that space.

I’ll tell you one other quick thing, and I don’t want to take too much of the time.

Getting back to it, I learned the lesson very early on in my life with a gentleman by the name of George Dalton.

He was one of the founders at Fiserv.

This is back in the ’80s, before many of you were born maybe, or some of you.

When he went out and assessed an acquisition, going to your point about relationships, when we went out for a visit to go in person and visit those companies, one of the things we always did was ask to walk the building.

It was to really get a sense of how were the people in the offices?

Were they open and engaging?

You’re walking around with either the president of the company or the founder or whoever.

What kind of feel did you get walking through those hallways and around those offices?

Did they stop and introduce you to people?

That is such a key indicator to me of a business.

To your point about the financials, if your clients are happy and the employees are happy, chances are you have a pretty good shot at success.

Well, I was just going to say, Paul, I love that because honestly, the old adage, happy employees, happy clients, it is true.

It is absolutely true.

When your employees are happy and passionate about serving those clients, they will overcome so much in that process of serving, and any bumps in the road, adversity along the way, they’re able to overcome because they’re building relationships too.

So I think that’s super important.

Just getting a vibe for the culture, because numbers in black and white without context can be misinterpreted.

But it’s a big deal.

That’s music to my ears to hear that you do that.

Yeah.

I just want to put in a quick plug.

We don’t plug products on Fintech Hustle, but I think I can make an exception for where I’m about to ride ahead.

Paul was asking if any of us are familiar with the ’80s at all.

I just want to put in a big vote for the ’80s.

I had a good run through the ’80s.

I’ll go ahead and put in a plug for this album.

It’s called Life Moves Pretty Fast: The John Hughes Mixtapes, for any of you that remember the John Hughes movies from the 1980s.

All right.

Next up, day in the life of Nima Ghamsari.

Nima, tell us a little bit about what’s going on over at Blend.

Yeah.

I’d say in this new AI wave, relationships have become probably 10 times more important because it’s a lot of things changing, a lot of moving pieces.

So I probably spend a decent chunk of my time, most of my time, with clients, with customers of ours, because it helps me understand what’s going on in their world and what they’re thinking about.

It changes almost week to week now.

It’s pretty cool.

Something new comes out.

I mean, I don’t know, while we’re recording this podcast, OpenAI announced GPT-5.6.

So apparently it’s the new frontier.

That just means that there’s so much that can possibly be changed, which is really exciting.

The other thing I was going to say that I spent a lot of time on, and I’m sure a lot of our customers and probably people on this podcast are going through this too, is I spend a lot of time on probably the hardest, meatiest problems around AI transformation internally at Blend.

The thing that’s been hard for me has been, you kind of have to rethink everything from the ground up.

It’s like this thing that you’ve been building for 14 years and you’re like, man, it’s basically all wrong.

But it’s not necessarily the wrong people.

It’s just the wrong structures and motions and process, whatever.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time on that.

What is the next generation?

What does Blend 2.0 look like?

Same thing as when we help our customers think through their credit union 2.0 or whatever.

It’s going to be a different world in five years, in a positive way.

I think in a greatly positive way.

I hope we talk optimistically about the future with all these things.

But I spend a lot of my time on that.

Last thing, I’m a software engineer by background, so I love building things.

I’m building AI.

My agents are working right now building some cool things for Blend’s customers.

I will always have that in my DNA as well.

I spend a decent amount of time on that as well.

Yeah, Nima, I’m with you.

That’s where I started.

Assembly language programmer.

There you go.

I’ll join the club.

I’ve been coding since I was a kid.

So yeah.

See, we’re all coders.

I think now it’s better than ever to be a coder.

Sorry.

Go ahead, Sam.

No, I was just going to say, I think I’m the only non-coder here.

I’d like to say when I was working in fintech companies, I had every possible job other than selling code or writing code.

I was like, that’s probably why I’m not at a fintech company anymore, because those are the two power tracks, right?

Can you grow the revenue or can you build the product?

I was always the product guy, or implementation.

I started out in implementations and training, but then product and then strategy and sales support and marketing and all the other stuff.

But I never did the coding.

Mad respect for those of you who have and who do.

I’m genuinely curious too, Nima, since you brought it up.

Let’s start with optimism here.

I’m genuinely curious.

Nima, let’s start with you.

What’s something that you see happening in the business right now that has you really, really energized?

Something that really jazzes you right now, that really makes you feel good about the future of the industry?

Anything pop out at you as things that are going right in the industry right now, or something that really excites you?

Yeah.

I’d say, short term, the thing that excites me is that I mentioned relationships are more important than ever.

Unfortunately, most people, and our clients, and including Blend as well, most people in Blend weren’t working to help the clients or their customers or members directly.

They were working for things that were to help them, but they weren’t working directly with the member to try to help them because there was so much back office and middle office, I’ll call it important nonsense.

A good example of that would be when you’re giving somebody a loan, you’ve got to check that they can pay back the loan, and that takes a lot of time and energy.

Well, what if there’s a world where you don’t have to check that yourself because you have amazing AI agents that are doing that work for you, and you can spend all your time helping the client or member or whatever it is with whatever problem or life situation they’re in?

The amount of the percentage of energy that’s going to go toward the consumer and the client and all these things is going to go up as an overall focus in organizations, which is hugely positive because there are so many underserved people and underserved companies, if you’re a software provider like us.

There are so many underserved things in the world.

That’s what leads me to this incredible optimism I have.

I think we might have a couple years where the world is figuring out AI.

But in a world where we can build infrastructure 10 to 100 times faster and cheaper than was historically possible, the amount of progress that’s going to be made and the amount of opportunities that are going to be uncovered is going to be immense.

I think about that every day.

I’m like, we’re going to have the booming ’30s, or I don’t know what they’re going to be called, but it’s going to be a boom.

Then, just for me as a nerd, I’d say the coolest thing is that I can create things that I’ve never been able to create, that weren’t possible to create.

No one could have created.

It’s like you suddenly now have this arbitrary, infinitely scalable intelligence.

It’s all real time and fast.

It changes the way that you could even offer experiences and products to consumers.

It’s super exciting.

So I have nothing but optimism in general, although I do think that there could be some short-term bumps in the road.

I wanted to blend something together.

Something Paul said and Nima, and we all got to get together and talk shop at some point.

I’m glad I got to meet you guys.

I know we’re having an optimistic conversation right now.

I just want to mention one thing first.

With AI, this can’t be understated.

There are two sides to this.

There’s one side, it’s creating opportunities, and I’m going to get back to that in a moment.

But I don’t want community FIs to downplay the potential impact that AI can have to their business on the other side as well.

What I mean is, you’ve got companies like OpenAI.

They’re taking bets.

OpenAI just bought a couple of fintechs.

Obviously, the direction they’re going is, what does financial management and financial fitness look like when it’s powered by AI in a conversational way, in a way that we’re all getting used to right now with these tools?

How does that change our relationship with our money?

There are probably a ton of benefits, and that’s why they’re making these massive investments.

That potentially poses a threat to our community FIs because the kinds of personalization and the relationship that made community FIs special, Paul mentioned going into the building and meeting people, community FIs have always excelled in the branch.

You go into the branch, you’re getting an experience you will never have at a big bank ever.

They care about you.

They’ll sit down with you.

They’ll figure out how to navigate your hardships and help you achieve your goals.

The problem, though, is that when we shifted over to digital, they didn’t carry that with them.

We’re all basically checking the same boxes.

All the community FIs are checking the same boxes.

That’s a major problem.

Now you’ve got these AI companies who are saying, “We’ll solve the problem for you. We’ll help your members and your customers get to the solutions and the answers they need faster because we’ve already built the underlying foundation. Now we’re just hooking into the finances.”

The upside of this, though, is that we still have an advantage potentially, but we have to move really, really fast.

What made community FIs special, I remember when I worked at a credit union back in 2012, 2011, we would look at a chart every year called the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

On that chart, you would see the credit unions were absolutely dominating when it came to delivering the best service versus the big banks.

Over time, you saw those lines converge.

That was roughly around the time digital banking was coming out.

We saw those lines basically even out because now everyone’s doing digital and there’s no differentiation whatsoever when you look at a big bank versus most community FIs.

The point I’m getting to is, here’s the opportunity.

If we’re leveraging AI for the good guys, we’ll say, we could take that thing that made them special in the branch and deliver that through digital and have that be your differentiation.

Help people achieve their dreams, develop good financial habits, navigate hardships, do all those things that made you special when you walk into the branch, but do it for people who are accessing your primary channel, which should be your primary channel today.

I’m super excited about this.

We’re thinking about these things all the time and building around it.

Yeah.

Paul, anything going on in the industry right now really have you excited?

No, I was going to jump on this because I mentioned AI even early on.

To have that curiosity, to me, and I agree with what Mike and Nima said.

For me, we’re at another chapter.

I’ve seen a few chapters in my life change in the space.

But this one represents a quantum change that I believe is going to happen.

I think for the FI, probably the first time, we may have the ability to really change, I’ll call it, customer engagement, whether that’s a retail customer or a business customer.

With AI and the applications you build with it and the solutions you build with it, to really engage with customers, really understand their intent and execute on it to make that end customer or that small-business owner’s life a lot easier than what it is today and really provide some benefit that has never been delivered before.

Whether that’s a person running a lawn service or somebody running a mid-market business or a retail customer.

I think we’re at that place where that could really start to happen.

That whole area, I call it customer, it’s ease, efficiency and execution.

To me, we have the opportunity in the next few years to really change how that happens and what the benefit to that end customer really looks like.

I do believe that, going back to Mike’s point, there is an opportunity here for these community institutions and the credit unions if acting on this.

They do have one, to me AI, one of the critical things is data and integration.

This is where all the suppliers who provide technology to the community space, if I’ll call it that in general, working together can leverage that data, open up the integrations, change workflows.

There’s going to be a lot of change in how workflows work and everything else.

That requires a lot of cooperation between everybody.

If that gets executed, the community market will be fine.

I will make one thing, though.

I still think we talked about digital, and I’m a big digital supporter, but I still think there’s a place for the branch in the world.

I think you could see a little bit of that in the demographic coming around.

If you notice, attendance at malls has reversed.

It was going down.

People are going to malls more now than they were two, three, four years ago.

I don’t know whether you follow the retail space, but mall traffic is going back up, not down.

So I still think there’s an innate part of the human being that craves community engagement in the physical sense.

I think we have to do, and that doesn’t preclude what you do with AI and how you deliver that, because that same efficient engagement has to happen not just in a digital channel.

That capability has to be delivered in the other channels as well.

So, Paul, you said something that has my wheels turning here.

Integration is tough in this industry.

There are so many different products and solutions that come together and layers in between, networks and all the things, and to get it all to kind of sync up and create a uniform experience for the member or the customer.

Depending on what that tech stack looks like and changing things out as you grow and those types of things, how do you all see that playing out?

Because I think it’s one thing to say we’ve got a digital solution that does this over here.

We’ve got a loan origination solution that does this beautifully over here.

But how do we make that credit union appear, or that bank appear, consistent across all that stack no matter what the customer or member is doing in the way of engaging and deriving that experience?

I’m struggling to see how that’s going to come together.

I think it’s a little choppy right now.

I can see it in the apps that I use.

We can see straight through it as technologists.

We know what’s happening in the background.

It’s easy for us to see.

But how do we as a group manage that?

Back when I worked at the credit union, we did something crazy.

We built our own digital banking.

We were half a billion dollars in assets and we decided we’re going to build our own.

Because I had that experience, I thought this is normal.

We should just go build it.

We’re crazy.

We’re all crazy, right?

But we built something there.

During that time, this was against the backdrop of neobanks beginning to launch.

Chime’s coming out and others were coming out at that time.

We were beginning to see what the potential was.

If a company’s committed to creating a beautiful experience and there’s no branch to back it up, it’s possible.

They were building beautiful onboarding workflows, mobile online banking, lending workflows.

Everything looked like it was built by the same company because it was.

Same design language, same flows.

Obviously our industry came up in this state where we were just trying to check all the boxes.

So we would go to six, seven, eight, 10, a dozen different vendors to kind of put it all together.

We ended up in the state that is opposite of what you’re talking about, Kelly, which is, I call the Frankenstein solution.

Aesthetically, it’s not there.

Aesthetically, it’s not competing with the SoFis and the Chimes.

But also there are inefficiencies that get introduced at the same time.

That’s why when we started this company, we decided we’re going to do the hard work.

We’re going to do the heavy lifting and build these products and these point solutions ourselves because we don’t see any other way to blend them together and create a seamless, beautiful, competitive experience.

Obviously member and customer expectations are rising.

We have to do something.

That was our solution at the time.

But I think, we’ve been talking about AI here, what’s really interesting right now is that it’s never been easier, and it takes much less time now to get products to market quickly.

So I do think we’re really close to entering an era where we can close the gap much more quickly from the experience side and also the backend infrastructure that needs to be built.

Because one of the major reasons we haven’t been able to get there is because all these companies and vendors get bottlenecked.

We’re so focused in our silos, and we’re so focused on our own infrastructures and our own experiences, that it’s laughable to think getting these companies together to actually work together to create beautiful, seamless experiences.

But now we’re getting to the point where we can potentially leverage AI.

We can leverage AI today, and it’s going to take time.

There are still some gaps to be closed to do this really quickly, as efficiently as I think we can all imagine.

But that’s going to be the way to solve the gap in the very near future.

Yeah.

I think AI will help because the other part of AI is, you have one that is helping the customer experience, as we talk about, and the customer side.

AI is going to help the technical infrastructures of this, the vendor side of the business, the supplier side, where there are a lot of, face it, a lot of the core technologies are older.

This is a way for, trust me, I don’t know a major core player who’s not looking and using AI and actually running projects to use it internally to modernize, if I want to use that word, their technology.

I think the AI tools aren’t fully there yet, but it will happen very quickly.

It’s not going to take long.

That too will help because, to be fair to everybody, there are so many generations of technology laying in the delivery of a solution in the bank-tech, fintech space today, in the traditional space anyway.

That will certainly help.

Everybody wants to get there, even internally, for their own reasons.

If you’re a vendor out there and you have technology debt, if you want to call it that, but it’s working really well every day, being able to modernize it for the long-haul value of the business itself is important, not only economically, but also from a resource standpoint.

Because the people who wrote these systems are starting to look like my age now.

Or older.

Yeah.

Nima, you have anything to add on that?

Well, I think the beauty of where the world is going is AI agents are going to be the primary users of all software in the world.

I don’t think that’s a super controversial statement.

But that includes the banking apps.

That includes the internal systems at banks.

So in a world where AI agents are the primary users of all of these technologies, the access to the tools is important, but the integration of the tools is less important in the sense that the AI agent can log in.

The problem with not having integrated systems as a community bank or credit union is that you have to work through seven different systems to get your customer or member an answer to a question.

The AI agent will do that in its sleep 3,000 times.

It doesn’t really care.

You don’t have to train it.

You train it once.

So if the AI agent is the user of the future, and also I think for consumers, I don’t think they’re going to have as much of a static experience.

They’ll have generated static UIs, meaning UIs that are generated specifically for them when they log into their bank’s app, or they apply for a loan there or whatever it is.

But I don’t think that their primary mechanism is going to be via fully static surface area.

I think the challenge of where the world is going is, how do you build a world in which the agents are the primary users of all the tools so that the consumer is not having to deal with tabbing through 15 different things to figure something out?

Your team isn’t going through five different tools to figure something out.

You end up with Frankenstein.

It just so happens to be that AI agents are okay with Frankenstein.

It’s not as much of a problem in a world of Frankenstein.

So they aren’t easily annoyed, huh?

Yeah.

They can handle all the crazy workarounds.

We don’t have rage-clicking agents.

Nima or Mike, how do you see LLMs affecting the end-consumer experience, the customer experience on the other side?

That’s an area of interest to me about how that’s going to change.

I’m talking about the front end, if I can think of it that way.

Even with digital, what is that interface going to look like in the future?

How much of that is going to change?

Because that’s a big, I’m real curious about that role as this starts to roll out.

Yeah.

To Nima’s point, these interfaces that we use in the future are highly likely not going to be static interfaces.

They’re going to morph.

Why would they morph?

They’d morph because everyone’s got different needs.

They’ve got different goals.

They’ve got different problems they need to deal with.

So everyone’s going to have a different view of what their finances look like.

LLMs are just a really nice step in the direction of taking in fluid inputs and giving you fluid outputs in a way that is much less static.

I’m not saying that I think the bank of the future is going to be a chat box.

I do think that could be a component.

Maybe a bad example, but driving in your car and having a conversation about, how do I go achieve this goal of buying my dream home?

It’s looking at your finances, looking at all your relationships across all your different external FIs, and it’s putting together a model for you and saying, “I think you could probably achieve this by saving this much every month. I think you’ve got room in your budgets to do it. Here are a few changes you can make. When we get started, I’ll create the savings goal for you right now and we’ll start working on that problem for you.”

So I do think that the future state of digital banking is more fluid in that way.

There’s going to be multiple ways to interact with your account and with your finances.

It’s going to be easier to achieve your outcomes because right now, when you think about the state of digital banking, it’s reporting.

It’s my dashboard and my balances and my transactions and a few tools.

I can move money around.

I can pay bills.

I can do things like that.

But in terms of helping me achieve my goals, honestly, most digital banking platforms aren’t set up that way today.

Yeah.

Thinking about it from the end consumer for me, or even the business, I have to interface with this bank.

I may have two different banks I use.

I have an investment account.

I have my insurance.

They all work differently.

I’m curious whether these new language-based models can change that experience and make it easier for the end consumer or end business customer.

That’s all.

Yeah.

I think what’s going to happen is the moment a consumer, whether they walk into a branch, I do like branches, by the way, whether they walk into a branch and they’re talking to someone or they log into their mobile app, behind the scenes an AI agent is automatically spun up, looks at the consumer’s financial situation, looks at the products that the bank offers, and the AI agent dynamically decides and renders in real time, within seconds, something that’s very specific to Paul or very specific to Sam or very specific to Kelly or very specific to Mike.

That would be totally different for all five of us on this call.

Historically, think of how much you have to train a team member to understand the hundreds of products that a financial institution may offer and the hundreds of different financial situations a consumer may have.

It’s not impossible.

You probably have some really top-tier team members who can do that, but it’s a really challenging problem.

Then keeping that up to date.

Those products change.

The programs change.

The promotions you have change.

The bundles, all these things change.

The consumer’s financial situation is fluid and changing.

So the idea is, you should just be spinning up agents.

You now have access to this infinitely scalable intelligence.

So spin up an agent the moment the customer or member engages and show them what you can do for them and make it easy to understand.

“Hey, actually, you probably should be consolidating your debt because these credit card bills are piling up. You could save $128 a month if you did this.”

That’s a friendly conversation that an agent or a human who has an agent at their hands, if they’re walking into a branch, can have with the consumer.

It’s super hard to do that.

Think about the work it used to take to do something like that.

Look through all their debts, run through their internal calculators, their decision engine, put together a nice sheet for the consumer to understand the before and after.

That was hours of work, if not longer in some cases.

But I think that all goes away.

I think that’s going to all be seconds and it’s going to be hyper-personalized.

Go ahead, Paul.

Just one last quick thing.

I think this is where, and I’m curious whether you believe this is true, one of the points I was trying to make before was that, to me, part of the key of this is having the data right that those agents can work against.

Right now, I think those community institutions potentially have that as an asset.

You still have to execute on being open to actually taking on and going down this path and doing the agents.

But having that data sitting there, with not only what the bank has but probably their credit data and their bill-payment data and their transactional data on their cards and everything else, that, to me, is an asset they have that hopefully we don’t waste.

That makes everything I think you described on that engagement lifecycle really work well.

Yeah.

One hundred percent.

I think all of these community institutions, banks, credit unions, lenders, whatever, they’re sitting on gold mines.

Yeah.

In a good way.

Ways that they could help consumers financially that would otherwise not know because they don’t understand the financial system.

Like I just said, it’s hard to teach a team member all this stuff.

Now imagine trying to teach 300 million consumers that.

It’s impossible.

It’s almost an intractable problem.

Mike, were you going to make a point there too?

Yeah.

It’s the second time Paul’s mentioned data, and I just wanted to go back to that for a second because we’re talking about the experience, we’re talking about the outcomes we can achieve.

I’ve got a real practical example of this.

When you’ve got a lot of data, the power you have with that data.

For example, one concrete example, we built a real-time fraud detection tool.

If you look at most community-based FIs, the way they’re set up is there’s a program at the end of the day.

They get a batch file at the end of the day.

Those transactions and all the data is analyzed.

A team comes in the next day and they’ve got a queue.

They’ve got a queue of fraud.

The fraud’s already happened because it was captured at the end of the day, identified at the end of the day.

Everyone’s gone home already.

So when we were looking at exploring adding real-time payments into our platform, we had to prioritize.

We said, we know there’s risk here, so let’s go build something that’s going to lower the risk.

We leveraged AI and we knew we needed more data.

We’ve got close to 100 clients now on the platform.

We knew we needed more data, though, to train our models to identify fraud before it happens.

We had a concept, but we knew that we needed more data.

So we ended up working with a company and we were able to acquire anonymized consortium data that we added in from a thousand other FIs.

We took that data, combined it with our own data, and then used that to train our models to determine if something looks like fraud before it happens.

You guys have seen Minority Report before, right?

So basically it’s that concept.

But now that’s possible, at least with financial crimes, by leveraging AI.

But you need a ton of data to make it effective.

The more data we had, the more effective it became.

What I love about this is we started this conversation 46 minutes ago and we jumped right into the deep end.

I’ve loved every minute of it.

Sam, I know that many of you have calls probably starting.

Well, I know, right?

I’m looking at the time now and I’m realizing these guys probably have...

We’ve got to get a few more hours on the books.

I know, right?

That’s what we need to do.

We need more time.

But that notwithstanding, I want to make sure that I’m being mindful of your time.

So on behalf of my co-captain here, Kelly Schultz, principal at Cornerstone Advisors, and me, I want to thank you, Mike Duncan, CEO and co-founder of Bankjoy, and Nima Ghamsari, who’s the head of Blend and co-founder, and Paul Danola, who’s the founding partner of Bridgeport Partners.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of Fintech Hustle.

We’ll see you out on the road, hopefully at Finovate or Money20/20 or AFT or at some point in between.

We’ll see you out there on the road.

Thanks again.

Hey there.

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