Happy(er) Days Are Here Again // The 2025 What's Going On In Banking Report

All right. Welcome, everybody, to What's Going On in Banking 2025. I'm Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors, and as always, I have the privilege of doing this with my boss, CEO, and founding partner at Cornerstone, Steve Williams. Steve, thanks a lot for joining me again.

Thank you, Ron. I love geeking out on banking and all things financial.

Absolutely. And I want to thank the marketing team, especially Bailey Wishard, for the opening sequence.

Each year, we try to make the What's Going On in Banking cover reflect the mood of the industry. In 2023, the mood was pretty bleak. There were concerns about regulation, the economy, and the direction of the industry, which is why that year's cover showed a boat in a storm.

Going into 2024, the mood was still uncertain, but it wasn't quite as dire. Financial institutions were trying to figure out what the next wave would be, especially around technology.

This year feels different again. I wouldn't exactly say "Happy Days Are Here Again," although my editor was not particularly amused when I wanted to play with the word "happier" on the cover. But the general feeling is that things may be improving.

Steve, does that line up with what you're seeing?

I think you can feel the mood changing. We'll talk later about bank stocks and how the market has reacted, but I think two things are driving the shift.

First, there's a sense that the country may be moving toward more of a growth agenda. Second, bankers expect a different regulatory environment.

A banker told me a few weeks ago that the last four years represented the worst regulatory environment of his career, and this was not a young banker. So I think both the growth outlook and the regulatory outlook helped drive the shift in optimism late in the year.

We'll get into more detail on that. First, I want to tee up the discussion and let everybody know where we're going. We've got a lot to cover, including technology, regulation, markets, competitive threats, and several other topics.

If we have time, we'll also take questions. Please put them in the chat. We'll be monitoring that as we go.

I also want to point out that there are 21 song references in this year's What's Going On in Banking report. Steve, you've seen me do this for a couple of years now.

I love it.

You love it because you're close to my age. Most people aren't going to get these references because they're largely from the 1970s and 1980s.

We've turned it into a contest. If you can identify all 21 songs by name, not just find the citations in the report, you can submit them through the link in the chat. Five winners will receive a $100 gift card.

And if you're thinking about throwing the report into ChatGPT and asking it to do the work for you, I tried that. It did not find all 21 songs, and several of the answers it produced were wrong. So, Luke, use the Force. You're actually going to have to read the report.

Steve, for the last 10 years we've tracked optimism and pessimism in the industry. Over the last five or six years, we've asked a consistent question: How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the prospects for the banking industry overall, not just your own institution?

We learned the hard way that executives are almost always optimistic about their own institutions.

Looking at the last several years, I have never seen optimism this high. Seven out of 10 respondents said they were at least somewhat optimistic, and another 12% were very optimistic.

That's why we characterized the environment as "happy days," at least compared with the last few years. Is that consistent with what you're hearing?

It may be because we're coming out of such a difficult period. 2023 was rough, and there was still a lot of fear in the market moving into 2024.

We'll talk about deposits and liquidity, but I will say this: I'm a banker, so when I see optimism, it scares the crap out of me.

People are feeling better about growth prospects, and many banks and credit unions that felt they were being punished in the previous regulatory environment expect some relief.

That said, I see a lot of strategic plans and operating budgets in board meetings during November and December. I don't think there are many CEOs saying, "I've nailed my budget and earnings targets for 2025." There's still a lot of work to do despite the macro optimism.

I agree. Bankers are generally conservative in their outlook, so when 71% say they're somewhat optimistic, that is practically jubilation.

I also want to point out that we fielded the survey in December 2024, after the election but before the new administration took office. If we ran the survey again today, I'm not sure the numbers would be identical.

The regulatory environment is changing, but too much change too quickly can create a different kind of uncertainty.

Every year, we also ask executives about their biggest concerns. The lists are similar for banks and credit unions, with a few differences.

Deposit gathering is at the top for banks and still in the top five for credit unions. New-member growth is at the top for credit unions. Efficiency and non-interest expense remain major issues.

What stood out to me is that cybersecurity and consumer-related fraud have historically not been top-five issues, and now both have moved up substantially. What do you make of that?

If these issues were songs on Casey Kasem's countdown, cybersecurity and fraud would be moving toward number one with a bullet.

Boards are increasingly concerned about both topics. Sometimes management responds with a somewhat patronizing, "We'll be fine," but I don't think that is enough anymore.

I've noticed that military veterans on boards are often especially concerned. One military board member at a bank I work with said, "This is war."

From an operational-risk standpoint, banks have a lot of work to do, and that means investment. It can be uncomfortable at budget time, but institutions need to spend on fraud prevention, cybersecurity, information security, and financial crimes.

We got a question from Derek asking why growth isn't a top-five concern for banks. New-customer growth was an option in the survey, but it didn't make the top five on the bank side.

Why do you think that is?

A lot of the regional and community banks we work with are liquidity-constrained. If they don't solve deposit gathering first, they can't support much growth.

That's why deposits remain such a significant issue, even almost two years after SVB.

Look at the macro trend. When COVID started, there were roughly $3 trillion in money-market mutual funds. Today, that number is around $6.9 trillion. That's a huge amount of money that is no longer sitting in banks, and banks are competing for it on yield.

Then you have fintechs and challenger banks taking a growing share of liquidity, especially in a higher-rate environment.

Between money-market funds, fintechs, and challenger banks, we're not going back to a world where banks simply turn the lights on and deposits flow in. This is now a structural competitive issue.

I agree. Another factor is that many commercial community banks aren't especially consumer-oriented, which may lower the importance of new-customer growth in the bank responses.

But deposit gathering clearly remains central.

I've been using the term "deposit displacement" for about a decade, going back to when fintechs and neobanks first started gaining traction. It feels like that displacement is becoming more significant.

When we asked executives about threats to the industry, we saw a sharp increase in the percentage who viewed large fintechs and challenger banks as significant threats. Big Tech remains on the list, although the perceived threat from companies such as Amazon and Apple may have softened somewhat.

The megabanks remain a concern, but the growth in perceived fintech competition is especially notable.

That's where a lot of deposit displacement is happening. Look at companies such as Chime, PayPal, Square, and even Robinhood. Robinhood is effectively getting customers to fund checking and cash accounts in order to support investment activity, and it generated a substantial amount of interest income last year.

Community banks and credit unions are feeling that pressure.

I think there are two broad types of fintech competitors.

Some are rate-driven. When interest rates rise, they offer an attractive money-market or interest-bearing checking yield.

But companies such as Chime and Venmo aren't winning primarily on rate. They're capturing younger consumers and households with less liquidity through transaction relationships.

I always come back to The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. The warning sign isn't necessarily that younger consumers are taking huge balances away today. It's that they're taking brand equity, attention, and usage away from traditional banks.

Household growth is an early indicator. As those customers get older and accumulate more assets, what happens to liquidity and balances then?

That's why this is a long-term competitive issue, not something that disappears when the Fed changes rates.

James asked whether there are good strategies for gathering low-cost deposits through bundled products.

We asked institutions which deposit strategies they used and which worked in 2024. The most effective tactic was raising rates. I know nobody wants to hear that, but it worked.

There are also analytics-based approaches, although my concern is that if you don't already have a strong analytics engine, building one takes time.

What else would you point to?

I picture a brainstorming session where somebody says, "What if we raise rates?" What a lame brainstorming session.

But the reality is that this is hard.

Analytics can help you answer a more important question: If I need to grow, at what cost of funds?

Maybe I can grow $200 million in deposits without raising rates 15 basis points across the board. Maybe better segmentation and analytics allow me to raise them only nine basis points. At a $10 billion institution, that difference is real money.

The other thing is segmentation. There is no magic bullet, but you should be able to articulate a clear strategy for small business, C&I, specialty finance, mass affluent consumers, and any other segment that matters to your institution.

If I can't walk into your bank and inspect your segmentation strategy, you probably haven't done enough work on deposit growth.

I couldn't agree more.

I spoke with a reporter from The Financial Brand who asked which mobile-banking features banks and credit unions should prioritize. My answer was that I don't really care about the feature list.

I care about the product offering.

Segmentation needs to show up in the product itself. It isn't enough to target marketing messages to a particular segment. The product has to be designed differently for that customer.

Someone in the chat said those deposits aren't coming back to banks and credit unions. I disagree.

There is still a huge opportunity, but it won't come from saying, "We have the best branch staff." It will come from redesigning and reinventing products.

I think we're going to see more chief product officers in banks and credit unions.

And I know this is going to upset some people, but I think the era of treating customer or member experience as the primary differentiator may be ending. Experience matters, but it has become table stakes. Product differentiation needs to move back to the center.

You always say radical things that tick me off, Ron.

Obviously, you're not saying institutions should tolerate a terrible experience. You're saying a good experience is expected. But if the institution doesn't manage product innovation and segmentation and simply says, "We have a great experience," that's not enough to drive market-share growth.

I recently had a $12 billion client create a chief strategy and product officer role and centralize product management. I do think we'll see more banks operate product functions the way fintech and technology companies do.

Let's go back to fraud, because it cracked the top five concerns for the first time in a long time and seems to be reaching epidemic proportions.

One thing I find particularly frustrating is how quickly ordinary consumers can participate once they discover an exploit.

There was a satirical Onion headline about a "genius" paying off one credit card with another, and we saw something similar play out in real life when a check-fraud tactic spread on social media.

What's interesting is how quickly that kind of thing can take off.

If you have 100,000 customers, or a million customers, a small percentage will take advantage of a weakness if they think they can get away with it.

We saw that when Chase offered immediate credit on certain checks deposited through ATMs. Once the exploit became visible, it spread like roaches coming out from under the refrigerator.

Social media accelerates it. And some people rationalize the behavior because they don't like large institutions and see cheating them as a kind of situational justice.

More seriously, what can midsize financial institutions do about fraud that they aren't already doing?

There's a lot of faith being placed in machine learning and AI, but these technologies aren't completely new. Are there practical things institutions should be doing differently?

The best institutions think in terms of a fraud stack rather than a single fraud tool.

One solution may focus on device recognition. Another may specialize in check fraud. Another may use network data. Institutions need multiple lines of defense and should keep looking for new tools as the threats evolve.

Integrated case management is also important. Verafin has talked about this for years, but many institutions still haven't fully implemented the concept.

If something suspicious is happening in ACH, something unusual is happening during login, and someone is simultaneously standing at a teller window, the institution should be able to bring those signals together.

The last piece is customer education.

Commercial banks, especially, are doing more to educate small businesses about fraud. Even if the account agreement says the customer is responsible, it's a terrible experience to tell a business owner, "You've been defrauded, and the bank isn't covering it."

Everybody says they're educating customers. The question is whether the education is memorable enough to change behavior.

Let's move to regulation.

There was a lot of optimism that a new administration would mean regulators getting off bankers' backs. The CFPB in particular has been a major source of frustration for banks and credit unions.

At the same time, now we're hearing about regulatory simplification and potential restructuring. That creates a different kind of anxiety.

I've been in this business since I was 21, and usually when Washington starts talking loudly about consolidating regulatory agencies, the rhetoric cools down eventually.

This time feels a little more serious because of the work being discussed through DOGE.

If I were betting in Vegas this morning, I would say the CFPB loses much of its examination role. That responsibility could move somewhere else, potentially to the OCC, which Jamie Dimon has suggested.

Russ Vought, who was serving as acting head of the CFPB while also leading the Office of Management and Budget, was one of the authors behind Project 2025, which proposed combining the FDIC, OCC, and NCUA.

If I were a credit union, I would at least pay attention to that possibility.

My bet, though, is that the agencies largely remain intact, while their regulations and examination processes are streamlined. The CFPB may become less of a separate examination force and more of a consumer watchdog or policy organization.

That prediction could be obsolete tomorrow afternoon, but that's where I'd put my money today.

Do you think anything the CFPB put out in 2024 survives? I'm thinking about overdraft pricing rules, other price caps, and open-banking rule 1033.

I think the overdraft rule is probably dead.

What's interesting is that you can have a supposedly free-market administration move away from one price cap and then see proposals for something like a 10% interest-rate cap on credit cards, which is incredibly populist and not particularly free-market.

So we can't predict everything, but I think a lot of the CFPB's recent agenda will be unwound.

We should talk about 1033, because fintechs and data aggregators are strongly in favor of it, even if banks are not.

We asked institutions what they thought the impact of 1033 would be.

About 32% said it would benefit neither consumers nor financial institutions. Another 21% said it would benefit consumers but not financial institutions. So a slight majority viewed the rule negatively from the industry's perspective.

Another 27% simply weren't sure. Only about one in five respondents thought it would benefit both consumers and financial institutions.

I'm not sure I agree with the respondents.

On the consumer side, I don't necessarily think the rule will be an obvious win. Consumers are already overwhelmed by privacy notices and cookie preferences. Someone who does business with several fintechs could end up managing a large number of data-sharing permissions and requests.

On the other hand, I think bankers may be underestimating the opportunities open banking could create for them.

If I'm a large bank with a lot of market share, of course I'm going to oppose anything that makes it easier for customers to move data or money. If I were their lobbyist, I'd say the same thing.

The interesting part is the industry rallying around standards such as FDX. My general view is that markets eventually create standards more effectively than bureaucrats do.

The wild card is if somebody such as Elon Musk decides to create a new standard around X or an X.com wallet. But for 2025, I view 1033 as more of a slow burn than an immediate operational crisis.

And remember, these respondents are overwhelmingly midsize institutions. I keep trying to get Jamie Dimon to fill out the survey, but he's apparently busy.

He's busy yelling at people to get back to work.

Sure, but he could still fill out my survey.

Let's move to the equity markets.

Regional-bank stocks are up roughly 30% over the last year, so bankers may be feeling a little better about themselves.

But if you zoom out over five years, the story looks different. Since the early days of COVID, regional-bank indexes have mostly bounced around and gone nowhere.

The recent increase is really a recovery from the trough after SVB, when investors were worried about bank runs and additional failures.

Western Alliance here in Phoenix is a good example. Its stock fell to around $27 during the panic and later recovered into the $90s.

So the larger question is why regional banks have underperformed both the S&P 500 and a large bank such as JPMorgan Chase.

I have two possible explanations, and I'm not sure either is completely right.

First, Chase is far more diversified. It has institutional businesses, a huge credit-card operation, and multiple sources of revenue.

Second, comparing one highly visible megabank with an index of regional banks is imperfect. Chase has a prominent CEO and an investor-relations machine actively managing Wall Street's expectations. There is no equivalent spokesperson for "regional banks" as a group.

When you aggregate the sector, you're averaging the strong performers and weak performers together.

That's fair, but money still flows to where investors believe they can earn the best return.

I think the lesson is something you've said before: If your entire business model is "we take deposits and make loans," and you don't have interesting niches or meaningful sources of non-interest income, you're going to trade at a lower multiple indefinitely.

Banks have to ask what it means to become a smarter bank. What intellectual property, specialized capability, or differentiated business can we build that makes the institution more valuable?

That's a major strategic-planning question for the next five years.

Another topic near the top of the strategic agenda is artificial intelligence.

We've seen year-over-year growth in chatbots and conversational AI. Robotic process automation has been around for years and is getting renewed attention as people talk about agents.

One thing we asked this year was where institutions expect to use generative-AI tools and agents.

Nearly three-quarters of credit-union respondents said they see a use for generative-AI agents in the contact center, compared with less than half of the banks.

But what concerns me is how few respondents see opportunities in areas such as IT, compliance, credit, finance and accounting, and legal. In many of those categories, fewer than one in five institutions said they were using or planning to use generative AI.

There are enormous opportunities in those functions.

In fraud, the most important technology may be machine learning rather than generative AI. But in credit, legal, compliance, finance, and accounting, generative AI can have a major impact.

The low numbers suggest there is still confusion about what these technologies are and where they fit.

I think the pattern partly reflects political power inside the bank.

The back office has been squeezed for headcount and budget for years, even though people constantly talk about making it more efficient.

Credit and finance tend to sit closer to the CEO, so they can fall into the mindset of, "We're good. Efficiency is somebody else's problem."

But if you look at the commercial-credit process, from origination through ongoing portfolio management, there are huge opportunities.

Numerated being acquired by Moody's is one example. AI can gather information and generate a first draft of a credit memo.

A commercial officer may think, "I'm an artist. Nobody can replicate what I do." But if a system can complete 80% of the mechanical work quickly, the banker can spend more time on judgment and customer relationships.

Someone in the chat asked us to be more specific because "customer service" and "fraud" are vague categories.

One practical contact-center use case is off-hours support. A bank may not want to staff the contact center 24/7, but it can still provide good answers to common questions outside normal hours.

On the fraud side, pattern recognition is critical. Where is the IP address coming from? What is the user doing? Have we seen seven similar attempts at other institutions this week?

That kind of signal aggregation can improve fraud and cybersecurity response.

At many banks, the current AI program is basically: We licensed Copilot, wrote a usage policy, and created an internal knowledge base where employees can ask questions about the intranet.

That's a start, but a year and a half after ChatGPT arrived, there's still a lot of work to do. Middle managers need to move further down the learning curve.

We're also doing research on the operational impact of AI across machine learning, generative AI, conversational AI, and robotic process automation.

One thing has been remarkably consistent in interviews: Institutions say that if they could go back, they would have gotten their data in order earlier.

In this year's survey, we asked institutions to rate the effectiveness of their data strategy, data governance, use of data to improve customer or member experience, and use of data to improve operational efficiency.

The percentage rating themselves "very effective" was low, while the number saying they were ineffective in applying data to experience and efficiency was much higher than I expected.

There's going to be a lot of work done quickly in this area.

We're also developing another study around what we're calling Data IQ, and we'll be asking institutions to evaluate their own capabilities.

I'm going to be the grumpy old man for a minute.

Fiserv introduced an early bank data-warehouse product called Informant around 1995. We're essentially celebrating the 30th anniversary of bank vendors selling data-warehouse tools.

So the problem cannot be that the technology doesn't exist. Today we have Snowflake, Power BI, Azure, Databricks, and a huge ecosystem of tools.

The words I keep hearing in AI conversations are indexing, categorization, and history.

Institutions need to ask whether their data is organized well enough to support AI and whether they'll be able to demonstrate control as they grow and face more sophisticated model-risk expectations.

And beyond regulation, better data simply helps management run the business.

Amazon manages itself with hundreds of data points. Banks should probably be a little embarrassed that this is still such a foundational problem.

Whenever someone brings up data in a board meeting, I try to interrupt and ask, "What data are you talking about? Transaction data? Customer data? Operational data?"

And one area that often gets overlooked is qualitative data.

Chris Nichols at SouthState once wrote about the idea of shutting down email for a period just to force the organization to clean up its information. Obviously, that's not realistic, but the point is useful.

Policies, emails, reports, and other unstructured content matter just as much as database fields when you're trying to use generative AI.

Exactly. And the first question should always be, "So what? Who cares?"

Don't just create mountains of data.

Don't bring in a technologist to show a flashy Snowflake or Databricks demo. Bring in the grumpy person from the back office who says, "We need to decide what we mean by a commercial relationship. Does this account count or not?"

That work isn't fun. Building a data dictionary is like flossing. Nobody enjoys it, but you have to do it.

I'd rather have someone force those decisions than another presentation promising that the technology will make everything easy.

Let's move to fintech partnerships.

The percentage of bank respondents who view fintech partnerships as a strong driver of growth has declined over the last few years, from roughly three in 10 to just 16%. Credit unions have held steadier, with a slight increase.

On the bank side, the percentage saying fintech partnerships are not a growth driver increased from about 30% to 40%.

My take is that banks are letting the banking-as-a-service problems of the last year, including Evolve and Synapse, shape their entire view of fintech partnerships.

That worries me.

I was in a bank board meeting last fall encouraging the institution to become more aggressive about fintech partnerships. A board member cut me off and said, "We've already evaluated this. We're not doing it. Move on."

When I asked why, the answer was regulatory risk, even though the partnership model I was talking about had nothing to do with BaaS.

There was a definition problem. They were treating all fintech partnerships as if they were banking as a service.

Credit unions seem less affected by that because they weren't as deeply involved in partner banking. They still see fintech partnerships as a way to improve their products.

That's what I'm advocating for on both sides. Am I wrong?

No, I think you nailed it.

On the bank side, many institutions viewed BaaS as a new source of deposits, especially retail deposits that commercial banks weren't particularly good at gathering on their own.

At the same time, some banks moved into crypto just before FTX collapsed. Regulators came away from those experiences saying, "We don't like BaaS, and we definitely don't like crypto."

That became the brand identity of fintech partnerships in some bank boardrooms.

Another issue is that many of the early successful fintech use cases were in consumer banking rather than commercial banking or treasury management, so some commercial banks didn't see the relevance.

The lesson I would give credit unions is to look at models where institutions engage actively with fintech entrepreneurs, not just invest passively.

Funds and consortiums can put capital into fintechs, learn from the founders, and push back on weak ideas: "Your mousetrap isn't great, but you're smart. What if we solved the problem this way instead?"

I'd like to see more of that.

For banks, don't think only in terms of BaaS. Think about bringing fintech capabilities into your own delivery system and technology stack.

I also think the collision of banking and fintech can help bring younger talent and more racial, ethnic, and gender diversity into the banking industry. That convergence can be healthy.

I agree, much to the disappointment of everyone who wants me to argue with you.

There are a couple of important distinctions here.

One is embedded finance versus embedded fintech. Another is embedded finance versus banking as a service.

For many banks and credit unions, the opportunity is not simply to provide a charter or license to a fintech. It is to embed the institution's own products into third-party platforms.

On the small-business side, vertical SaaS platforms are a major opportunity because they already serve specific industries and can become distribution channels for deposits and lending.

And despite the decline in the percentage of banks that view fintech partnerships as a strong growth driver, the percentage planning to get into BaaS hasn't really fallen. It's still a small group, around 5% to 7%, but it has remained consistent.

Looking at the Fintech Meetup attendee list, there are still plenty of banks saying they're entering the space. So BaaS isn't dead.

Maybe we've passed through the trough of disillusionment and are moving into the slower build of the real players.

Another problem is integration.

Banks may want to work with fintechs but struggle to connect them to the core and digital environment.

We've asked banks and credit unions about satisfaction with their core providers. Interestingly, bank satisfaction with some attributes has improved over the last few years, including the ability to integrate with third parties.

The ABA recently released a separate survey asking different questions, but it showed a similar improvement in overall core-provider satisfaction among banks.

On the credit-union side, however, satisfaction has declined across several areas. Integration has been relatively stable, but satisfaction with the core provider's ability to help the institution compete, grow, and respond to changing needs has weakened.

What's your take?

The healthiest thing bank and credit-union leaders can do is see the core market for what it is.

In the old model, the core provider tried to be full-service. Whatever you needed around the core, they would sell or integrate it.

Today, payments revenue is increasingly important to those companies, and they may be less interested in providing the entire technology stack.

Institutions need more realistic expectations about what the core provider will and will not do.

There's a broader ecosystem now: digital providers, fintechs, middleware companies, and integration firms.

To succeed in that environment, you need people internally who understand data, integrations, user experience, and architecture well enough to connect the pieces around your strategy.

That's difficult for a $500 million institution and absolutely critical for a $10 billion institution.

The cost and complexity will also drive more consolidation because integrating fintechs and building a modern technology environment requires a different type of IT organization.

One thing I learned from the ABA survey is that in future What's Going On in Banking research, we need to ask how long institutions have been on their current core platform.

The ABA found that the longer the relationship, the lower the satisfaction. We haven't historically captured that tenure variable.

That doesn't mean there isn't innovation in the core market. New providers continue to emerge, including some from overseas.

But banking is an extremely complex industry. Technology companies that assume building a core system will be easy eventually run into that reality.

The market will move slowly.

Banks should still look for areas where they can unbundle the core, especially larger institutions. But much of the real innovation is going to happen around the core: fintech integration, digital experience, and data.

And as someone in the chat pointed out, a provider's willingness to integrate is not the same thing as actually being able to execute the integration.

Absolutely. Who has the hands-on expertise to make it work?

We're getting close to time, so I want to close with one larger trend.

For years, digitization and automation were about high-volume processes. Increasingly, AI is about augmenting knowledge workers.

The focus is shifting toward creativity and problem-solving. I don't mean creativity in the sense of artwork or inventing the next trillion-dollar product. I mean people using technology to think differently and make better decisions.

Automation still matters, but creativity matters too.

I agree.

We're also entering a world where people have to wake up every morning and ask, "Is this real?" But beyond that, the bigger point is the cost of the things we fail to do because we stayed inside the lines.

If I were a CEO today, I would be challenging the team to get creative about growth.

Growth in a plain-vanilla banking model is hard. So where are the niches? Are we integrating with SaaS providers in treasury management? What are we doing with next-generation marketing? What should a sales role look like in a multichannel world where customers aren't walking into branches the way they used to?

I'd also challenge middle management to move faster down the learning curve with vendors, AI use cases, data, and better management dashboards.

The biggest strategic mistake may not be doing something wrong. It may be failing to proactively do something right for the future.

That's a good place to wrap up.

Thanks to everybody who joined us and contributed questions in the chat. If you don't already have the What's Going On in Banking report, scan the QR code and download it. The link goes directly to the report, so you don't have to register again.

If you need to get in touch with Steve or me, our email addresses are available, although LinkedIn is probably the better place to reach us.

Steve, it's always a pleasure to actually do work with you. I'm coming up on 10 years at Cornerstone, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times we've actually worked together, so I enjoy these opportunities.

Thanks. And I love the chat too. It's like our internal meetings, where the chat is often more interesting than the speakers.

A lot of the people joining us are the ones in the trenches trying to do the things we're talking about. Ultimately, that's what this is about: building a smarter bank.

Thanks to everybody for coming.