Money20/20, AI Agents, and the Fiserv Fallout

Hello, and welcome to another episode of What’s Going On in Banking. I’m one of your co-hosts, Stacey Bryant, director of client development at Cornerstone Advisors. And, as usual, it is a breath of fresh air to be alongside my buddy and pal, Cornerstone’s chief research officer and senior Forbes contributor, the one and only Ron Shevlin.

What’s going on, Ron? How are you doing?

I am in recovery mode.

I’m not sick, but I’ve had one of the most exhausting 96-hour stretches I can remember, and my voice is shot.

We’re recording this on a Thursday afternoon. The previous Saturday night, I flew to Las Vegas, got in late, slept, and then had Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and half of Wednesday packed almost nonstop with Money20/20.

I can’t even imagine how many people I talked to.

So my voice is gone, and I am completely wiped out. And just so everyone knows, I did not have a single drop of alcohol the entire week.

But one of the benefits of all the travel we do is that we often get to eat pretty well.

My wife is furious with me because I had two of the best dinners I’ve had in a long time.

Please tell me. What was cooking?

Monday night we went to Bazaar Meat in the Palazzo, across from the Venetian.

It’s José Andrés’ restaurant, and the meal was almost omakase-style in the sense that dish after dish kept coming out.

One of the strangest things I ate was cotton candy wrapped around foie gras. Picture a stick with cotton candy and a bite of foie gras tucked into the center. They tell you to eat the whole thing at once.

It was wild.

Then Tuesday night, just when I thought the food couldn’t get any better, we went to Nobu at Caesars Palace.

They brought out lobster tail in this incredible sauce, Wagyu beef that we seared over hot rocks, and a miso tart for dessert with a salted-caramel base.

I probably gained 15 pounds this week, and I’ve completely lost my voice.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was What’s Cooking in Banking with our resident foodie, Ron Shevlin.

I Googled Bazaar Meat while you were talking. Yes, José Andrés, known for being creative and doing some molecular-gastronomy-style food. That sounds amazing.

And, of course, you were in the other city that never sleeps, Las Vegas, for Money20/20.

For a conference like that, I usually need an IV afterward. It’s late nights, early mornings, and nonstop conversations.

For people listening who may not know the scale of it, Money20/20 is one of the leading global conferences for payments, banking, fintech, and financial innovation. It brings together thousands of attendees, hundreds of speakers, executives, investors, and technology companies.

So tell me about it. What did you hear? What’s going on at Money20/20?

I don’t think anyone will be surprised that a relatively small set of themes dominated the conference.

AI was everywhere.

It’s funny how quickly the conversation went from being completely consumed by generative AI to now being consumed by agentic AI.

And you know how I react to some of the marketing claims.

When I see a booth that says, “Unlock agentic AI,” I think, “It isn’t locked.”

There is a lot of hype.

But I also had more substantive conversations with technology leaders, founders, CTOs, and CEOs who are actually building things.

There are real use cases emerging, especially around loan processing and origination.

One conversation that stood out was with a founder and CTO who are applying AI agents to parts of the M&A process.

Bank M&A involves much more than negotiating the deal. The actual execution can be extremely onerous, especially loan review, data conversion, and system migration.

They are using agents to help review loans, which is traditionally a highly manual process, and to help with data-model transitions and migration.

Those are real operational applications.

Given how much M&A activity is happening, this matters. One reason executives hesitate on acquisitions is the question of how long integration will take and how expensive it will be.

If these tools can materially reduce that burden, that is something we at Cornerstone need to pay attention to.

So yes, there is real substance underneath some of the agent hype.

Another huge topic was open banking.

I’m still organizing my thoughts on this, but I told two executives something similar. One was Kevin Feltes at FDX, and another was Ryan Caldwell, CEO of MX.

I told both of them that they may want to move away from the “open banking” label.

The term has become politically loaded because of Rule 1033 and all the fighting around it.

My advice was: focus on the business outcomes.

I told Kevin, “You’re improving the economics of integration. You’re affecting how quickly and cheaply systems and data can connect.”

If I were a bank client, that is much more compelling than hearing the phrase “open banking.”

The same goes for MX.

And I want to use this platform to retract something I said earlier.

Someone came up to me at the conference and said, “I heard you said MX isn’t going to make it.”

I would never predict the death of a company that categorically.

But thinking back, I did write or say that I thought MX could be disproportionately hurt by what was happening around Rule 1033 and JPMorgan Chase.

I now think I was wrong about that.

I’ll get into the details elsewhere, but I want to correct the record.

The third major takeaway was the mood.

Money20/20 was probably one of the most optimistic fintech environments I’ve seen in a long time.

A lot of people seem to believe that “fintech is back.”

I don’t necessarily disagree with the positive mood, but from my perspective, fintech never left.

When investment levels and startup valuations decline, people inside fintech become pessimistic. But lower venture valuations do not mean the long-term role of fintech in financial services has disappeared.

The future of fintech was never really in question.

Still, the positive energy made for a good conference.

I can imagine you walking past every booth with “AI-powered” plastered all over it and asking, “What kind of AI? What does it actually do?”

A lot of banking executives go to Money20/20 because they assume the companies exhibiting there are the leading edge of innovation.

So asking those harder questions matters.

And I also want to give you credit for publicly correcting yourself on MX.

We are opinionated on this show, and that means sometimes we’re wrong. Owning that is part of the job.

Hopefully next year the dynamic duo of Ron and Stacey can dominate Money20/20 together.

You are absolutely coming with me next year.

I’m sure they’ll let us record a podcast from the conference. I want to do that.

And I have to tell you one more story from Money20/20, about my own session.

LoanPro sponsored a session on customer engagement.

During my rant, I argued that banks need to define what customer engagement actually means and identify the behaviors that demonstrate real engagement.

A lot of large banks brag that customers check account balances 30 times a week.

I said, “That isn’t engagement. That’s desperation.”

Then, over the course of about two minutes, I managed to talk myself out of my own thesis.

I started by saying banks need to define and measure engagement over time.

Then I said, “As agentic AI gets better, agents will perform 10 times as many activities for customers as customers do themselves.”

At which point I realized that the traditional concept of customer engagement might become meaningless.

I had essentially argued myself from one end of the spectrum to the other.

So I stood up and pretended to walk off the stage in the middle of the session because I had invalidated my own point.

Thankfully, it was the last session of the conference.

It sounds like you need a post-conference IV.

I’ll send you the link to where I get mine.

You weren’t at Money20/20, but last week you were in New York for American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking event.

Tell us about that.

Yes. American Banker has built an incredible initiative recognizing women who have been shaping financial services, building digital capabilities, leading institutions, and mentoring the next generation.

It was surreal to be invited and to sit in that room.

I’ve been in financial services for nearly 20 years, and I’m a geek about this industry. Seeing multiple generations of women who have genuinely changed banking was inspiring.

Several people were recognized.

Sophia Kearney-Lederman, a senior economist at FHN Financial, was honored on the Next list for women under 40 to watch. I met her last year, and she has a great ability to talk about the economy in a balanced but still engaging way.

Raquel Oden, who leads wealth and private banking at HSBC in the U.S., was recognized for her leadership and commitment to diversity, inclusion, female investors, and underserved communities.

As an Afro-Latina woman in banking, that one meant a lot to me.

Maria Escorcia, president and chief operating officer at Atlantic Union Bank, was also named among the women to watch. I had the opportunity to sit near her team, and they were a powerhouse. You could feel the culture and the leadership that had been built there.

And, of course, Jill Castilla, president and CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, was recognized for the 12th consecutive year for her creative work around banking and technology.

She is one of the most approachable people in the industry.

I told her how much I admire what she has built, and she immediately started giving advice and encouragement back to me.

She also mentioned that she had gotten you your own business card as “Chief Snark Officer,” which I thought was pretty great.

She speaks very highly of you.

There’s another person I would add to that list: Julie Thurlow at Reading Cooperative Bank.

Jill and Julie are both people who, if I called or texted them, I genuinely believe would respond.

And what strikes me about them is that they don’t seem driven by being “powerful bankers.”

They are trying to be great bankers.

They are innovative, accessible, and generous with their time.

I’ll tell you a quick story about Jill.

Years ago I was at a conference in San Francisco, sitting with a group of people talking about how bankers used social media. Everyone agreed that nobody in banking used Twitter more effectively than Jill.

I said, “I’ll make you a bet. I’ll send Jill a direct message right now. If she responds within five minutes, you all owe me a drink. If she doesn’t, I owe all of you a drink.”

It was a stupid bet because I don’t even drink that much, and I didn’t need five or six drinks.

But she responded.

And that wasn’t because I’m somehow the most powerful guy in banking. That’s simply who she is. She is responsive, present, and generous.

She also took the initiative to create the Chief Snark Officer business card for me.

Now I can tell people I’m technically in the C-suite of a bank. I’m not sure her actual C-suite knows that, but it’s fine.

Julie is similar.

Reading Cooperative is relatively small in the context of the banking industry, but Julie has done an extraordinary amount around innovation.

Those are the kinds of leaders that stand out to me.

One thing Jill said at the event really stuck with me too.

She talked repeatedly about consistency.

Be willing to disagree openly. Be willing to fail and learn. Be vulnerable. Hold other people to a high standard. And then do those things over and over again.

When we talk about strategy, execution, and leadership, consistency is one of the major pillars.

So shout-out to everyone who was recognized, and to American Banker for putting the event together.

Hopefully I can get invited back next year.

We probably have time for one more topic.

We’ve been very upbeat today, but something happened this week that is a lot less positive: the Fiserv stock news.

This is still fresh, so the story is developing.

Our colleague Brad Smith, who leads Cornerstone’s core practice, posted a recap on LinkedIn.

Fiserv had a very rough quarter, and the financial-solutions segment, including core banking, digital channels, and cards, was a major part of the earnings surprise.

Organic revenue in banking declined, digital payments weakened, and management acknowledged execution and communication problems around core migrations.

After years of speculation, the company also confirmed plans to consolidate its large number of core platforms down to a smaller group of strategic platforms.

That means clients on systems that are not part of the long-term roadmap should expect change.

The story is still unfolding, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it.

But I have one question.

Is the era of the “safe bet” core vendor over?

In an environment of open banking, rapid fintech change, and modernization pressure, does size still equal security?

If you’re a community-bank executive approaching a core renewal or considering modernization, how should you think about that tradeoff?

I’m hesitant to comment too deeply on the operational specifics because our core experts know that situation better than I do.

But something about the way the news is being interpreted bothers me.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve seen a lot of LinkedIn posts about the situation, and many of them read like someone simply asked ChatGPT to summarize the news and write a reaction.

They all had the same generic language about growth, change, transformation, and execution.

There’s a more important context people are missing.

Fiserv’s stock-price decline is coming off an extraordinarily high base.

For the last four or five years, Fiserv dramatically outperformed Jack Henry, FIS, and many other financial-technology companies in the stock market.

So part of what we’re seeing is not simply a failure at Fiserv. It is also a failure of Wall Street to correctly price the company in the first place.

Our colleagues have been talking for years about Fiserv’s strengths and weaknesses. Wall Street does not call us for advice, but the issues did not appear overnight.

Then earnings disappoint, Wall Street suddenly realizes there are problems, and the stock gets hammered.

My point is that the stock probably never should have been priced high enough to make a 47% decline possible in the first place.

I agree there’s a bigger narrative here.

Wall Street may obsess over next quarter’s earnings, but what happens with Fiserv will echo through bank boardrooms, vendor negotiations, investment pitches, and partnership decisions throughout financial services.

There’s another management lesson here too.

A former colleague of mine who specialized in change management used to say, “You get the behavior you reward.”

Fiserv’s board rewarded management for driving the stock price higher.

And management did what it was rewarded to do.

Now the situation has changed because one quarter dramatically altered the market’s view.

There are also rumors and accusations about whether some numbers were overly aggressive, which could make the whole situation much messier, especially because of the political environment around the company’s leadership.

I’m not going to speculate beyond that, but there is a lot here to watch.

From a bank-board perspective, the broader question is important: how do you balance the urge to innovate with the need for operational reliability?

That’s probably a good place to leave it.

Thank you so much for listening, and stay tuned for another episode of What’s Going On in Banking.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you’re listening. We’ve got more conversations coming your way, and you won’t want to miss them.

Thanks for tuning in.