Transcript
Hello, and welcome to another episode of What’s Going On in Banking. I’m your co-host, Stacey Bryant, director of client development at Cornerstone Advisors, accompanied by the one and only Ron Shevlin, Cornerstone’s chief research officer and senior Forbes contributor.
Ron, how are you doing? What’s going on?
Doing great, Stacey. I haven’t been traveling much lately, so I’d love to hear what you’re seeing out there.
I wonder why you haven’t been traveling. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Before anything else, banking is about connections, and so is food. Every city we travel to has a story, often told through the menu.
So I want to kick off today with another edition of What’s Cooking in Banking, where we talk about what’s fueling us on the road.
I was in Washington, D.C., last week for the Capital Affair Gala hosted by Credit Unions for Kids, which supports Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals across the country.
I tried to get a dinner reservation at Dogon, Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant inside the Salamander Hotel, but I couldn’t get in.
I’ve followed Chef Kwame for years, including from his time on Top Chef. Dogon has an Afro-Caribbean menu that reminds me of Tatiana, his restaurant near Lincoln Center in New York.
And you know I’m a New York City girl, Ron, so I love the way he combines Afro-Caribbean food with fine dining.
At Tatiana, I remember an escovitch-inspired hamachi crudo, braised oxtail worked into a crab rangoon, and a short-rib pastrami dish that riffs on a classic New York deli sandwich.
Then there was the Bodega Special, with a homemade cosmic brownie and powdered-donut ice cream.
So good.
But back to why I was in D.C.
I want to thank John Bratsakis and the Maryland & D.C. Credit Union Association for having me. Credit Unions for Kids has raised billions of dollars for life-saving pediatric medical care, so it was great to dress up, spend time with the community, and talk about what’s happening in the credit-union world and the broader “people helping people” mission.
How about you? You said you haven’t been traveling. What happened?
Nothing bad happened.
But when you said, “We all have to eat at the end of the day,” I laughed because I have to eat several times during the day.
And I’ve learned that my new granddaughter does too.
That’s one reason I’ve been off the road. My oldest daughter just had grandchild number three, but very importantly, granddaughter number one.
So we haven’t been going out to restaurants much for the past week and a half. We’ve been spending time with the grandkids and the new baby.
The eating may not be as exciting as what you described, but it’s all good.
First of all, congratulations. You weren’t going to casually mention a new addition to the Shevlin family and move on.
What is your grandpa name, by the way?
Papa.
Aw. Congratulations, Papa.
I know grandchild number three is going to rock the world.
Back to the gala and the other events I attended that week. I also presented for two banking associations, and the theme was the same one I’ve heard throughout the entire year: tell us about AI.
How are community financial institutions using it? What are large institutions doing? What are fintechs doing? What are the practical use cases?
Our colleague John Meyer and I did a session that went from the basic categories of AI through agentic AI.
That conversation reminded me of a McKinsey article about how consumers are increasingly using AI in travel.
The article showed that travelers are becoming more comfortable using AI tools to improve the travel experience.
I can attest to that personally.
One of my girlfriends needed help planning a five-day trip for a 50th birthday and anniversary. I asked about the budget, where they wanted to go, what they liked to eat, what her husband was interested in, and other details.
Then I put all of that into ChatGPT.
It created a day-by-day itinerary, including a San Francisco and Napa Valley segment. At one point it recommended being at a particular landmark around 2:00 p.m. because the lighting at that time creates a popular photo opportunity.
That got me thinking about what agentic AI could eventually do in financial services.
Imagine I’m a Gen Z consumer who receives an inheritance or starts earning substantial money as a creator. I have goals. I want to improve my credit. I want to buy a house. Maybe I want to retire within 10 years.
How powerful would it be to give an AI system those goals, my income, my financial obligations, and my current position, and have it build an actionable financial itinerary?
That leads directly back to the questions community banks keep asking me.
How are other institutions using these tools? How do we make the case to our board and executive team? What does it mean to be “ahead” as we move from 2025 into 2026?
I’m glad you brought up the travel example because it’s a very useful way to center the agentic-AI conversation.
You’ve heard me go on too much about definitions, but there is still a lot of confusion.
I recently saw someone say, “With agentic AI, we’ll be able to predict customer needs.”
That is not really what defines agentic AI.
Predicting needs could come from machine learning or generative models.
Agentic AI is about doing things. It completes tasks. It acts toward a goal.
The travel example works because the system doesn’t merely tell you that you might enjoy Napa. It can help build the itinerary, identify timing, locate options, and eventually make reservations or execute other steps.
It does something.
Banks should think about agentic AI in terms of experiences, not only advice.
Ten years ago I wrote Smarter Bank. It’s old now, but the subtitle still matters to me: Why Money Management Is More Important Than Money Movement.
I chose that because bankers often thought payments and money movement were the core of the customer value proposition.
I argued that the bigger opportunity was helping people manage money better.
That isn’t limited to giving advice. It includes experiences.
A banker might say, “We’re not in the travel business.”
No, but you are in the business of helping people manage spending and make financial decisions.
Travel can be wildly expensive or much more affordable depending on how it is planned. Anything involving meaningful financial tradeoffs is potentially relevant to the institution’s role in helping customers manage money.
The second reason I like the example is that banks are currently focused, and correctly so, on internal productivity use cases for AI.
They are looking at operations, workflow automation, compliance, and employee efficiency.
That matters.
But agentic AI also changes what institutions may eventually offer customers.
It is a product-delivery question, not just a productivity question.
And then there’s the employee side.
A lot of employees fear that AI will replace them.
Executive teams and boards need to communicate that much of this is about augmentation and support, not immediate replacement.
That said, some roles will disappear over time. Telephone operators largely disappeared because technology changed.
The same thing will happen to certain roles in banking.
But for most employees today, the nearer-term opportunity is making them faster, better informed, and more capable.
Conversational AI, machine learning, and generative AI have already started doing that. Agentic AI could accelerate it dramatically.
I agree.
And the McKinsey article actually highlighted challenges that sound very familiar to banking: fragmented data, legacy systems, and heavy reliance on human expertise.
If banks try to put advanced AI on top of a weak foundation, it reminds me of the Three Little Pigs. Build the shiny new AI house on straw and the big bad wolf is still going to blow it down.
The investment levels at larger institutions also show how serious this is. Bank of America, for example, has billions of dollars in annual technology spending, with a significant portion increasingly tied to AI and related capabilities.
Our colleague Al Dominick recently shared benchmarking showing how much technology spending can scale with asset size for banks.
Community institutions obviously cannot spend like Bank of America, but they still need to think clearly about where technology investment belongs in their strategy.
And every time I speak about AI, someone asks, “What about the people?”
That reminds me of an article our colleague John Meyer wrote using the body-snatcher analogy.
In the old science-fiction story, aliens take over human bodies, but something essential is missing: empathy and emotion.
Agentic AI may eventually be very good at completing tasks. It still does not replace human judgment, empathy, and emotional intelligence.
That means the jobs change.
Institutions will need people who understand AI governance, data, oversight, risk, and how to design better customer experiences.
Manual tasks may shrink while new roles emerge.
There’s another piece I’ve been thinking about for more than a year: AI should force us to become more creative.
A couple of months ago my wife went into a bank branch to solve a problem.
She came home and said, “That was the best banking experience I’ve had in years.”
I asked why.
She said the employee knew every system and knew how to work around the limitations of those systems to actually solve the problem.
That is a form of creativity.
As AI automates more rote work, it should free employees to solve problems more creatively and design better experiences.
If you asked many employees at community banks today, “Go redesign a new product,” they might say, “I don’t know how. We’ve never done that.”
Ask, “What problems are your customers having managing and spending money?” and many institutions still struggle to answer because they are so account-focused.
They think about how to manage an account rather than how to help the person manage money.
When technology takes over more of the mechanical work, the human differentiator becomes creativity.
There’s a popular line that says, “You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI.”
I don’t completely buy that.
I think you may lose your job to someone who is more creative and uses these tools to produce better outcomes.
And that creates another challenge for younger workers. If AI reduces the number of entry-level jobs, how do people gain the experience needed to understand problems deeply enough to solve them creatively later?
We may be setting ourselves up for a skills gap.
I’d combine both ideas.
To be more creative, you also need to know what you can delegate.
If I’m traveling from event to event and trying to keep up with content, research, and client work, using AI to remove lower-value tasks gives me more room to be creative.
So learning the tools and becoming more creative reinforce each other.
Speaking of innovation, let’s talk about SoFi.
SoFi recently announced that crypto is back on its platform.
More importantly, SoFi says it is the first nationally chartered bank offering customers the ability to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency directly inside the digital-banking experience.
That should send a signal to almost every other bank and credit union in the country.
SoFi has seen tremendous account growth with a product set that blurs the lines between checking, payments, investing, and other financial services.
Younger consumers do not necessarily care which traditional product silo something belongs in. They want strong digital delivery and a complete financial experience.
Adding crypto makes the differentiation even stronger.
I also want to bring up the demand side.
We’re currently doing consumer research for a privately commissioned report. I can share a few topline data points even though the full study will not be public.
Almost 80% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said there is at least some chance they will buy or invest more in crypto over the next year. Roughly half of that group said they are very likely to do so.
Even Gen X shows substantial interest.
Baby boomers look completely different. Only about 10% say they plan to invest in or buy crypto in the next year.
So if a bank’s executive team is dominated by baby boomers who view the market through their own preferences, they could badly underestimate consumer demand.
Crypto is not only “back” because SoFi added it. Consumer interest is still significant.
I do worry about the get-rich-quick mentality around some crypto investing.
Bitcoin and other assets can move dramatically, and consumers may interpret a sharp drop as a buying opportunity without fully understanding the risk.
But the demand is real, and banks and credit unions need to pay attention.
I think about this in terms of attrition.
One reason customers leave or spread their financial relationships across providers is that their existing institution does not offer the technology or products they want.
SoFi has created a digital one-stop shop for millions of members.
Community institutions may not be able to build cryptocurrency infrastructure themselves, but that does not mean they have to ignore the category.
Strategic partnerships can help them add capabilities without recreating the entire rail.
And this connects to the GENIUS Act and the broader movement around digital assets.
Regardless of exactly what happens with crypto next year, institutions are going to need technology partners and infrastructure that let them respond to changing customer expectations.
Those partnerships need attention now if institutions want to maintain long-term relationships with younger customers.
That’s a good place to end.
Stacey, I’ll let you have the last word today.
Thanks for all your thoughts, and thanks to everybody listening. We hope you’ll join us 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.
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