Stop Calling Banking's AI Adoption a Frozen Middle

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of What’s Going On in Banking. I think by the time you listen to this, it will be September 2026. And man, that was it for the summer. I can’t believe it. Stacy Bryant here with me, as always. Your summer’s over too, huh?

It’s finito, as they say in Spain.

Yeah, you ended it very nicely. Why don’t you tell everybody how you ended your summer, and then I’ll tell everybody how I ended mine?

Of course. Yeah, summer is long gone, and it makes me a little sad. But to your point, I was able to kick it off with a good bang—and a bang across the pond in Spain. I celebrated a big milestone birthday of mine with the family, and we also have some family in Spain. So we went to Madrid, then we went to Málaga, then we went to Valencia.

My extended family—shout-out to them, shout-out to my little brother—gifted my daughters and me an experience to learn how to make authentic, original Valencian paella with one of the award-winning paella makers on the globe, Ron. I thought, “Okay, here’s the best of the best.”

And I could tell that I was a year older when, after having that paella and a little bit of red wine, I needed a nap. So, you know, happy birthday to me. But it was absolutely amazing, and it was hot. Oh my gosh.

Then we went through the rest of the coast. In Alicante, we were beach-bumming every single day. To your point, September is upon us, and I know you and I are darn near busy every single week, but it was an amazing end to the summer.

But how are you doing? Or, as they say in Spain, “¿Cómo estás, Ron?” How have you been?

Doing great. Listen, first of all, your new cooking thing there—we now know what you need to bring to the GonzoBanker Awards when we do this in a couple of months. I can’t believe we’re getting close to that. Yes, you’ll have to bring that.

Second of all, I do want to say happy birthday and welcome to drinking age. You finally made it. Old enough to drink. I think that’s a big milestone.

Smart guy.

There we go. So, yeah, my summer’s over too. It ended pretty much at the Fiserv Forum. I had to get on a plane for the first time in six weeks. I had a great July and August of not going anywhere. That was amazing. Then having to get on a plane pretty much signaled the end of the summer.

I had another conference this past week up in Quebec City. That was a drive, and it’s a great place to go. Lousy drive, though, man. Six hours from Boston, but we did it, and it was well worth the trip.

Anyway, we’re back in the saddle for another What’s Going On in Banking episode. I know we’ve got a bunch of things lined up. Why don’t you kick us off? Where do you want to start?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve never been to Quebec City, so shout-out to the Allied Solutions folks for hosting their conference there. I know you mentioned in a previous conversation that it was like a little mini-Europe. So good for you, outside of the six-hour trek, getting to indulge in a European-like feel of sorts.

But yeah, let’s dive right in. I found this Substack article by a guy named Rich Turrin. He’s another fintech commentator of sorts. I’m sure you know him, but he speaks about the frozen middle, and it was very intriguing. I went down a rabbit hole that I think you’ll indulge me on.

I need you to sit with a number for a second that I extracted from here because it changed how I think about this whole AI conversation in banking. Rich commented on a survey of 500 financial services executives from Adobe and Incisiv in which 60% are stuck. They’re not failing. They’re not refusing. They’re stuck past the pilot. They can’t scale into production. They’re just frozen. There’s actually a name for it in the industry now: the frozen middle.

Here’s what makes it click for me, Ron. Of every 100 AI use cases banks propose, only 15 make it to production. Fifteen. I don’t think that’s because bankers are lazy or scared. I think it’s because nobody in the middle of the org chart was ever handed the authority to make the call.

You’ve got the board saying, “Go. Go ahead. We spoke about it.” The front line is just trying to survive a Tuesday. And you’re stuck between your VP of operations, your compliance officer, your branch manager—people who believe in this but have zero extra hours and zero extra headcount to actually make it real.

I actually think there’s real hope buried in this stat, not just doom. Only 20% of these financial institutions have a named AI owner—the title, budget, the whole thing. That means, for 80% of this industry, the fix isn’t a moonshot. It’s an org chart decision. I believe that is so fixable.

I’m going to stop there. What do you think about those numbers and some folks having a budget, or not, for a specific AI role? I know we’re going to dive a little deeper later in this episode.

Well, surprise, surprise. I have a different take than Rich. I know Rich, and he’s a super-sharp guy. He’s been living in China, I think, for 20-plus years, so he knows the industry really, really well and knows technology really, really well. Rich, if you’re listening, kudos. Great, great post.

I don’t know if the frozen middle was his take or if it was the take of the report from Adobe and Incisiv, but, Stacy, here’s my take on this. Let’s say the technology that enabled you to read minds came out tomorrow, and a week later somebody said, “Well, only 3% of people are using technology to read minds.” It’s like, yeah, we’re a little early in that cycle. That’s where we are with AI.

I’ve said this so many times in the past: The adoption path for AI really mirrors what happened with personal computers 40 or 45 years ago. Right now, we do not have a high percentage of adoption of enterprise AI systems. It’s personal usage.

Who is going to use these types of tools and technologies? It’s analyst types—marketing analysts, production analysts and financial analysts. It’s people who, 45 years ago, said, “Oh my gosh, PCs. This is amazing. I need it for spreadsheets, and I can do PowerPoint and word processing and all that kind of stuff.”

But there were a lot of workers who had jobs in factories or other places. They drove trucks. They did whatever, but they didn’t need technology at that point, based on what was available. That’s very similar to today. It’s not everybody who needs to get onto ChatGPT or Claude and ask questions, generate marketing materials or do legal contracts. It’s a certain group of people.

We’re just not there yet from an enterprise perspective because the natural path is personal first, then enterprise. So I disagree with this frozen middle. This is not the frozen middle. It’s just the next wave of adopters. That’s the natural path of things. To me, this is not a huge issue to be worrying about.

Okay. Let me look at this another way, then—another way worth arguing with. Maybe frozen isn’t even the right word for some of this. Maybe some of that caution is just banking doing what banking is supposed to do.

Speaking as a financial institution leader, we’re not a startup. We hold people’s life savings. Slow can be a feature, not a bug.

I read something else from McKinsey partner Ankit Kapoor, and he points this out beautifully, Ron. He mentions that most banks don’t even need to build risky, cutting-edge AI infrastructure. Buy that part off the shelf from people who do it for a living.

Now we start leaning into another branch of the build, buy or partner discussion. He goes on to say that what you build is the stuff that’s actually yours—your workflows, your relationships and the trust your members have had in you for decades. Where you can’t buy or build, you partner. That’s not reckless. It’s discipline.

Kapoor continued by speaking about a company that automated half of a target workflow using exactly that build, buy or partner mix. The way I’m looking at it, that wasn’t a disappointment. That was a win.

That’s the part that should get everybody in community banking genuinely excited because you don’t need a perfect system. You need a system that’s 50% better than what you had yesterday and the courage to call that progress.

A few other things I want to touch on—and I want to hear back from you, of course—are about the fear-of-failure piece. It took me back to the 2026 What’s Going On in Banking report and the deployed-to-planned ratio. I’m telling you, the rabbit hole went deep because I know plenty of good people who would rather do nothing than do something that gets picked apart in a board meeting. I’ve been in a few board meetings and seen this myself.

This is the part that breaks my heart a little bit, honestly, because it’s so fixable and so human. Twenty-nine percent of institutions, when an AI pilot fails, respond by assigning blame instead of asking what they learned. Almost a third of this industry is still treating a stalled pilot like a fireable offense instead of a data point.

Even our boy, very sarcastically speaking, Sam Altman, has been out there lately saying he was flat-out wrong about how fast this AI stuff would move because habits and existing relationships have gravity. Talk to me. What do you think about that?

I can’t believe I agree with Sam on something. But that’s basically what I just said: Adoption is going to be a lot slower.

I’m not sure about the blame thing, though. First of all, 29% is not a majority that placed blame. But I don’t get it. What’s wrong with placing blame? Unless you’re saying they’re blaming people for it.

But we’re falling into a trap. How many times have I said we’ve got to stop using the term AI? This is the other problem. What are we talking about? Are we talking about machine learning or predictive models for underwriting and fraud? Are we talking about generative AI to generate contracts and marketing? Or are we talking about AI agents that are going to get various pieces of the loan origination process done?

There’s a frozen 60% of that market, and probably even higher, because so many are still dealing with cores, digital platforms and loan origination systems that don’t enable APIs to be used for data connections.

You’re also talking about a set of financial institutions where it isn’t a data cleanliness issue. It’s a data accessibility issue. It’s about being able to access data that they’re not currently able to access, and that’s getting in the way.

It’s just going to take a few years to get there. For fintech influencers to go out there and say, “This is horrendous,” it’s like, no, it’s life. It’s going to take some time to get there.

I think the bigger issue is the financial institutions, Stacy, that you and I talk to and see that aren’t moving toward it. Here’s my issue: I’ve run into a couple of CIOs over the past number of months who are looking at this situation and kind of pooh-poohing the whole AI thing.

They say, “There are so many issues. Look at this horror story here and that horror story there. See? That’s why we don’t really need to be doing much with this.” To me, that mentality is the bigger issue, not the frozen thing.

You have me nodding and doing all these church memes right now because I agree with you. Especially from my own road stories and speaking to a whole bunch of folks in banking, people are looking at certain failures within AI and using them as the end-all, be-all.

If I were to boil it down, it would be: Fail fast, learn faster.

Then, playing devil’s advocate with my own thoughts, I ask myself: Is failing fast even responsible advice? You and I speak to a lot of folks and are in a lot of board meetings. Banks aren’t tech companies, at least for now. That may be different five years from now. It may be different 10 years from now, but there’s real regulatory exposure here. I want to be precise, not just inspirational.

I’m not saying fail recklessly with member money. I’m saying fail small, on purpose, with a plan for what killing the pilot looks like before you even start.

I take three questions from what Kapoor over at McKinsey mentioned as we head into the tail end of Q3.

One, name the person—not the committee, the person—who owns turning our AI ambition into a working pilot.

Two, what’s the smallest, most reversible AI experiment we could greenlight in the next 60 days? I think about execution so we can just do something small, not the biggest thing. Start moving the needle, which is such a popular term, especially in banking.

Three, when a pilot doesn’t work, do we treat it as a failure or as tuition? How your team answers that last question tells you everything about whether you’ll be in the frozen middle a year from now or whether you’re already moving.

That’s what I wanted to touch on. Thank you for entertaining me there.

Let me address something because I think it was the McKinsey person you were just talking about. I don’t agree with naming the person who has to make AI happen.

There’s a tension that financial institutions have to deal with, both downward and upward from the executive suite. This was the presentation I gave at the Allied Solutions advisory council up in Quebec City.

I said, “Look, we’re on a path to make the same mistakes we made 45 years ago.” Sorry for keeping bringing this up, but spreadsheets came out and everybody said, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I can start doing things.”

Within five years, every organization had more spreadsheets than they possibly knew what to do with. They had no consistency of design, no documentation of what was in them and no quality control over whether the formulas in those spreadsheets were correct. Yet they were being used for enterprise-level processes.

Then you know what happened, Stacy? The person who created that spreadsheet moved on and left the organization with a pile of you-know-what sitting there.

We’re potentially going down a path where we give people in the organization AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and AI agents, and give them the ability to do things and do their jobs faster. But we’re running the risk that you give 500 people the tools and now have 500 different ways of doing things that aren’t documented, aren’t designed from the top down and are difficult to integrate and assess for quality.

There’s this tension: Yes, we want to give people the ability to go do things faster, but we also want to maintain some top-down control. You can’t move that fast with top-down control, and you’re going to have a quality problem if you just let everybody run amok. There has to be some balance here.

McKinsey is 100% wrong, and they’re always wrong on organizational stuff. They don’t know jack-you-know-what about organizational design. I know that from 40 years of competing with them and following them from an IT strategy perspective after they do stuff. And, wink, wink, I have another reason why I don’t like McKinsey.

But I’m telling you, you can’t just give one individual responsibility for the AI decisions. There has to be some top-down and bottom-up tension here.

Shout-out, ladies and gentlemen, to all of our listeners. This is why I love this guy. I love when the New York just comes out of you.

I don’t want to keep running this because I know we have more to speak about, but I have to say one more thing and somewhat argue. I’m not going to say McKinsey is completely right. I hear you.

I also think about a lot of these credit unions and community banks around the billion-dollar size, give or take, where they only have that one person. I hear you: What are we doing after that person leaves? But perhaps they only have that one person—or two—who, at every quarterly board meeting, is asked what’s been moving and how they’ve been moving it.

When you give a billion-dollar community financial institution that permission and say, “This is your authority. This is your budget. Go ahead and take off,” there’s more accountability there.

I see how this can vary. I see, especially organizationally, how we can come together. But the glove doesn’t fit all these situations. That’s what I want to say.

That’s a good point, and you just raised a point that I want to leverage into our next segment. You mentioned the budget, and here’s another thing I want to run by you and everybody listening.

I posted this in a Fintech Snark Tank post under the banner of “The Most Important Job Announcement in Banking.” And no, it wasn’t Jamie Dimon relinquishing the CEO crown at Chase.

M&T Bank named a new head of AI engineering. I saw it in an article on Finextra. It had 111 words in the article, and the job description itself is nearly that long.

This is not the person you just talked about—the McKinsey person who has control over everything. It’s AI engineering. It’s the platforms. It’s the repositories and pipelines. It’s the person who heads up embedding AI into development, testing, security and delivery.

My reason for posting this was a total jiu-jitsu. It wasn’t about who cares about the role itself. It was all about how you make that person successful, why it’s so important and why it was so important to me, Stacy.

What we’ve been talking about here with pilots and things like that has been very surface-level: How do we do a task or a piece of a process with generative AI? It hasn’t really been about building the AI infrastructure or environment that enables all of this to be operationalized, productionized and scaled.

When I saw what M&T did, I thought, that’s what more financial institutions need. It’s not the person who’s in charge of rolling out ChatGPT, but the person who’s in charge of making sure we have an infrastructure that enables new applications to talk to AI systems and so forth.

Part of this, from the budget perspective, was what I put out there in the presentation. You’ve got two buckets.

The tools-and-licenses bucket goes toward $20 a month for ChatGPT access. Let people go run off, play with that and do some pilots. But there’s this other budget bucket for the AI environment. That’s the API access. That’s the repository access.

What I was saying is that not enough financial institutions are putting enough money into bucket number two because that’s where the real transformation is. That, Stacy, is what takes the frozen middle out of being frozen: putting money into the second bucket.

First and foremost, I thought you were being dramatic when I read the headline, “The Most Important Job Announcement in Banking,” and it wasn’t the CEO. I’m like, come on, Ron. But the more I started reading, the more I thought, “Okay, wait. He’s going somewhere with this.”

Before I even dive in, it made me think about earlier this year when we were at the Acquire or Be Acquired Conference in Phoenix. I was pestering you. I was like, “Ron, what is the role? What is the AI role that community banks can just take and charge with?”

You said, “Listen, it can be the chief fill-in-the-blank, whatever, as long as they’re a change agent.” Reading these job duties and responsibilities for the AI engineering role, it does scream change. It brings more focus to the number of people they’ll be overseeing and so on and so forth.

But I really want to use my response here to think about the smaller shops I spoke about a few minutes ago. I want to be real with our audience. I don’t think a $2 billion regional bank and a $400 million credit union are playing the same game.

I want to contest this because one of the actual comments under your article says something I can’t shake: This kind of role is going to show up at regional banks, and it’s going to skip right over everybody smaller.

Honestly, I think that’s the devil’s advocate case, Ron. It’s a strong one. But most community banks and credit unions listening to this are not about to post a $300,000 salary for a head of AI engineering managing 100 people. That job, as written, literally does not exist in their budgets.

Where I push back on myself—and on that comment—is that I don’t think the title is the point. I think the function is the point.

You mentioned change agent, right? You don’t need to build your own identity and permissions layer for AI agents from scratch. Again, we spoke about this just a few minutes ago. That’s exactly what you buy or partner for.

But what you can’t outsource is the decision to take governance out of a once-a-quarter committee meeting and build it into how things actually ship.

You mentioned PenFed, and it was so funny. You mentioned names like Wingman and Max. It sounded like a whole bunch of college kids. But PenFed didn’t hire 100 engineers to do this responsibly. They spent real time upfront on security, privacy and trust before their first member-facing agent went live.

Once that foundation existed, adding new capabilities got cheaper and faster every time. That’s the mindset I extracted. That’s the mindset a $500 million credit union can absolutely adopt. It’s that foundation, even without M&T’s org chart.

Okay, I buy it. I’m at a loss for words about how to respond because I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, except maybe that I think you’re right.

Look, a $10 billion or even a $20 billion financial institution cannot do what M&T, at $200 billion, did. That’s a $300,000 job.

But my point in bringing this up to the community-level institution is: Look, this is where—not even a megabank, but a regional bank—is going. You can’t simply wait three to five years for your core vendor or digital banking vendor to come do that.

Now, having just said that, I’m about to get a whole bunch of phone calls as soon as this goes live saying, “Ron, we’re a core, and we’ve got this today.”

Yeah, I get it. But you’ve still got an 18- to 24-month implementation timeline that you’re forcing on your customers, with a $250,000 integration budget. So, yeah, you have it today, but it’s not very realistic for a lot of these organizations to do it.

That’s why I think they have to make the hard decisions to shift the AI budget from tools and access to the AI environment, process redesign and process transformation.

You know what I told the advisory council at Allied? I hate going back 40 years, but it’s such a good parallel. In fact, I even said this to Cornerstone. I don’t know if you were at the meeting or not—our big company meeting a couple of weeks ago.

I said, “Look, guys, we have a decision to make. Do we want to party like it’s 1993?”

Not 1999. I know what Prince’s song was. You don’t have to educate me on this.

I was about to correct you.

No, I knew what I was doing. Party like it’s 1993 because that was the height of the reengineering consulting boom. It started around 1989 or 1990. In 1993, it peaked, and by 1995, it was dead.

But why did it peak in 1993? The reason, Stacy, is because it took a number of years for personal computers to be adopted, and then they started moving to the enterprise level.

That’s when smart people started saying, “We’ve got this powerful computing opportunity now, and we’re still running our processes as if they were running on mainframe computers. We’ve got to reengineer our processes to take advantage of the technology.”

That’s what we’re going to be going into over the next three to four years: smart banks and credit unions looking at their processes and saying, “Man, we could be doing this so much faster.” I mean blindingly faster, getting incremental costs down to practically zero.

But we can’t do that with today’s processes and only little spot uses of AI here and there. That’s something every organization has to do, Stacy.

They may not be able to hire a $300,000 director of engineering and staff the position with 50 to 100 people, but they have to start looking at the processes, picking the ones that need to be transformed and figuring out how that technology is going to help that transformation.

A couple of things. You said mainframe PCs. What is that? Don’t answer that.

I also have a question that came to mind. It’s a rhetorical question for me. You were speaking about the future of banking and how speed—not the end-all, be-all, but a main pillar—has to be important now with artificial intelligence and finding ways to inject it into improving workflows or whatever it may be.

It made me think: If every financial institution becomes fast, then differentiation—one of the pillars of Cornerstone’s smarter banking and how to be that smarter bank through 2030—is when it’s really going to matter. That’s a whole other conversation when we speak about differentiation.

But can we dive into SoFi? Can I kick that one off?

Yeah, we’ve got a few more minutes. We can stretch this out.

All righty. I want you to expound here. I was just going to remark on the headline of another Substack article from Ron Shevlin. If you are not following him, he is dropping those bars in his articles, so please subscribe.

“You’re Not Losing Members. You’re Losing Money.” SoFi gives checking away, too. It just sells something afterward.

In 2025, you mentioned SoFi opened more new checking and payments accounts than every credit union in America combined. Not one region. Not one asset class. Every credit union in the country combined.

SoFi ended the year with 13.6 million customers and $38 billion in deposits. I know exactly what a room full of community banking leaders would say when they hear that number, Ron, because you’ve heard it too: “We could be like SoFi if we had their app,” or, “If we had their marketing budget.”

Your take on this stopped me cold because you said that’s not it at all. SoFi isn’t winning because of the app. SoFi is winning because it prices the first product to buy the customer, and then it goes and gets the second one.

I loved when you said—and I think I’m going to take this and put it into all my strategic analysis conversations going forward—that it’s an acquisition-and-expansion machine, whereas credit unions, by comparison, are mostly acquisition-and-retention shops.

Get the member, keep the member, throw them a toaster at renewal. Two completely different games, and only one of them is designed to grow.

Thanks for setting that up really well. It’s a mentality difference. It’s not an app difference. It’s not the digital experience.

This really came home for me before we did this research. By the way, it was commissioned by LendKey. The report’s available. The link’s on our site, or you can go to LendKey’s site. It’s about how credit unions can steal SoFi’s playbook.

It is definitely something applicable and transferable to credit unions because it does not require the huge marketing budget that they have. Remember, their marketing budget supports a whole national strategy that cuts across a lot of different products, so that’s different.

But what really set this off, Stacy, was a series of interviews we did before we kicked off the survey itself. We ended up surveying, I think, about 1,200 SoFi members, so we had a pretty good representation and an understanding of how they got into SoFi, what their path of products was, what they started with, how they grew from that and their level of engagement.

But it started with a series of interviews with credit union CEOs about student lending and why they either weren’t offering student loans or weren’t pushing them very heavily.

This was kind of surprising because, Stacy, have you come across a credit union in the past five years that isn’t obsessed with lowering the average age of its member base?

Knowing how many consumers in this country have student debt, and will need student debt over the next few years, why isn’t this a bigger product in credit unions?

We did interviews with about five credit union CEOs, and almost to a person, Stacy, the answer was the same: “We just can’t make an ROI case out of it.”

Here’s the credit union mantra: “Members for life. Lifetime value.” Well, are you looking at the lifetime value of these members?

They also said, “We thought we would be able to sell it to our existing members, the older ones who would need it for their kids or grandchildren.” That just didn’t play out.

Then you start looking at the SoFi model and realize they don’t calculate the ROI on the first product. They calculate the ROI based on the lifetime opportunity, and whatever the first product is, there’s a path to a second product.

Yes, they started off very focused on student loans and really the refinancing opportunity before getting into the primary banking relationship. But it’s really only been the last 18 months when the entry point has been the checking account, the payments account.

They’re still looking at that and saying, “Yes, it’s free, but we know we’ve got a path.” They’re driving engagement.

They’ve got a loyalty program that is not a rewards program. It’s an engagement platform. That’s another aspect that’s so different in terms of the mentality they have, not the technology they have.

I think matching the experience, to your point, isn’t just about having a prettier app. To sum up everything I’m understanding, it’s product design. It’s pricing design. It’s relationship design.

It made me think about a couple of other situations. First—and I think I remarked on this in one of our previous episodes—one of my friends was at my house around Thanksgiving. I was asking all the generations in my house how and where they bank now.

One of our extended family members, in his mid-30s, had just moved everything to SoFi. I said, “Why?”

He said, “I had all my other accounts elsewhere, but SoFi got me at an amazing rate. Then, slowly but surely, I started transferring more because of everything else they were offering.”

It just holds true to this particular article and what we’re saying.

On another completely different note, earlier today our colleague Brandy Gregory remarked—and I’m not sure if you saw this—about the normal experience. I have to read this because, especially in community banking, we think about how to retain our members and customers. All I’m hearing is, “Stacy, I need some churn strategies.”

Brandy said the following: “I don’t often need the banking services offered by my credit union, but recently I needed them for two car loans.”

She goes on to say that she was trying to buy a car 225 miles away from her home address, and the credit union could not offer the loan because the car was located more than 75 miles from its closest branch. They suggested that she finance directly with the dealer and then do them the favor of refinancing at the credit union.

She lives two miles away from the branch, but her home location didn’t matter.

She then provides another example about refinancing a different car loan from Chase to her credit union. She was able to do everything virtually except closing. She needed to go back to the branch for that, and none of the branches close to her had availability for another week or two.

When we start thinking at our shops about what’s standing in the way and why SoFi is winning, let’s understand these examples that still require such a manual, 1993 process.

There are a couple of questions raised here. First, why did Brandy need to go 225 miles away to buy a car? The only thing I can come up with is that it was the closest Lamborghini dealer to Stacy.

I am really looking forward to seeing a picture of Brandy in her new Lamborghini.

But this goes back to the SoFi story, Stacy, because when we did the survey and asked SoFi members, it wasn’t the design of the app. They all pointed to the ease of not just opening the account, but moving the relationship.

Brandy’s story is a great example of what’s on the other side of that coin. It’s, “Look how great the rates we have on our things are, and you can apply online.” But if you can’t do the whole thing—and then, even after she decides she wants to do it with the credit union, you can’t schedule a closing for two weeks—it’s mind-boggling.

How could you not be obsessed with closing that immediately? Even if you’re forcing her to do that, for Christ’s sake, send somebody to her house. She’s two miles away. “We’ll be there in five minutes, Brandy, with the paperwork. You don’t have to get up and leave.”

That’s crazy stuff. But it really shows you the dichotomy of the experience today.

Yep, yep. All right. Well, I think we went a little longer than we usually do, but it’s great to be back, Ron, and to keep going with What’s Going On in Banking.

We spoke about some really heavy-hitting topics today that, now at the tail end of Q3, will hopefully resonate with a lot of our listeners. So I’m going to kick it back to you to close us out.

Thank you, Stacy. As always, I love doing this with you. And everybody, thanks a lot for listening in.

I hope to see you and hear from you on another episode of What’s Going On in Banking. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please follow us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple—wherever.

Please do it because this is the eighth time I’ve had to do this thing. So let’s get it done, people. Follow us. Come on, man.