Banking, Payments & Digital Strategy — commentary for bank and credit union executives on where digital banking platforms, core modernization, and payments infrastructure actually create advantage versus where they’ve hit parity. Covers vendor evaluation beyond feature checklists (culture, talent flow, ownership structure, technical moat), the gap between “AI-native” marketing and embedded intelligence, and the bridge between today’s digital banking and an agentic financial future.
BYO AI will happen. It should not be the next experience you fund. If the front end is somebody else’s LLM, the branded experience you already paid for disappears — and the adoption curve still looks like Apple Pay, not like a vendor roadmap.
Six critical criteria for executives evaluating digital banking in the era of intelligence No technology decision you make will have a greater impact on the long-term relevance and competitive posture of your institution than the digital banking system you select next. Your team will still dig into features, functionality, and process. That’s their focus. Yours…
Recent client engagements have renewed my conviction that Banks must modernize. Or die. Over the course of the last 20 years, banks have either consolidated and gotten bigger, or closed up shop to the point that there are roughly 40% fewer of them in the U.S. today. The same is true for credit unions. In…