Why a Bank Built a Fintech to Compete With Itself

Download the free Innovation in Retail Banking report, with insights from 170+ banking executives worldwide: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/dbr/dbr314 Bancolombia built a digital bank to compete with itself. It now serves 24 million customers. Many U.S. bankers still think of Latin America as a region catching up. Fidel Vargas, Chief Information Officer of Bancolombia, says that's the wrong lens. Inclusion, fast digital adoption, real-time payments, and a wave of new competitors, from Nubank to Revolut to Mercado Pago, have forced Colombia's largest bank to innovate at a pace few U.S. institutions face. The result is a model worth studying for any bank or credit union, built by an institution with more than 32 million customers. Fidel walks through why Bancolombia let Nequi, the digital bank it started inside the bank 10 years ago, become its own licensed company with 24 million customers, and how the group decides when an internal initiative needs more speed, a different regulatory setting, or a brand of its own. He also explains why Bancolombia brought more than 60% of its IT people in-house and builds what sets it apart. That decision rule, starting inside and separating only when a customer need demands it, is one any institution can apply at its own scale. On AI, Bancolombia moved past experiments two years ago and put generative AI in front of customers, cutting its contact center budget by more than 20%. Fidel explains why innovation and resilience aren't competing priorities for a 150-year-old bank, why he believes banks that don't modernize won't survive, and why his toughest daily challenge is helping his own people keep pace with change. He closes with the daily forums Bancolombia runs to keep its teams aligned with how fast customers are moving. About the guest: Fidel Vargas Londoño is Chief Information Officer of Bancolombia, part of Grupo Cibest, where he connects business and technology and leads digital transformation across the bank and its companies. Thanks to Infosys Finacle and Qorus for making this conversation possible as part of our ongoing work on innovation in retail banking. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

A bank or credit union that waits for balances to grow before helping a customer start investing may be handing the relationship to Robinhood Banking. Robinhood Banking has reached more than $3 billion in deposits by starting with customers who were already investing. Robinhood reported more than $3 billion in Banking deposits from over 240,000 funded Banking customers at the end of June 2026, within a base of 28.4 million funded customers. About 40% of Banking customers had signed up for direct deposit. Those figures show traction, and they leave open how much income is arriving and whether Robinhood has become a primary account. Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC, provides banking services, and Robinhood describes itself as a financial technology company. Gold members who receive qualifying direct deposits earn checking interest and certain fee waivers, giving existing investors a financial reason to move recurring income to a company that already holds their investments. Javelin Strategy argues the larger risk for banks and credit unions may be the investment assets of younger, upwardly mobile customers, who are easy to overlook while balances are small. Bank Policy Institute research found banks lost ground in brokerage and mutual fund services between 2016 and 2022, which fits a pattern of customers starting to invest outside their main institution. The episode follows a made-up customer named Daniel, who is happy with his bank and starts investing $50 a month elsewhere, and asks what his institution had ready that evening. Daniel's story shows how a customer's decision could unfold. It closes with a test to run this week: have your team show an existing customer starting a $50 monthly investment, in the app and at a branch or by phone, and count the screens, calls and days. Four questions show where an ordinary customer would stop. About: Banking Insights Videos give bank and credit union leaders a practical view of one development at a time. Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and host of Banking Transformed. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Banks can give each customer a VIP on the phone with voice AI, if trust comes first. Bland CEO Isaiah Granet says his AI already handles more than 3 million phone calls a week. At JPMorgan Chase, a great customer gets a private wealth banker. Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, believes voice AI can give everyone else a version of that relationship: a contact in their phone that answers by name at any hour. He estimates call centers cost companies more than $1 trillion a year worldwide, says that spending is already about as lean as it gets, and argues the bigger opportunity is customer lifetime value. He also sees savings in cutting the phone tree, hold time and drop-off friction. Granet is direct about what it takes to deploy conversational AI in a regulated institution. Bland does not build on the large frontier AI labs and will run on premise so customer data stays inside the bank or credit union. He recommends starting slowly, with a first interaction that simply routes the call, and says Bland's average time to go live is under 30 days. He also explains why internal notes need rules, since an unflattering comment about a customer could surface in a call. The conversation gets practical on the details that shape the customer's experience. Granet explains warm transfers, where one AI keeps a caller company while a second AI briefs the call center agent, and citations, which pull policy or reference numbers from a call and write them back to a system of record. He also covers mortgage calls, the pathways approach that lets a language model follow an institution's procedures, why one brain should serve voice, text and chat, and why Bland trains a voice that competitors cannot use. About Isaiah Granet: Granet is the co-founder and CEO of Bland, which began in health tech, went through Y Combinator and pivoted to voice AI. Bland builds conversational voice AI for large enterprises. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Hear the full conversation with Jorge Camargo of Bank of America on Banking Transformed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KibFqG47KzQ Banks and credit unions can let customers see and correct what the institution assumes about them, the way Amazon's About You page does for shoppers. Bank of America's experience shows customers will share what matters when someone asks. Amazon now gives shoppers a page where they can view, change or remove the preferences behind their recommendations, and even ask its shopping assistant what it knows about them. Most banks and credit unions still decide what a customer needs from transaction data the customer never sees. When that guess is wrong, the customer gets an offer that doesn't fit and quietly concludes their financial institution doesn't really know them. Jim Marous draws on his conversation with Jorge Camargo, who runs digital platforms at Bank of America. Erica, the bank's virtual assistant, has handled more than 3 billion conversations that came down to about 700 consumer banking topics, and one overarching concern customers bring to the relationship: am I good? By 2023, Life Plan users had scheduled more than 2.3 million follow-up appointments with the bank's financial specialists. Jim lays out three questions any institution can ask: what's your biggest financial challenge, how can we do better, and where else do you do business? The follow-up that matters most is "Did we get this right?" This isn't a big bank story. A community bank or credit union can start this week with one financial need, one channel it already has, and a promise to respond. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at thefinancialbrand.com.

Community banks and credit unions keep pace by putting their own data to work for customers. Many community banks and credit unions already have the technology, data and insights they need, and are waiting too long to put them to work. That execution gap is what customers and members feel. Greg Adelson, President and CEO of Jack Henry, joins Jim Marous to explain why the technology gap with the largest banks is narrowing while the execution gap keeps getting wider, and what it takes for community institutions to keep pace. Greg sees the institutions that end up acquired as the ones that waited too long or chose not to invest. The way forward starts with data. As Greg puts it, nobody has more data than a bank or a credit union, and the flow of funds shows where customers and members are moving money long before an account closes. He and Jim discuss turning that insight into a better experience, and why no provider can be the best at everything. That makes partner choice critical. Institutions need partners that work openly with others and can help them deploy at speed and scale. On AI, Greg's advice is to protect what community institutions were built on- service, relationship, and trust - by taking cost out of the back office and putting those savings into people on the front line. He closes on the opportunity he'd act on first: Gen Z. About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed explores the people and ideas changing retail banking. New episodes multiple times each week.

PayPal and Venmo already have brand recognition and a huge customer base. Can they become your customers' primary bank in the future? PayPal's CEO has shared their plan for the future. PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous breaks down what Venmo's debit card economics, Teen Accounts, and a rejected $53 billion buyout bid actually say about where that trust is headed next, and what it would cost your bank or credit union if a customer's paycheck lands there first. Inside the episode: • → PayPal and Venmo together reported 439 million active accounts last quarter, more than Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo combined, built on trust that predates every major neobank challenger. • → PayPal CEO Enrique Lores has told investors he wants Venmo to become a one-stop shop for money management, crypto, and investing, modeled directly on SoFi and Chime. • → Venmo Teen Accounts let kids 13 to 17 receive direct deposit tied to a parent's Venmo, meaning a first paycheck can land in Venmo before it ever touches a bank or credit union. • → Stripe and private equity firm Advent offered a 28% premium to buy PayPal in July, and reporting says Venmo, not Braintree, was the real prize behind the bid. • → Zelle still moves nearly three times as much P2P money as Venmo, but Venmo wins on frequency, identity, and brand pull, the real foundation of a banking super app. • → A Fiserv marketing executive's own teenage daughter got her Venmo debit card before anything arrived from her traditional bank account, a preview of the customer banks are losing first. • → Every dollar that sits in Venmo and gets spent on a Venmo debit card earns your own debit card nothing, while Venmo builds a map of customer spending you'll never see. Institutions and research referenced: PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Zelle, Stripe, Advent, Chime, Nubank, SoFi, and Fiserv. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Microsoft's financial services data chief forecast in 2023 how banks would use generative AI. Charles Morris now leads agentic enterprise strategy at Truist, and his early calls are worth revisiting. In February 2023, barely two months after ChatGPT reached the public, Jim Marous asked Charles Morris, then Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft, where generative AI was headed. Morris admitted he had never lived through an inflection point like it, then got specific. He described AI as a copilot to a human pilot who stays responsible for every output, speeding up first drafts, summaries of long documents and search across large content libraries. For compliance and documentation-heavy work in banking, he said, the early value was simply spending less time reading what nobody needed to read. He pointed to CarMax, which used OpenAI models to summarize customer reviews for every car it sells and cut work it estimated would take years down to a few months, with its own team approving the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with knowledge systems that hold verified facts, and called a professional human in the loop the strongest safeguard against errors reaching customers. That pairing, now widely known as retrieval-augmented generation, became a common pattern for enterprise AI. On jobs, Morris argued generative AI would show which parts of knowledge work are repetitive and which depend on creativity and people, changing roles and creating new kinds of work. This is the first Flashback Friday, a replay of one of our most-viewed conversations tested against what has happened since. Morris has since become SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Listen for which of his calls held up, and how far your own bank or credit union has moved since 2023. About the guest: Charles Morris was Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft when this conversation was recorded in February 2023. He is now SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.

Download Alkami's 2026 Generational Trends in Digital Banking research: https://www.alkami.com/resources/research/2026-generational-trends-in-digital-banking-report/?YouTubeIV54 To win over millennials and Gen Z, a bank or credit union has to win their primary checking account. J.D. Power finds these generations open 67% of all new primary checking accounts, and community institutions are winning less than their existing share. Millennials and Gen Z are the customers who will replace the baby boomers most banks and credit unions rely on today. Yet J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Millennial & Gen Z Checking Satisfaction Study shows midsize banks, community banks and credit unions hold 26% of these relationships while winning only 21% of new ones. Fintech customers rate their accounts higher on fee fairness, real-time balances and help making progress, and J.D. Power found many of the gaps come down to design and policy choices. Jim Marous uses his own son's banking to show where these relationships go: $200 a paycheck left at a top-5 bank to cover automatic payments, direct deposit at Chase after a rewards card he found through AI and search, daily spending on Venmo, and a credit union checking account that only makes the mortgage payment. As Jason Dorsey, who led new research for Alkami, puts it, a primary banking relationship is no longer a promise of exclusivity. Jim then lays out six moves for product, marketing and contact center teams: being named when customers ask AI or search where to bank, a 3-minute mobile account opening, no fees on small overdrafts, available balances that update the moment a purchase is approved, goal-based onboarding with a progress tracker and short money lessons, and helping customers discover the right feature at the moment it fits. The customers who will sustain a bank or credit union's growth may already have an account there. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

A $3.2 billion credit union chooses its digital partners from member surveys, and the results show. Chartway Credit Union runs $3.2 billion in assets and serves 265,000 members, yet it brought in $2 million in CD deposits in under 45 days without leading on rate. It segmented members with known excess liquidity, reached them with a personalized Pulsate push, and took them through one-tap Entersekt authentication straight into account opening and funding. Esteban Guerra explains why a batch email and a trip to the branch would have lost a large share of those members along the way, and why the targeting kept the money from behaving like hot money. The method behind it starts with members. Chartway surveys them, builds its roadmap from what they ask for, then searches Q2's Innovation Studio and checks references with credit unions on a similar stack before choosing a partner. With 85% of members on the mobile app and roughly 1.7 million logins a month, any partner that adds friction to mobile doesn't make the cut. And the feedback flows both ways: Chartway takes what members tell it back to its partners, and it often ends up on their roadmaps. Speed has changed the math for smaller institutions. Work that took six to nine months now takes weeks, and Chartway had ScribeUp subscription management in a production pilot in under two weeks. During a fraud spike it added background authentication rather than friction and cut manual reviews by 40%. Esteban, whose credit union was named Q2's 2026 Credit Union of the Year, closes with advice for banks and credit unions earlier in the journey: start with your members, invest in your people, and do the due diligence. About the series: The Experience Factor is a special Banking Transformed series with Q2, recorded at Q2 CONNECT 2026 in Austin, Texas, featuring consumer banking experts and financial institution leaders on how account holder experience and engagement drive long-term success. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Agentic AI: Powering the Self-Driving Bank: https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/agentic-ai-powering-the-self-driving-bank/ A bank or credit union that judges Meta's Muse by whether it moves deposits is watching the wrong risk. Within about 10 days of launch, Muse was the most downloaded free app on the iPhone, and it reads customer accounts through Plaid. Meta's chief AI officer has challenged people to see whether Muse can find them $1,000, and the Muse Money Challenge gives customers a low-risk reason to connect their accounts. A forgotten subscription or a lower bill is a small win, but small wins build a habit. Each useful result makes it easier for a customer to bring the agent a bigger question, from which credit card to use to where to borrow for a major purchase, and none of that requires moving a single deposit. In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous builds on his earlier video, The Agentic Bank Run. Many observers, including the chief economist at Apollo, are now warning that AI agents could pull low-cost deposits out of checking accounts. Jim argues that deposit flight may be the last thing to move. The earlier exposure is influence over the decisions that grow a relationship, including the lending side of the balance sheet, where Plaid's liabilities data gives an agent a view of card and loan balances. Jim closes with five practical moves for a bank or credit union: testing Muse internally, alerting customers when a recurring bill increases, reviewing customer borrowing before an agent does, giving branch and contact center staff the tools and authority to respond to an agent's comparison, and running a 30-day money challenge that puts a real person behind the help. Most of these moves rely on data the institution already holds, and the episode is candid about what that data can and cannot tell you about a customer's next financial decision. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.