BAI Banking Strategies

Banks and credit unions have invested heavily to enhance the customer experience on customer-facing channels to keep pace with fintechs and other competitors. Less thought and spending have been focused on middle- and back-office operations. Tammi Shapiro, global head of product for financial services at ServiceNow, makes the economic and efficiency case for implementing an end-to-end digital solution.

Financial institutions have experience dealing with recessions that hammer businesses and elevate default risk among borrowers. But 2020 offers a new wrinkle — an instant collapse in economic activity due to a deadly pandemic. On this podcast, Laurent Birade and James Partridge, both experts in credit risk analysis at Moody’s Analytics, discuss the challenges of extreme tail events and how going through COVID-19 may help improve future risk modeling.

Many banks run ad campaigns highlighting how they serve customers in the military community, but we hear less about banks and credit unions hiring from the military community. For Veteran’s Day, our podcast guest is Barclay Keith, who served in the Army in Afghanistan prior to co-founding the fintech firm Artis Technologies, where he is now CEO. He joins us to share insights on what veterans have to offer banks and credit unions.

Bank branches were already evolving when the coronavirus arrived last spring, and the pandemic has only added to that state of change. Sue Dowd,  senior vice president of retail strategy at design firm Miller Zell, discusses branch safety measures during COVID and how financial institutions are trying to get more out of less space.

Perhaps nothing in banking has been more disrupted by COVID-19 than customer service, and it’s still unclear which of today’s workarounds will become permanent changes. Patrick Reetz, senior vice president for products and markets at Revation Systems, discusses the present and future of customer service, including how banks should blend their digital and human capabilities to achieve best results.

One of COVID-19's key impacts on banking is an acceleration of the industry’s transition away from the branch and toward the digital device. While that may be the broad trend, a deeper look shows a less uniform reality, with some banks and credit unions transitioning faster and more effectively than others. We’ll traverse this uneven terrain with Greg Thompson, director of change management at nCino, and get his take on how financial institutions should think about digital transformation.

With the arrival of COVID-19, fraudsters and other criminals have put even more of a bull’s eye on financial institutions. Greater reliance on digital banking, the cyber exposures of work from home and the harsh economic side effects of the pandemic are all contributing to the upswing in scams and schemes targeting the industry. Matt Tengwall, general manager for fraud and security solutions at Verint Systems, discusses tough security challenges that banks and credit unions now face, and some ways to more effectively meet those challenges.

COVID-19 has forced banks and credit unions to embrace short-term change -- the health of their businesses depends on it. These changes create opportunities for innovation. Amy Radin, a leading voice on innovation in financial services and author of “The Change Maker’s Playbook,” is the guest on this week's podcast. She discusses how banks and credit unions can innovate for the longer term, as well as the BAI Global Innovations Awards, where Radin has served as a judge the past several years.

The national focus on inequality is driving greater efforts to address long-standing issues around diversity, equity and inclusion in the financial services industry. Nate Bennett, chief diversity officer at Comerica Bank, discusses the industry's successes and ongoing challenges when it comes to DEI, as well as to discuss what’s working for Comerica in its approach to DEI that might also work for other banks and credit unions.

What are the key factors driving a financial institution’s profitability? How do banks set strategy and then support it? What are the products and services of tomorrow, and how should they be priced? Enterprise performance management (EPM) can help answer these questions and more. On this podcast, Danny Baker, vice president of market strategy at Fiserv, discusses how EPM works and how it may provide value for banks and credit unions dealing with a disrupted financial services landscape.