Banking Reinvented

Dr. Efi Pylarinou, founder of Pylarinou Advisory and a fintech-focused finance PhD, explores the rise of agentic banking. They discuss early AI payments, why customers hesitate to delegate financial execution, liability when agents make mistakes, and the shift from APIs to agent connectivity. The conversation also covers MCP governance, tokenized money, agent-native banks, and safe outcomes over automation metrics.

Banks no longer have a monopoly on financial guidance. Nearly as many consumers now ask ChatGPT about their finances as ask their bank’s own assistant, yet most banks still score their assistants on calls deflected. That metric can’t tell them whether customers got what they came for or whether those customers are quietly drifting elsewhere.In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten chats with guest speaker Aurélie L’Hostis, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who has tracked conversational banking since she wrote one of the first reports on chatbots in banking a decade ago. Drawing on that history, she explains how banks should measure conversational AI now that it’s moving from answering questions to helping customers actually complete tasks.The conversation covers the four types of metrics she recommends, spanning customer outcomes, operations, business results, and risk; why governance belongs in the design from day one and works as an accelerator; how to organize ownership across a bank; and why, in 2027, banks will need to make their products visible and trustworthy to the AI agents customers use to find them.Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.

Nvalaye Kourouma, Ecobank’s Group Chief Digital Officer and a former Coca-Cola strategist across 21 African countries, explores AI-led banking across 35 markets. He discusses one platform with local execution, governance over fragmented innovation, and AI as a capital allocation decision. The conversation also covers microloans for underserved customers, local-language interfaces, and building shared AI infrastructure for Africa.

Steven Redden, a McKinsey partner leading data and AI strategy across the US and Canada, brings an engineer’s mindset and startup experience to banking’s biggest technology tensions. He explores why AI-ready data demands more than regulatory compliance, how domain-led transformation can create measurable value, and where competitive advantage really lies beyond language models. The conversation also examines AI-native banks and why smaller institutions may move faster.

Jennifer Jefferson, PwC’s Gen AI Banking Transformation Leader and former commercial banker, explores commercial banking’s AI opportunity. She discusses treasury management onboarding, agent-to-agent interactions between corporations and banks, zero-touch operations, and why isolated AI fixes fall short. She also shares how hands-on experiments, hackathons, and candid leadership can turn frontline skepticism into transformation.

Patricia Hines, a financial-services technology strategist; Tom Collins, West Monroe’s commercial banking leader; Shannon Lambert-Habermehl, BOK Financial’s commercial COO; and Christine Martin, EverBank’s treasury chief, explore commercial banking’s next act. They tackle the compliance burden in onboarding, smarter payments, AI-enabled relationship managers, fraud detection, and real-time working-capital management. A sharp look at technology that strengthens human relationships.

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, host Tim Rutten talks with Fabiano Lewis, Global Head of Digital Trust at Feedzai. Feedzai is the native risk operations platform working with the world's leading financial institutions on fraud prevention.Fabiano brings 17 years of experience at the intersection of real-time risk, AI, and banking transformation. He explores how the fraud landscape has become industrialized.The conversation covers why the democratization of digital banking has opened the door to a new generation of fraud. Fabiano explains how deepfakes and AI-generated documents have made traditional onboarding verification dangerously unreliable. He argues that banks treating fraud prevention as a point-in-time check are losing a fight measured in milliseconds.Fabiano also tackles the agentic question no one in financial services has fully answered. When AI agents transact on behalf of customers, how does a bank tell the good ones from the bad? And why business banking - higher limits, shared account access, fewer controls - is becoming the next major frontier for financial crime.

Kelvin Chen, a policy leader who built the Fed’s innovation team and now leads US policy at the Consumer Bankers Association. He unpacks agentic payments, gaps in outdated liability rules, rising consumer risks from stablecoin and API-driven rails. They discuss why banks will be pulled into agent-driven commerce and a governance shift toward ongoing monitoring of probabilistic AI agents.

Mitch Siegel, Principal and Partner at EY who leads Next‑Gen Banking and Payments Tech with ~30 years in financial services. He talks about legacy cores and COBOL holding banks back. He explains why committee-driven governance and data silos slow AI. He discusses regulation flipping from drag to advantage and how orgs must reshuffle roles as AI changes work.

Tom Collins is a Senior Partner and National Commercial Banking Practice Lead at West Monroe, a consulting firm with 250 banking professionals working across commercial lending, credit and risk, treasury management, and payments. In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Tom joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that advancements in AI are pushing commercial banking to an inflection point, and the distance between the banks moving and the banks watching is compounding.The conversation covers the generational shift in commercial client expectations that most banks are still underestimating, the growing competition to find and own the white space in client relationships, and the cautionary tale of banks that convinced themselves strong relationship management was a reason to move slower on technology.Tom also gets specific about what AI looks like in production: continuous portfolio monitoring that catches emerging risk and attrition signals before they become problems. He also walks through why banks that get the technology right but leave their people unprepared for what comes next are only solving half the problem.Curious to find out more about AI in banking? Check out our content hub.