Jim Marous 💯

I had the great honor of speaking at the Majlis Mohamed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi, on the grounds of the Grand Mosque on The Future of Finance in the Age of Intelligence.

In attendance was His Highness Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Thank you to my family and the teams from Majlis Mohamed Bin Zayed, @provokemgmt, @StreamEvergreen and @FinancialBrand for the ongoing support.

youtu.be/Q6Uaq24dxuA?si…

For decades, traditional retail banking operated under a comfortable assumption: once a consumer opened a checking account, that institution became their exclusive financial home for life.

Today's consumers fragment their financial lives across multiple providers without hesitation. They keep a legacy account open just to satisfy mortgage payment obligations, use peer-to-peer apps for daily spending, and move their direct deposits wherever credit rewards or digital experiences are highest.

When community institutions rely on historical loyalty rather than frictionless digital onboarding, they wake up to find their best depositors have quietly dispersed across half a dozen platforms.

❓ What strategies is your executive team implementing to become the true financial hub for account holders who use multiple competing apps? Share your take in the comments section.

📌 Watch the full Banking Insights Episode: youtu.be/HK6OKfhd-7s

If you ask your children who their primary financial institution is, are they actually picking the company that owns their checking account?

My son is 28. If he looked deeply into his soul, his primary financial institution is probably Venmo. That's the way he makes payments.

Second, or maybe primarily, it's his credit card company. He puts as many transactions through it as he can to get the rewards.

Here's what was interesting. He just bought a house and just got a new job.

He transferred his legacy checking account relationship to the company that owned the credit card.

The checking account followed the payments relationship, not the other way around.

❓ So who is really primary for your customers?

📌 Watch the full episode with Greg Adelson of @JH_Fintech: youtu.be/XGHPrJSWVAY

The community hub is one of the most admired branch ideas in banking. It is also one of the least prioritized.

In our 2026 Future of Branch Banking research, advisory ranks as the top priority at 52%. Transactions come second, which is appropriate: the routine work has not disappeared from the branch, it is simply no longer the point of it. Community centers rank as a top priority for 10%.

The hub concept has taken up a lot of space in industry conversation about reimagining branches. Most institutions are not designing their networks around it as a primary use case.

I think they are reading that correctly.

Community programming without advisory skills generates goodwill, not growth. Goodwill is real. It just does not compound.

Community connection matters. It works best integrated with relationship banking rather than run as a strategy of its own. And what is left for the branch is not a smaller version of the old role. It is a different one, built around the moments that still need human judgment, trust, and conversation.

That is where the growth is.

❓ So, for your network: are your branch teams trained to turn community goodwill into advice someone can act on?

📌 Grab your free copy of the 2026 Future of Branch Banking here: digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-fu…

Bank of America became the first bank ever to sponsor the World Cup, in a deal reported to be at least $100 million.

That puts their logo in front of billions. It does not buy their attention. It rents proximity to attention the tournament had already created.

Most banks and credit unions answer the attention question with visibility. Branches, impressions, sponsorships, the sheer number of times your name appears. But visibility only measures who saw you. It says nothing about who actually cared.

You can be everywhere a customer or member looks, and still be the thing they look beyond.

The real threat was never dislike. It is the customer who simply stops noticing you and starts giving their attention to whoever earned it.

Attention is not a number you report after the fact. It is the leading indicator of the whole relationship. By the time the deposits move and the balances thin out, the contest is already settled.

Attrition rarely begins with a closed account. It begins months earlier, the day a customer's attention moves on without telling you.