Your bank knows the customer. The employee sitting across from that customer usually does not.

Banks and credit unions have spent millions learning about the people they serve, then built an access model that keeps most of what they know away from the employees responsible for those relationships. New research from MIT's Center for Information Systems Research finds that only 28% of employees regularly draw on the data assets their organization has already built, and that employees who do reach data spend 61% of that time finding and preparing it rather than learning anything from it.

In this Banking Insights episode, Jim Marous examines the gap between data creation and data use inside financial institutions. He argues that the industry measures one kind of risk carefully and never records the other: the relationships lost, the avoidable fees nobody questioned, and the marketing dollars spent acquiring customers who quietly went dormant, all because a signal never reached a person who could act on it.

Drawing on the MIT research, the Digital Banking Report study of agentic AI in banking sponsored by OpenText, and examples from Fifth Third and Bangor Savings Bank, he shows why fraud teams have already solved this problem and why far fewer institutions have done the same work for the employee desktop.

The episode closes on a question every leader can answer this week. What would change if the person handling your next important customer conversation could see what your institution already knows, and had the authority to act on it?

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 thefinancialbrand.com.