Trust, Fear, and Silos: What Banking Leaders Are Really Navigating
Insights from Craft’s Inaugural Inner Circle Roundtable
Recently, we gathered banking leaders across product, digital, and CX to pressure-test a critical question: How can leaders progress bold strategic initiatives while preserving the customer trust, brand authenticity, and institutional stability that define who they are?
The theme was Authenticity by Design: Where purposeful innovation drives measurable growth. What emerged wasn’t a list of technology problems or regulatory headaches. It was something more fundamental about how to innovate at speed while protecting the trust that took decades to build.
Here’s what we learned.
The Trust Paradox: You Can’t Cross-Sell Customers You Never Talk To
The conversation opened with a deceptively simple observation from one participant: “We have really high loyalty and satisfaction scores… but that’s the problem if you don’t look at the underlying segments.”
Dig deeper, and the challenge becomes clear.
Banks spent decades building trust through human relationships. The local banker was a trusted advisor in the community, alongside doctors and lawyers. That personal connection was the foundation of everything.
Technology has eliminated 90% of those interactions. According to recent American Bankers Association research, mobile is now the #1 channel for every generation. Even Baby Boomers prefer mobile first, online second, with branches coming in third.
Yet banks are still trying to cross-sell to customers they never talk to anymore.
As one leader put it bluntly: “How do you cross-sell a group of people that we don’t talk to anymore?”
What Younger Customers Are Actually Saying
The Gen Z perspective was particularly revealing. In research conducted by one participant, younger customers expressed a clear expectation: “I trust you with my money. So, YOU should provide budgeting tools, subscription management, and financial insights. Don’t make me give my credentials to a third party.”
The message is unambiguous: Trust isn’t just about security. It’s about using the data customers give you to provide genuine value back.
But here’s the catch: younger generations don’t respond to traditional feedback mechanisms. One bank reported getting only 1% response rates on email surveys from customers who represent 14–15% of their base.
The solution isn’t bringing them into branches (they’ll only go “on pain of death”). It’s about creating what one leader called “white glove service in a fully digital environment,” establishing deep relationships without a single human conversation.
Innovation Paralysis: “Why Are We All So Scared?”
Midway through the roundtable, one executive asked a question that reoriented the room:
“Why are we all so damn scared?”
“Everyone’s worried about what Bitcoin will do, where AI is taking us, what the regulators will say, what the Fed will do. These are all important things, but they dominate the conversation. Everyone’s so scared… we got this. Banks are very good at managing risk, but we don’t have to sit here being absolutely polarized by not knowing which way to jump.”
The Fear Factor
The comment resonated because it named something everyone was experiencing:
Risk and compliance are brought in after building, not before. Teams spend months developing solutions only to have them blocked at the approval stage.
The search for a “magic bullet” AI use case becomes an excuse for inaction. One leader drew parallels to the dot-com era, when agencies proclaimed the end of the old world, only to collapse themselves when the hype didn’t match reality.
Perfect becomes the enemy of good. Organizations wait for the killer use case instead of making incremental progress.
Customer expectations are set by Tesla and Amazon, not Chase. One participant shared that a customer told them, “My Tesla app is easier to use than your banking app.”
What’s Actually Working
The banks making progress aren’t waiting for permission or perfect solutions. They’re taking a fundamentally different approach:
1. Early Partnership with Risk and Compliance
Instead of presenting finished solutions, forward-thinking teams are saying: “We want to build this thing. What scares you? What challenges do you see?” Building solutions that address compliance concerns from day one, rather than retrofitting security into finished products.
2. Programs Over Projects
Rather than hunting for one big AI win, successful institutions are running programs of 100 small automation wins. One leader described it as “digging ditches every day in the right spot.”
3. Making Humans Better at Being Human
The most successful AI application discussed was “Agent Assist,” listening to contact center conversations in real time. It helps agents by:
- Providing sentiment analysis and tone coaching
- Summarizing conversations automatically
- Surfacing relevant FAQs and documentation instantly
As one participant explained: “If you can make AI applications make the human be better at being human, that’s a great use case.”
4. Moving from Reactive to Proactive
Multiple leaders identified this as a top priority. The vision: When the Fed cuts rates, automatically triggering outreach to specific customer segments. When a customer has a life event, anticipating their needs before they ask.
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As one executive put it: “Don’t make the client come to us. Let’s go to the client. Obviously, it’s beneficial for us, but in a way where we can really offer something beneficial to them.”
The Single Source of Truth That Banks Keep Missing
When we asked each leader to commit to one action for the year ahead, something remarkable happened: Nearly everyone pointed to the same foundational issue, just phrased differently.
- “Breaking down silos”
- “Purposeful collaboration across departments”
- “A single source of comprehensive customer data”
The Viking Cruise Lines Lesson
One participant shared a Viking Cruise story that crystallized the challenge.
What makes Viking different?
“From the CEO all the way down to people you don’t even see that are probably mopping the floors at night, everyone is focused on the customer. The physicality of the ship, the quality of food, the tech engineered into your room card, the way they know your food preferences, how they meet you at the airport… everything in the journey is a highly orchestrated, intentionally designed experience.”
He asked the room: “Why can’t banks do this?”
The Brutal Answer
Even with massive amounts of customer data, most banks don’t have a unified view. Marketing sees one truth. Operations sees another. Product sees a third. Digital sees a fourth.
One leader explained the consequence: “You could have two customers with identical balances and identical activity levels. One is an absolute promoter of your brand with tons of money at other institutions. The other is a severe detractor, one foot out the door based on their last interaction. Without experiential data connected to operational data, you can’t take the right action for either one.”
Why This Matters More Than Your AI Strategy
Without a single source of truth:
- You can’t anticipate customer needs — you’re reacting instead of being proactive
- Different departments interpret data differently — killing consistency
- The customer experience fractures across channels and touchpoints
- Innovation investments underperform because they’re solving for partial pictures
As one participant noted: “It’s not just what you do, but what happens to the left of you, to the right of you, in the journey that the customer takes. We have to be better connected together to be as helpful as we possibly can.”
The real unlock isn’t about tools, it’s about leadership, culture, and data. What emerged clearly: breaking down silos, aligning around a shared view of the customer, and designing experiences where technology serves a clear, human-centered strategy rather than driving it.
Strategic Priorities for the Year Ahead
The roundtable ended with commitments. Here’s what banking leaders are prioritizing:
From reactive to proactive service models — Anticipating customer needs based on life events, market changes, and behavioral patterns.
Technology in service of experience, not the opposite — Choosing and implementing technology that supports the user experience vision, rather than letting technology constraints drive the experience.
Unified customer data platforms — Breaking down silos to create a single, comprehensive view of each customer that combines transactional and experiential data.
Cultural transformation around collaboration — Moving from departmental optimization to journey-based orchestration.
Strategic, measured AI adoption — Focusing on making humans better at their jobs and automating the right tasks, not chasing magic bullets.
Openness over fear — Moving forward despite uncertainty, managing risk without becoming paralyzed by it.
Designed to Deliver Value
Following the roundtable, we synthesized the conversation into a strategic framework for participants — distilling key signals to watch, implications for their organizations, and near-term opportunities they can act on immediately. The goal wasn’t just a good conversation — it was creating clarity that shifts outcomes.
What’s Next for the Inner Circle
Craft’s Inner Circle Roundtable is held quarterly, and throughout the year we’ll be diving even deeper into the themes that matter most to banking leaders navigating this transformative moment.
Topics we’re exploring for upcoming sessions:
- Establishing executive alignment on what customer experience success looks like
- Designing breakthrough value for advisors and customers from your data
- Building advisory relationships at scale in a digital-first world
- Financial education as a trust-building strategy across all customer segments
- Orchestrating seamless experiences across physical and digital touchpoints
Interested in joining future Inner Circle roundtables? We’re building a community of product, CX and digital executives who want to move beyond surface-level conference panels and dive into the work that actually matters. See what happens when artfully crafted questions meet peer expertise. Contact @Scott Esmond.
About Craft: Recognized for their experience design expertise and deep roots in financial services, Craft partners with leading banks across retail, small business, commercial, private, and wealth management to create experiences that build trust, drive engagement, and deliver measurable growth.
