Digital tech’s next wave, powered by AI, will empower consumers to say “do it for me” rather than do it themselves. U.S. Bank’s innovation team found some promising building blocks at CES 2025.
Digitization ushered in major shifts for many aspects of consumer financial services. Online banking and then mobile banking apps made “everything DIY on a device,” says Don Relyea, chief innovation officer at U.S. Bank. But Relyea is convinced that the age of DIY banking is coming to an end.
“I think the next big space is going to be the emergence of a ‘do it for me’ customer experience,” says Relyea. “Both consumers and companies are going to have tech that will enable them to get information proactively and they’re going to expect companies to do things for them proactively.”
DIFM — “do it for me” — doesn’t have quite the panache for DIY, but “GenAI” didn’t used to look cool either.
Initially, Relyea believes, people and businesses will nibble at the edges of this idea. “You’ll see them ceding control to agentic AI and other automation to handle things like scheduling that aren’t very risky.”
But the technology, and their comfort and acceptance of it, will eventually hit a tipping point, according to Relyea. “Expectations not just in banking, but in all activity, will go up, and we need to be able to meet those expectations head on.”
What’s critical is not to get too far ahead of customers. “We want to meet our customers where they want us to meet them — not the other way around,” says Relyea.
Think of what’s coming as embedded banking to the max. The banking may not only be invisible within a given process, but the process itself may fade into the background as people come to expect artificial intelligence to do more and more for them, perhaps even before they themselves realize they need or want it done.
The implications ripple beyond the technology. What will banking services look like? If agentic AI is going to be making decisions for businesses and consumers, how will marketing to both audiences evolve? What will be the role of branding? How will this intersect with the movement toward open banking?
Much of this remains to be worked out in the future, but the future is near and, in some ways, already here. Preparing for such changes is part of what brought Relyea and members of his team to CES in early January. (CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is run by the Consumer Technology Association.)
Relyea says on-the-ground research he and his folks have done at each year’s conference has helped guide U.S. Bank’s innovation efforts. A landmark: Encountering voice technology at the show a decade ago that turned into the bank’s award-winning U.S. Bank Smart Assistant.
Every year since then, says Relyea, “we’re looking for the next iPhone moment.”
But in the search for a key technology a healthy portion of skepticism goes well with a ticket to a meeting like CES.
U.S. Bank’s innovation chief Don Relyea undergoing a 3D scan on the exhibit floor at CES 2025.
On one side of the exhibit hall Relyea and his team saw retail store technologies that held promise for branches. On another side, “there was a big sign for some company with ‘AI-powered water’,” says Relyea. “It’s probably around water conservation or something, but we didn’t even stop in there.”
Not Getting Suckered by the Hype Cycle
Innovation comes in many shapes and flavors, but often the latest hot thing gets a lot of play. Sometimes this finds legs, sometimes not.
Relyea noted that references to the Metaverse, so prevalent in the past, had become just about invisible this year. Digitally enabled heavy equipment is a pet interest for the team — U.S. Bank finances a lot of it, and, heck, it’s fun. This year Todder Moning, the bank’s SVP and lead futurist, operated a Caterpillar excavator from a cockpit on the show floor in Las Vegas, moving half a swimming pool’s worth of dirt. The machine he was controlling and the dirt he was moving were on a lot in Arizona.
“AI was everywhere at CES, absolutely everywhere — and at times probably in places where it doesn’t necessarily belong,” Relyea says in a post-conference interview with The Financial Brand. “It’s being so hyped right now, people there were sometimes just using it as a branding thing.”
U.S. Bank’s Todder Moning can really dig remote work. In this case, he’s operating a real Caterpillar excavator in Arizona from the exhibit hall at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.
Relyea is an old hand at innovation, and he’s seen this scenario play out over and over again.
“People try to come up with solutions, but they don’t yet have the problem or the marketplace totally defined yet,” he says. Right now, “they’re just combining AI with a bunch of different technologies that are converging, and trying to see if something sticks.”
Not everyone took this road, he says. Out of a hundred things the team saw, he says three or four companies “did it the right way. They thought about: What is the customer problem I’m trying to solve? What is the need in the marketplace? How can I leverage these technologies to meet that need?”
Relyea says finding workable ideas is “very much a needle-in-a-haystack exercise.” Some of the ones that meant the most to the team were practical applications of AI in ways that promised to help people with ordinary life. Two standouts in this regard were exhibits by Samsung and LG — appliance makers — showing how AI could help with running a household.
“What we saw supports what we’re working on, where consumers are going to have really powerful AI tools working at their disposal, as opposed to being manipulated by AI offered by large tech companies,” says Relyea.
Ultimately, “we’re really at CES to understand consumer trends and sentiment towards some of the emerging technologies that we see coming,” he explains.
There are already custom financial GPTs — the abbreviation stands for “Generative Pre-training Transformer” — that can tailor themselves to consumers’ personal needs, circumstances and attitudes that can run their affairs. Their advent is going to put more economic power into consumers’ hands, he says, though they’ll be doing that through the technology.
Is the average consumer ready for this? No.
“Consumers are not there yet,” says Relyea, “certainly not in the finance space. But throughout history, humans have typically traded security and privacy for convenience, and I think you’re going to see tremendous convenience in this space.”
So, at some point, he expects, they will make that trade.
“But consumers aren’t ready yet for that level of automation, and they don’t trust it as much yet,” says Relyea. “And they shouldn’t, just yet.”
The banker noted that many exhibitors offered cybersecurity solutions, sufficiently so that next year he hopes to bring a member of the U.S. Bank cybersecurity team to CES 2026.
Source: THE FINANCIAL BRAND
Recent Comments