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Assuming you can drown out the blockchain chatter, artificial intelligence (AI) is this year’s hottest financial services topic. Although IBM’s Watson and Google’s Deep Mind remain somewhat abstract concepts from a mass market perspective, consumer breakthroughs like Siri and Amazon Alexa have begun to set expectations for banking interactions, leading to high-profile rollouts like Bank of America’s virtual assistant, Erica.

Most of the early-stage rollouts, focusing on chatbots and fraud detection, are coming from the industry’s largest players. Credit unions and community banks cannot afford to fall too far behind the curve and need ample opportunity to participate in exploratory ventures. At the same time, it’s important to remain mindful of AI’s potential downsides if not properly implemented.  

At SRM, we take the time – every six months or so – to step back from our various engagements with clients to identify the general trends we have seen in our work and consider how they might play out in the coming six months. Just past the midpoint in 2018, there are several forces in play worth mentioning.

It seems like basic blocking and tackling on the surface, but you’d probably be surprised with how often it slips through the cracks. Most financial institution vendor contracts include a requirement that the client file a “notice of non-renewal,” otherwise the agreement will automatically renew at “expiration” on pre-defined terms. A multi-million dollar organization should have no trouble tracking such administrative to-dos as vendor contract management, right?

In case you missed it, June 2018 saw another consortium enter the already crowded payments fray. As its name implies, the Secure Payments Partnership’s primary focus is “to address the ongoing battle against payment fraud and to devise improvements for the U.S. card payment system.” To understand the impact of this announcement, the history and context below must be considered.