Tyler Brown

Bankers’ words drip with acid when they say what they think about a relationship with their core providers, at least in the public record. A perverse benchmark based on American Bankers Association data shows COCC leading customer satisfaction even though it resells Fiserv DNA: Bankers loathe the product when it’s sold by Fiserv. Behind this index are lessons for vendors about customer satisfaction and implications for technology selection that run deeper than a bubble chart.

“Meet customers where they are” is a truism that runs rampant in strategy sessions, then gets parroted to the press. It’s code for “spend more on mobile banking;” it’s an easy out when there’s no cookie-cutter catchphrase for how consumers and businesses interact with their finances in 2026. The mobile era is over: What it means to be a banking channel has changed nearly overnight thanks to AI; banks don’t own the channel; few vendors support it. And nobody knows how they should talk about it.

A chatbot’s place is not as a do-everything box that turns typed instructions into actions. Its purpose is to return useful answers to precise questions when it would take the user more time or energy to tap, click to get the same information or to manually calculate results. It’s fashionable to think that an AI bot will solve friction in digital banking, and easy to jump on the bandwagon. How they work and how they should be used are more sophisticated and more nuanced.