Digital transformation is the 2022 payments phrase of year. You can’t attend a meeting without hearing about its importance in the financial services landscape, and when you consider that nearly nine in ten Americans are now using some form of digital payments, you understand why it needs to be a top priority.

In late 2022, ICBA announced it was bringing the Accelerator and all innovation activities in house. In this episode, our guests reveal the reasons behind this move and give a glimpse of how the association will develop initiatives that help community banks flourish.

Bob Dylan once said, “There is nothing so stable as change,” and I have found that to be true, particularly as we look to embrace modern technologies and the companies that enable them.

Even if you aren’t hearing the words “faster payments” or “instant payments” directly from your customers, trends and research show the demand is there – and rising. Recent Federal Reserve surveys reveal growing interest in faster payments

When I attended FinovateFall in September, I was struck by its palpable energy. Not only was it the most well attended Finovate to date with roughly 1,800 attendees and 64 participating companies, it was a widely collaborative conference, converting what had once felt like a competitive environment into one of enablement.

In the first half of 2022, there were 817 data breaches in the U.S., and combined with data leaks and data exposure, they impacted more than 53 million individuals. These are alarming numbers, but they could have been much worse without the use of some form of multifactor authentication.

The consequences of uncoordinated regulatory standards at the federal level are creating an artificial problem at the local level, potentially endangering many community banks’ ability to lend to local customers.

October has been a busy month at ICBA Community Banker University, and we hope that your staff are benefiting from the additional courses we have added to the course catalog, not to mention several exciting new enhancements!

With the producer price index down, can we say we are past peak inflation? Not really. Getting behind the reason for the decline of the overall PPI indicates inflation will be here for quite some time.

We are at the very beginning of exploring the opportunities the metaverse may provide. And while the path forward may be long, financial institutions need to start assessing what those opportunities look like for them.