Digital banking services are second nature to consumers now. McKinsey & Company estimated that digital banking channels will account for more than 90% of banking interactions globally. So, what’s next?
As consumers use these channels more, they expect a smooth, quality experience. At the same time, they still want to talk to real person when needed. Balancing that with the efficiency of AI, these are all things credit unions must consider when crafting their members’ digital experiences.
At GAC 2025, host Sarah Snell Cooke sat down with Candescent Chief Product Officer Gareth Gaston to discuss the current digital banking trends and where they may be headed in the future. They also discuss open banking and how to best implement it in your credit union’s digital baking platform.
Disclosure: Transcript below the video is automatically generated
Read the Full Transcript:
Sarah Cooke 0:29
Hello. Welcome to the GAC. We’re here today with Gareth Gaston. Welcome.
Gareth Gaston 0:35
Hi, Sarah. Nice to be here you as well.
Sarah Cooke 0:38
Good to meet you. And Gareth is the Chief Product Officer at Candescent. Give us a little more background on yourself from the company. Yeah,
Gareth Gaston 0:46
certainly. So I’m actually a whole nine weeks in now to the role at Candescent. I recently joined Candescent from US Bank, where I spent the last 11 years helping them innovate and reinvent their digital banking experience, whether it was those early days of relaunching our mobile app or our voice assistant or launching Zelle. So it was awesome fun helping US Bank and its journey for the last 11 years. And then, you know, the opportunity that I saw here at Candescent is, you know, at US Bank, I got to help one institution, and now I get to help hundreds of financial institutions with Candescent digital banking. So Candescent has about 1300 customers and about 29 million end users from those financial institutions, and we offer a suite of products that really help, whether it’s pure Candescent digital banking or human plus digital. So we do that through digital banking experiences, account opening experiences, branch and banker products and ATM software as well. And of course, we aim to orchestrate all of that into a seamless omnichannel experience, omnichannel,
Sarah Cooke 1:45
that is the word of the day. It is. So talk to us a little bit about the digital banking trends that you’re seeing. Because, I mean, I just know they’re growing. Yeah. They
Gareth Gaston 1:58
are, yeah. Well, I mean, I think the first the thing about digital is the sort of first principles still matter at the end of the day. It’s all about the experience. And so that’s what we’re striving for at Candescent, class, digital experience. And that, you know, you can define experience in a few different ways. You know, first of all, it still is important to have a beautiful, elegant experience. You know, our financial institutions, our credit unions, end customers. They they get their digital experiences from the apples and Amazons and Googles and all the big names of the world. So that’s their expectation when it comes to digital so our goal is to be as beautiful and as elegant as as the best digital experiences out there. And then the other way to think about digital experiences, just what are all the things that you can do? How can I self serve? How can I, how can I administer my own life and look after my financial life with with my app, for example? So I would say that sort of, you know, big trend number one. Trend number two, I think, is, is really embracing that human plus digital. So, you know, at the end of the day, this is still a people business and and people need people to do complicated things with their financial life. So it’s making sure that, you know, we like the word omni channel, right as the COVID du jour, and that the the in person channel, and the and the virtual channel, or the digital channels, all interact well with each other. And then, of course, you know, no discussion like this would be, would be complete without talking about artificial intelligence and how that helps, right?
Sarah Cooke 3:22
So you helps, right? So sick of hearing
Gareth Gaston 3:26
so artificial intelligence is going to be great, and a few contexts is obviously still very early days, and there’s a lot of experimentation going on, but Artificial intelligence has the great potential to, first of all, help with that experience that I was talking about, it helps the experience be much more personalized and to anticipate needs and things like that. And equally, for the person who’s in person talking to the client, there’s an opportunity for them to be prompted and helped with that conversation as well.
Sarah Cooke 3:56
As far as like, how do you get past the hesitation that some people have with AI. Do you
Gareth Gaston 4:05
know, I think, like all things in life, there’s, there’s always, there’s always an adoption curve of anything, right? And and, you know, it was exactly the same, you know, my background actually is in the digital travel space. So I remember, in the early days of digital travel, first launching a hotel booking website, and everyone telling me that no one would ever use that hotel, right? And here we are today. 80% of hotel bookings are done online, and so I think AI will quite naturally have the same now, of course, to some people, AI is just that bit more scary, because, you know, there’s a lot more intelligence in there than just it being a digital transactional experience. But like all things, there’ll be the early adopters. There’ll be you know, and I think as the as the as the technology matures, I certainly, I’m an AI optimist, that that rich experience that it provides, you know, whether it’s you know, delivering that more personal experience or. Is helping you with your personal productivity. We’ll all see the benefits of that. I feel in times. You know, it sounds like we could have a great conversation with this for a long time.
Sarah Cooke 5:10
Oh, I’m sure, as a content creator, I keep getting asked, Are you scared I’m retired by the time this is a problem.
Gareth Gaston 5:19
Thankfully, don’t think there’s been any originality yet from so you’re still ahead. You’re still ahead.
Sarah Cooke 5:24
There you go. But even I’m looking at little bots that help do things, yes, and so there’s so many efficiencies to be created, and that’s just more time for credit union people to spend with their members doing the things that can be automated. Pretty simply. I mean, from a
Gareth Gaston 5:39
personal perspective, you have to have to think about, How many times do you get stuck on a task that you can’t think about like, you know? Whereas, if you ask, you know, an AI chat bot, for example, can you write me a letter that, or write me an email that does this? Or, yeah, you know. And then if you start extending that into what conversation should I have with this customer? You know, it’s, it doesn’t replace you. It just augments and creates a better experience. So I certainly, you know, my optimistic view of it all is that it takes a lot of the things that we don’t like doing and allows us to focus our brains and things that AB like doing in our real value add, right? And I think that’s the potential for credit unions. You know? It just helps us be more productive with the customer, whether that’s in person or digitally.
Sarah Cooke 6:20
Yeah, for sure.
Gareth Gaston 6:23
Let’s talk about,
Sarah Cooke 6:24
go ahead I was going to ask you, actually ask you what you were going to say before I interrupted you. So really, well,
Gareth Gaston 6:30
one more trend I was going to say. One more trend is, is, you know, open and connected to finance. So we obviously are. I think it’s interesting, because I think there’s many financial institutions that embrace this far ahead of a 1033, type environment. And you know, I think that as we think about being open and open and open and connected finance, there’s many ways to think about that, but the world, of course, in general, is becoming a more open and connected place, and finance is no exception to that. And so I think it’s super important to think about, what are the needs of the members, and you know, where do they want to share their financial data? And that’s one aspect of being open and open and connected. The other aspect of being open and connected is, how do you enable your services to be used in other places so it could be embedded payments or or, in our case, as we look to help our credit union clients, how do we enable the credit union to integrate fintechs into their existing digital banking experience, with whatever types of capabilities they have? So, so that’s another big theme, I think, is just this kind of open extensible banking, which is a new thing.
Sarah Cooke 7:35
So now, are you talking open banking, though? I think open banking
Gareth Gaston 7:39
is a subset, yeah, and to me, that’s kind of the foundational part of it, which is just allowing customers, our members, to share their data with whoever they want to share their data with in a secure and safe fashion that’s easy to use and easy to stop if you want to cancel that. And you know, so, so that, I think that’s kind of the foundational layer. But then as you then build on top of that. You get into things like embedded payments or or, you know, a whole bunch of different there’s, there’s so many phenomenal fintechs out there who offer great solutions that you might want to integrate into your digital banking solution. And so that’s part of being really open and extensible as well.
Sarah Cooke 8:16
Okay? And so always ask my guests for final thoughts. I’m sure you have a lot. What would you like to say is your last word, parting words with our credit union audience?
Gareth Gaston 8:26
I think the main thing is, as we talk about all of this stuff, you talk about AI, you talk about omnichannel, and all the great buzzwords that we’ve talked about today, fundamentally, what it’s about is the experience. And you know, really, you know that’s, that’s what we do, and why we’re here is really to help our credit union clients deliver that seamless customer experience and to stay ahead of the expectations of the customer. And that’s, I think, why we’re all in this is just to help with that tremendous experience. Yeah,
Sarah Cooke 8:53
excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Gareth Gaston 8:54
Thanks for having me.