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Thursday, January 22, 2026
Regional and Community Banks: Your Card Program Is Killing Your Future
Regional and Community Banks: Your Card Program Is Killing Your Future
For decades, regional and community banks have been the backbone of American commerce—the trusted partners who understand local markets, relationships, and the economic fabric of their communities. Deposits and lending built these institutions. Credit cards? They've been an afterthought. A customer accommodation. An ancillary product.
That accommodation is now costing you your future.
The Brutal Reality
Here's what I'm seeing in 2026 as a payments consultant working across the industry:
Your best customers—the ones with strong credit, high spending, digital fluency—are quietly moving their primary banking relationship elsewhere. Not because they don't like you. But because your card experience is stuck in 2010 while they're living in 2026.
They're not even telling you they're leaving. They're just using your institution less and less, one transaction at a time.
The Legacy Trap
For too long, regional and community banks have had two equally bad options for card programs:
Option 1: Join an agent program. Get a cookie-cutter, take-it-or-leave-it credit card with zero differentiation, minimal control, and economics that leave most of the value on the table. You're a distribution channel, not a financial institution.
Option 2: Work with a legacy processor. Get treated like a burden rather than a customer. Settle for basic card features, a clunky mobile experience, and be told "that's just how it works" when you ask for anything modern.
Both options made some sense when cards were truly ancillary. But cards aren't ancillary anymore—they're the primary interface for how customers interact with their money.
The Competitive Onslaught
While you've been accepting mediocre card programs, your competition has been building weapons:
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Neobanks are offering instant card issuance, real-time spending notifications, automated savings tools, and sleek mobile experiences that make your app look like a relic.
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Top 10 issuers are using sophisticated data analytics to identify and poach your highest-value customers with precision-targeted offers you can't match.
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Crypto platforms, trading apps, and gamified payment providers are redefining what financial engagement looks like for Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X—and your institution isn't even in the conversation.
The heat has never been hotter. And it's only getting worse.
The Invisible Death Spiral
Here's the danger: When your card offering is forgettable or frustrating, customers use it as little as possible. They shift their spending to competitors. Once that primary relationship moves, everything else follows—deposits, lending, loyalty. The relationship banking model that's always been your competitive advantage becomes irrelevant if you're not part of their daily financial lives.
You're not losing customers overnight. You're becoming invisible to them, one transaction at a time.
The Technology Exists. Today.
Here's what frustrates me most: The technology to compete—really compete—already exists.
Modern card issuing platforms and API-based infrastructure providers have democratized access to world-class card experiences. Technologies that were only available to the megabanks five years ago are now accessible to institutions of any size:
- Modern issuer processors that treat you like a partner, not a burden, with flexible APIs and modern mobile SDKs
- White-label card platforms that give you full control over user experience, branding, and features
- Embedded finance infrastructure that lets you integrate cards seamlessly into digital experiences your customers actually want
- Real-time payment rails and instant issuance that match neobank capabilities
- Advanced fraud detection and rewards optimization powered by AI that used to require megabank-scale data
- Modular core banking integrations that don't require ripping out your entire tech stack
The barriers aren't technological anymore. They're organizational. They're about recognizing that card programs aren't ancillary—they're existential.
What Needs to Happen
Regional and community banks need to stop accepting mediocrity in their card programs. That means:
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Treating cards as strategic, not operational. This needs C-suite attention and investment, not just the card manager's budget.
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Demanding control and flexibility. If your provider won't let you differentiate your offering or innovate on user experience, find one who will.
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Building for mobile-first customers. Your card experience needs to be as good as what customers get from neobanks. Full stop.
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Leveraging modern infrastructure. The technology exists. Use it.
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Moving fast. Your competitors aren't waiting. Neither should you.
The Bottom Line
Regional and community banks have always won on relationships, local expertise, and trust. But relationships require relevance. Trust requires presence. And if you're not present in your customers' daily financial lives—in their wallets, on their phones, in their spending decisions—you're losing ground you may never recover.
The technology to compete is available. The question is: Will you use it before it's too late?
What do you think? Are regional banks doing enough to modernize their card programs? What's holding them back? Let's discuss in the comments.
#CommunityBanking #RegionalBanks #PaymentsInnovation #Fintech #DigitalBanking #CardIssuance #BankingTechnology #PhilliouPartners
Monday, January 12, 2026
Two Paths to Healthcare AI: OpenAI vs. Anthropic (January 12, 2026)
Two Paths to Healthcare AI: OpenAI vs. Anthropic
There was significant activity announced this week at JPMorgan Chase's healthcare conference; specifically, the race to transform healthcare with AI has accelerated dramatically. Within days of each other, OpenAI and Anthropic unveiled different visions for how AI should serve medicine.
Why fintech should pay attention: Healthcare represents one of the largest sectors in the global economy, and the intersection of health data, AI, and financial services is already reshaping payment systems, insurance underwriting, benefits administration, and healthcare financing. The data infrastructure and trust frameworks being built today will define tomorrow's opportunities in health savings accounts, embedded insurance, claims automation, and preventive care incentives. Whichever approach wins—patient-direct or provider-centric—will fundamentally alter how money flows through healthcare systems.
OpenAI's patient-first approach: ChatGPT Health targets individual users directly—integrating personal health data, wearable device insights, and patient-facing applications. The goal? Put health management power in patients' hands. Back to the question of why fintech and payments people should care: consumer-directed healthcare is as much about empowering consumers to make healthcare decisions as it is about how and how much they spend. As the ChatGPT Health initiative matures, the possibilities for payments integration and agentic AI/agent pay initiatives become more viable. A myriad of healthcare savings and financing options become available as data and information on patient and treatment outcomes become accessible to patients.
Anthropic's clinician-focused strategy: Claude enters healthcare as a tool for professionals—enhancing biomedical research, supporting clinical decision-making, and providing system-level infrastructure for healthcare institutions. This approach prioritizes the needs of practitioners and researchers navigating complex healthcare systems.
Neither strategy is inherently better. But the choice between personal empowerment and systemic integration isn't just a product decision—it's a fundamental tension that will shape:
✓ How these tools evolve ✓ How regulators respond ✓ How trust is built (or lost) ✓ Ultimately, how AI transforms healthcare delivery
We're witnessing two distinct philosophies compete in real-time. The winner may not be the technology itself, but rather which approach better balances innovation with the responsibility healthcare demands.
A critical caveat: Both announcements are US-only launches. This geographic limitation raises important questions about global health equity, regulatory complexity across markets, and whether the diverse healthcare needs of international populations will shape these tools from the ground up—or be addressed as an afterthought.
What's your take? Should healthcare AI prioritize the patient experience or the clinical workflow? And how do we ensure these innovations serve global healthcare needs?
#HealthcareAI #DigitalHealth #ArtificialIntelligence #HealthTech #Innovation #consumerdirecthealthcare #JPMC #claude #chatgpt
Monday, January 12, 2026
Mastercard Agent Pay: AI agents buying on your behalf
Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay today, payment infrastructure built on the premise that artificial intelligence agents will execute transactions on behalf of humans rather than humans clicking "buy" buttons themselves. The system establishes security protocols, trust mechanisms, and verification frameworks addressing what happens when software rather than people initiates financial commitments.
The announcement coincided with Google's launch of the Universal Commerce Protocol, disclosed today during the National Retail Federation's annual conference. Mastercard is collaborating with Google on technical standards enabling AI agents to discover products, negotiate checkout parameters, and complete purchases without requiring custom integrations for each merchant platform.