Lee Wetherington

What strategies are your peers pursuing over the next 2 years? Which competitors and threats keep them up at night? How are they allocating tech budgets? What are they doing to improve efficiency and drive growth? Join Lee Wetherington for a revealing look at where your peers and competitors are headed, why, and what new opportunities are being presented by the ecosystem disruption reshaping financial services.

If you’ve been having a hard time keeping up with the flurry of regulatory rollbacks, updates, and changes coming out of Washington DC over the past few months, you are not alone. Almost every day brings a fresh announcement about possible changes to the financial-services regulatory environment. Is the CFPB dead? What about its rules on financial data exchange (1033) and small-business data collection (1071)? Will the CFPB, FDIC and NCUA be merged with the OCC? How will that work, and what does it all mean? Join us for a high-energy session where we’ll help you make sense of the mayhem and wade through the downstream effects of regulatory changes on financial institutions and fintechs. 

Last year, the CFPB issued its final rule governing open banking and “Personal Financial Data Rights”.  How will consumers’ ability to share financial data impact your institution, and what should you do about it? In 2025, successful FIs will use open-banking rails to expedite account opening, solve financial fragmentation, achieve first-app status, eliminate inbound screen scraping, improve authentication/security, streamline underwriting and reclaim their position at the center of their accountholders’ financial lives–allowing them to see, share and control all of their financial data easily and securely in one location (your FI). What’s your open banking strategy? And how does it inform or support your data strategy? Join Lee Wetherington for insights on how to capitalize on new opportunities in the open-banking era.

Payments drive 80% of digital engagement, but neobanks, fintechs and BigTechs have used payments to poach accountholders and drive historic financial fragmentation—average Americans now have relationships with 10-20 financial service providers/apps. Even more concerning, some competitors are beginning to leverage real-time payment rails to help small businesses expedite receivables, optimize just-in-time payables, and gain more accurate insights and forecasts on cash flow. This year, smart FIs will get sober about bill-pay trends, prepare themselves for pay-by-bank schemes’ impact on card volumes, and use existing payments data to retain or reclaim small business clients, many of whom remain camouflaged in retail checking accounts. Join Lee Wetherington for the bottom line on payments trends and strategies for 2025 and beyond.

Strategy is best done from the future backwards. What will FIs look like 5 years from now? How will agentic AI and dysregulation impact the evolution, distribution and consumption of financial services? Will the value of your charter increase or diminish over the short-, mid-, and long term? How will exams change? Join Lee Wetherington for a long view on the future of financial services and what opportunities and threats that future presents now, soon and later.