Gen X: The Quiet Force Behind Banking Opportunities

In this sponsored episode of the ProSight Banking Strategies podcast, experts from Jack Henry and Nuuvia unpack why Generation X—often overlooked between larger cohorts—is actually a critically important segment in banking today, serving as the financial “bridge” between aging parents and younger generations. They explore how Gen X’s pressures—managing peak earning years alongside caregiving responsibilities, retirement concerns, and rising debt—create both risk and opportunity for financial institutions that can deliver relevant, family-centered solutions.

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For more on this topic, don’t miss the ProSight Quick Q&A with Lee Wetherington of Jack Henry and Marcell King of Nuuvia, where they share practical insights on how financial institutions can stay relevant to Generation X —and use that relevance to strengthen relationships across the broader family ecosystem.

TRANSCRIPT:

Frank Devlin: This is the ProSight Banking Strategies Podcast. We’re here to inform you on the top trends, challenges, and opportunities in banking today. ProSight is a leading, non-lobbying connector of people and information with deep expertise in risk, fraud, compliance, and retail and commercial banking. Our purpose is to empower financial services leaders to strengthen and advance our industry through training and insights, as well as tools and resources like this podcast.

Hello, and welcome to the ProSight Banking Strategies Podcast sponsored by Jack Henry. I’m Frank Devlin, a senior editor at ProSight. For Generation X, born from the years 1965 to 1980, the carefree days of “I want my MTV” and John Hughes and Brat Pack films have given way to stresses about retirement planning, putting kids through college, and caring for aging parents. Not that Gen Xers are making a big deal out of it. And if they were, who would listen? Said to be the middle child of generations, the common wisdom is that Gen X gets overlooked in favor of the larger and louder generations that preceded and followed them. Now that phenomenon is even reaching into the financial services industry media where more attention is paid to the rise of Gen Z.

Well, we are here today to give Gen X their due. And as a Gen Xer myself, and a middle child on top of that, I have to say that all this attention might get a little bit uncomfortable. But I’m going to forge ahead anyway to meet our guests and Gen X subject matter experts, Lee Wetherington, senior director of Corporate Strategy at Jack Henry, and Marcell King, president and COO at Nuuvia.

Lee and Marcell, I was wondering if you could talk a little about your background before we get started with the questions, starting with Lee.

Lee Wetherington, Jack Henry: Great. Yeah, thanks, Frank. I’m senior director of Corporate Strategy at Jack Henry, and the practical way of describing what I do is I’m the big picture person. At Jack Henry, I work with a team of strategy analysts, each of whom are deeply expert in their respective domains that wrap up and comprise financial services, financial technology. I sit atop all of the different primary and meta-analysis they’re doing day in, day out, and connect the dots between those domains to come up with frameworks that hopefully can efficiently describe where we are, how we got here, and are serviceable in so much as forecasting forward to understand or better understand day in, day out what the three to five-year future looks like. That’s my day job. Marcell, I’ll hand it over to you.

Marcell King, Nuuvia: Frank, thanks for inviting us. Marcell King, I am president and COO of Nuuvia. Nuuvia is a youth digital banking solution that enables financial institutions to acquire, grow and retain the next generation of members. We provide those services through a digital experience that is personalized for kids between six and 17 years old. And the product includes the capability for kids to get their own debit card with parental controls. There’s financial education. It allows the parents to pay for chores and grades and tasks and jobs that are assigned to the kid. There’s also a charity module which teaches kids giving as well. A savings bucket, so if the kid wants to save up for the next bike or their PlayStation, or whatever it might be. But the crowd favorite is the parental lending. Where if a kid wants to borrow money from the parent, the parent can loan the kid money but actually charge interest on it and teach the kid about the interest that they’re going to pay as part of that loan. It’s a safer environment to enable the parent to teach kids about what debt actually means. That’s overall a side of the business.

I myself, I’ve been in the fintech space, mostly on that B2B2C side for about 30 years. I’ve worked on solutions at Amazon for a few years. And most recently, before this role, was at Payveris, where I was chief innovation officer for a payments and money platform.

Devlin: Thanks so much for being here, Lee and Marcell. And I was wondering if we could start off big picture, and maybe if we could hear from both of you on this one. What’s the danger in not putting enough focus on attracting and maintaining Gen X customers? As there’s so much attention going to other generations, why is it important to remember about Gen X? Maybe starting with Lee.

Wetherington: Frank, I feel you. I am Gen X. I believe Marcell is as well. In fact, I even belong to an even less well understood micro segment called Generation Jones, which is at the top of Gen X, between Gen X and Baby Boomers. I’m wearing my latchkey around my neck in solidarity with all of you all and how we grew up and how we’ve been ignored since.

Yeah, it’s really interesting. Because right now you’re right, Gen Z is getting all of the attention. And rightly so, Gen Z, if you’re a strategy guy like me, they are the generation that is the most durable driver and shaper of the next three to five years in financial services, so we spend a lot of time talking about their behaviors. But we’ve never really much talked about Gen X, just because the size of the Gen X population is materially smaller than the Boomers on one side and the Millennials on the other.

But now Gen X is playing a really pivotal role. We’re the sandwich generation. We got married later. We started therefore saving later. The whole way in which humans in the United States save for retirement changed while we were beginning to make money. Where we didn’t have access to pensions and, hey, you’ve got to do your own self-funded 401Ks. Early on, we didn’t have the defaults that a lot of those 401K programs now have, thank goodness, so that people are just defaulted into savings for their own benefit over time. And now, we got married later, we had kids later. Because of that, some of us are still supporting kids as they finish up college or trying to find and make their way into the workforce in a very challenging situation, much like what we experienced in the late 80s and early 90s with the recession then.

And on top of that, our parents… What’s the most delicate way to put this, Marcell? Our parents are living longer. That means that we’re now taking care of them, we’re taking care of the kids, we’re taking care of everybody. And while we’re at the height of our earning power, we are also carrying the biggest debt of any generation ever because of this rock and a hard place position that we’re in demographically. That’s a broad thumbnail of where we are as Generation X. I’ll pass it over to Marcell for color.

King: Great call-outs there, Lee. As you touched on being that sandwich generation, we look at our parents, unfortunately both of my parents have passed, but when you start thinking about it from an economic perspective, especially financial institutions, that $124 trillion great wealth transfer being passed on, generally that’s being passed on through Gen X and Gen Y because it’s the Baby Boomers that may maintain those high levels of assets and dollars that sit in their trust funds, or whatever there may be. Gen Z perspective, the biggest gaps that I see, especially in financial institutions, is making sure that the institutions are staying relevant for a Gen Zer.

Like I said, at prime time, what are the capabilities and services that they need to bring to retain those Gen Xers? I think that’s going to be a key element as over the next 10 to 15 years, even though our parents are living longer, they’re generally in their 70s and 80s. And we know that as they pass on, if they’re at a financial institution that is different than where you are, those funds are going to be moved out of the holding institution. I think the biggest thing really is around just the relevancy. And how do you make sure that, as a financial institution, you’re staying relevant to that demographic?

And as a sandwich generation, tweener, et cetera, you go on one side you’ve got your parents like you’re trying to manage, but you’ve also got not only your kids, but me as a Gen Xer, I’ve got grandkids as well. You got to start thinking about that Gen Alpha, Gen Beta as it continues to grow. I think it’s really, how do you maintain relevancy with a Gen Xer? Even within those particular milestones that they may be going through, maybe it’s the passing of a parent, maybe it’s a divorce or remarried. There’s so many different milestone events in someone’s life, even within that demographic, that it’s important that financial institutions find ways to stay relevant. Because it’s very difficult. Deposits, interest on loans, those are commoditized. How do you differentiate yourself for the specific demographic?

Devlin: Lee had touched a bit on how things have changed in terms of how retirement funding works, Gen Xers got married later in life. Gen Xers are currently 46 to 61, I believe. On top of those things, clearly there are some natural things that you’re concerned about at that age. But what’s different about other generations in history that have been in that spot of 46 to 61 years old characterize them maybe in a different way than other generations, and how does that affect banking?

Wetherington: I want to say this, I think we, especially if you look at this generation Jones sub-segment that often gets thrown in the Gen X window, we are adaptively cynical. And what I mean by that, we didn’t come up in the post-war optimism of the Boomer generation proper. We saw some really ugly stuff in the economy in the ’70s and the ’80s. We saw a recession. Right as we were beginning to really have enough earnings power to begin saving long-term, we hit other things like 2008, 2009. And so, we’ve got some scarring, and that’s made us cynical. We didn’t have the pension plans that our Boomer parents did to be on autopilot and have that all taken care of.

Yeah, I think adaptively cynical gets it. I want to say that also if you look psychologically and emotionally at how Gen X feels because they are sandwiched, and this does make them unique with respect to other cohorts that have come through this same age window, is that even though we’re at the height of our earnings power, the demands of many of us still having to finance and take care of kids who are having a hard time finding that first job, especially as AI is eating away the first layer of jobs you would go into after college and now we’re having to take care of parents. We may on paper look like we’re doing great, right? We’re at the top of our earning power, et cetera, but we don’t feel good. We feel bad.

There’s a disconnect between our… It’s much like the economy, right? The economy seems to be pretty resilient, and most everybody feels like things are terrible. This is what Kyla Scanlon, you may know her, who coined the term in the pandemic “the vibe resession”. Which is this disconnect where we feel like we’re in a recession even if our economic indicators say otherwise. I think that’s really unique about where we are.

And then the last thing I would say about Gen X is… Well, first of all, again, we’re cynical. I do have a chip on my shoulder. In fact, Frank, I even suspected that you wanted to talk about Gen X, because nobody ever wanted to talk about us until they found out we were inheriting 40 trillion over the next 22 years, and now suddenly we’ve got enough attention to get a podcast feature.

Devlin: It’s funny how that happens.

Wetherington: But here’s the thing that I think your listeners would really want to focus on and understand. They’re having a really big problem registering at all with Gen Z. They have Gen X represented on balance demographically in their deposit base, they don’t have that representation with Gen Z. One way to read the economy that has begun to slow, and we now have odds for a recession have bumped up into the high 40% range. Now things are slowing down again with all the difficulties we’ve already named here. Really understanding how Gen Z children are going to be leaning on Gen X mom and dad during this souring economic forecast is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to get Gen Z back to the door and through the door if you can offer some creative co-managed account capabilities that facilitate and enable and expedite the financial support that Gen Z’s going to be looking for in this dimming economic picture going forward.

And that’s going to be much more plausible than trying to figure out, how do we come up with millions of dollars for a national ad campaign to compete with the likes of Chime, for instance, or any of these other Neos or fintechs that we talk a lot about? Gen X is a key to Gen Z if you understand the connections, the familial connections, and most importantly, map that to the financial and economic pressure that they’re all feeling together now as we go into the back half of 2026.

Devlin: You talk about some more characterizations of Gen X, and they’re known for some more things as well. I thought we might try a little something here. Let’s see how it goes. I’m going to bring up some qualities that Gen X is known for. And then, Marcell and Lee, you can let me know how this should affect how banks and credit unions, financial institutions reach out to them. Starting with this one, Gen X less likely to overshare online than younger generations, and they value their space and privacy. I was wondering if either of you have any thoughts on how that might affect marketing and banking [inaudible 00:13:50].

King: Yeah, maybe I’ll take a stab at that one.

Devlin: Thank you.

King: It’s interesting, but quite funny. I have a Facebook account, but I very rarely post. Occasionally I’ll go in and when there’s a big event for one of my kids or grandkids or something along that lines. My wife, she gets chastised by some of her friends because she doesn’t have an Instagram account. From a demographic perspective, obviously I think this is with any type of, I call it marketing or advertising, is you got to make sure that you know where your customers are and what they’re reading. And I still read, although it’s the digital, New York Times. You got to think about where that demographic is going to give you, or that medium is going to give you the most exposure to that demographic. And my kids tell me that I’m old because I don’t have a TikTok or Instagram account primarily.

It’s traditional in terms of, how are you marketing to the right people at the right place? The traditional social media, at least the newer ones, a lot of our generation are not posting. Maybe we have an account, maybe we don’t. In fact, I was talking to my brother as well, and he’s a couple of years younger than I am, so still looking at Gen X, but very seldom posts on the social media. When you start getting into the Millennial and the Gen Z, they are digital natives.

And one of the things I think about is how our products have been marketed to the parents to get access to their kids. For example, one of our institutions leverages our platform, but all of their marketing around this youth banking service is done in the branch. Which is where, if you look at the demographics, the demographics of the folks who are going into the branch generally tend to be Gen X or Baby Boomers. But they’re marketing to those individuals to actually help capture the Gen Z and Alphas that are filling the pipeline on the backend, leveraging it. The parent is the one who needs to sign up the kids, so let’s make sure we’re marketing it to the parent, not necessarily to the kid.

Again, I think it’s just traditional marketing is you have to find where the mediums that an institution can market to and through to capture not only that Gen Z demographic, but in addition to that, Gen Z and Gen Alpha that definitely need to be serviced for traditional financial institutions. Because as we see today, actually more than half of all accounts open in 2025 were opened on pure digital banking platforms, whether it be a Chime or Greenlight, et cetera. And so, financial institutions have to find a way to get access to the kids early, but that’s generally through the parents, which tend to be-

Devlin: And like you’re saying, there’s definitely still a role for branches. And as we’re seeing, a lot of institutions are actually, they’re rebounding from cutting branches and they’re adding them again. The old saying, the rumors of the death of branch banking have been greatly exaggerated. Interesting point that you’re making there.

Okay, I want to throw this next one to Lee. Gen X is independent and self-reliant. How does that play into… If you agree with that or believe that, how does that play into how banks should be treating them and welcoming them in marketing?

Wetherington: Well, yeah, we had to survive. We came home alone with our last piece and went into the house-

Devlin: We’re [inaudible 00:17:07] going to give up on that latchkey. You [inaudible 00:17:08]-

Wetherington:… had to feed ourselves. I got issues. I’ve got big issues, Frank. I don’t know if we want to work those out here or not. Yeah, I think we are independent. I think we’re a little cynical. I think we’ve not been paid attention to. And quite frankly, I think we’ve grown accustomed to that. That does make reaching us a little bit more difficult. My phone is perpetually on do not disturb. My phone doesn’t make sounds unless it’s from either my wife or my two sons calling. My phone doesn’t make a sound. Then the question is, how do you get to me? How do you reach me? You probably want to know, or we need to find out what podcasts I’m listening to. I listen to podcasts. What shows I’m streaming.

We’re driven by nostalgia. I’m not sure exactly what we’re so warm and fuzzy about looking at our past generationally speaking, but we love the television shows we grew up with. You see that in TV franchises, movie franchises. A lot of musicians who’s defining albums were the backdrop and score of my upbringing are now doing these tours that are based around just playing those albums from 30 years ago or 20 years ago. It’s understanding, we do consume a hybrid mix of both a traditional digital media. Like Marcell, I like to read. Probably unlike Marcell, I prefer to read on paper. I got off Facebook-

King: That’s true.

Wetherington: I got off Facebook a long time ago. I did that for really health reasons. For mental health, I’ve done a complete reassessment of where I want to spend my time and where I don’t. And I don’t really want to spend much time on socials. I had a LinkedIn addiction. Can you believe that? I took LinkedIn off my phone. It’s hard to reach me. We’re right now in a voting window too around the country, and I’m just scoffing at every single text that comes to my phone from any politician. And they don’t have permission, I didn’t give them permission to reach out to me, but they all do.

Anyway, I’m sorry. I feel like I’m just complaining and venting. But anyway, here’s the thing. If in the context of our adaptive cynicism you can lever your authenticity. This is one thing that community financial institutions have in droves, they do have authenticity. They have a higher trust factor than most other financial service providers. The real question is, how do you lever that in the way that you reach out and reinforce it with what you say and how you behave? This, it turns out, is also very effective with Gen Z. Gen Z wants to see real people saying real things that help them make a real difference in their financial lives. We often are dismissive about TikTok and short form video on Instagram, et cetera, but those things resonate.

And those things, by the way, resonate not just with Gen Z, they also resonate with Gen Xers. I’ll admit it, I’m on Instagram. I’m probably on YouTube more than Instagram. And so, I pay attention to things there. There’s a YouTube connection, a video connection to the podcast that I enjoy and watch, and that’s a launchpad and a launching point for my media consumption. Understanding those things… Back to Marcell’s point, really understanding that not just the media diets, but the consumption patterns across those different channels is really key to understanding how to get to Gen X.

But here’s the thing, most financial institutions have Gen X inside their checking account bases. What you’re saying to them starts with that captive audience inside your DDA base. And if you can help resolve pain that they’re experiencing in the family, not just as an individual, but in the family with, again, Gen Z kids that are trying to get a start. And you can bring some medicine to that circle digitally, you can win their attention and win more of their business. And by the way, get Gen Z back in the door, which is a huge structural headwind for every community financial institution in the country.

King: If I can ask you that, Lee, I think you touched on a couple of key notes that brought some thoughts into my mind here. Number one is going back to, where are the Gen Xers? Not necessarily on the Facebook and maybe not an IG account, but definitely TikTok. I think TikTok can be addicting no matter how old you are. I spend a couple of minutes when I’m bored watching a couple of scrolls or a couple of videos. But one of the things that has been interesting is my wife and I, we watch movies on the weekend. Occasionally, we’ll go to a theater, something big. But generally we’ll watch a series or something like that.

And one of the things that I’ve started seeing pop up, not even just on Netflix, but even just general direct TV and in YouTube is Amazon promoting products. Or there’s a series of, it could be a car, it could be an outfit, it could be whatever it may be, but they’re actually tailoring that content to me and then enabling me to engage in that content right away with a QR code. That feels like it’s actually starting to grow more. I was actually surprised that these are things that whatever that was being advertised were things that my wife and I, it would appeal to us. That’s one component in terms of there are other channels that you can reach Gen X through that normally might not think about it. It’s just in that everyday life that I uncovered this. Or became aware of it, I should say.

And then a second point, going back to the branches and how the branches are transforming not into just more transactional capabilities, but being more consultative and setting up the branches so that you can sit down and actually talk to someone across the desk or at a round table. I think a key thing, and one of the reasons why these digital fintech banks have been so successful is because they are creating services that wrap around your checking account or your savings account, or whatever it may be, other types of products and services that help you strengthen your financial situation or your wellness or your health.

If you look at something like a Chime, Chime started with early payday as a key element to their value proposition. Credit unions have been doing that forever. I think about from a Gen X, what are the services that an institution can provide to me outside of my checking account, my credit card, or a loan? Those are the big three. what are the wraparound services that will help me improve my financial wealth or for financial health? And it’s not just necessarily those two or three core products, it’s wraparound services. It could be AAA at a discount. But it’s the things that actually are going to be like a discount service, or whatever it may be, that’s actually helping me save money or grow my money faster. And it’s not just those three accounts.

Wetherington: One of the things too, just to get this on the table, is the bigger issue here for the structural headwind for all financial institutions is the disruption Chime, PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, Credit Karma, et cetera. Their playbook is that Henry go to-market strategy playbook. It’s targeting the high-earner, not-rich-yet crowd. Their success in doing that over the last 12 to 15 years has fundamentally disrupted the generational continuity that used to happen by way of analog handoffs. Like literally handholding your young child, walking them into the branch and opening that first savings account. That doesn’t happen now.

The real challenge for financial institutions is, how do you reestablish generational continuity in a digital context? It’s also, “Hey, at the same time, help me make it easy for me to manage my parents’ bills or their finances, et cetera.” It’s both up and down. And so, it’s about thinking about banking services in a way that’s structured around the way families are structured, not just individuals and here’s your commoditized products, to Marcell’s point.

King: Right.

Devlin: That seems like it’s a pretty big message in this conversation so far is Gen X is the entree into relationships in their families, the generations that follow. I was wondering if that means that Gen X is considered small, I think 65 million individuals in the US versus 77 million Baby Boomers, 83 million Millennials. But are they punching above their weight in influence in terms of because they have these relationships, they’re the nexus of so many things? And if so, what are your thoughts on that, and why would that be relevant?

Wetherington: Flat yes is the answer to your question. We have an outsized influence on everything right now. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say we’re literally running the world, but nobody knows it. And by the way, I get really happy, Marcell, thinking about 40 trillion divided by a very small 65 million. I get really, really happy thinking about that.

King: I’m okay with that.

Wetherington: I’ve got a cynical chip on my shoulder. But anyway, yes is the answer. They are the entree. Frank, that’s the exact right word to use here strategically. We are literally the best way to get to not just Gen Z below us and Gen Y, actually, but to the Baby Boomers above us too that we’re beginning to take care of. If you can figure us out, you’ve got an on ramp and you can, by the way, tap into the 124 trillion or whatever wealth transfer that’s happening over the next 22 years. And by the way, 70% of that is going to women. It’s very important to say this, 70% of that 124 trillion that is transferred is going to women. Why? Because women live longer.

If you really want to dial in, a lot of CEOs of financial institutions that I’ve been in meetings with over the last several months, I couldn’t believe I heard this. They said, “We have got to get better at death.” And I’m like, “Wow, that’s morbid.” It’s like, no, we have got to get better at death. And you dig into these stories and this is happening all over the place. It’s like, yeah, we have this customer and she was with the bank for 45 years, and she died, and then the next day $2 million left the bank. And then they’re left scratching, “Wait a minute, where did that money go? Do we know who her family is? Were they not banking the family?” We need to be knowing these older Boomers, and we need to know what matters and who is managing their finances. And by the way, do we have a wealth tech capability inside the financial institution so that we would have a chance at capturing some fraction of those wealth transfers?

Devlin: Interesting.

King: To add onto that, Lee, we talk about that sandwich generation and the potential beachhead for other relationships. And going in back to what Lee just said about this managing your elderly parent who needs help, the way that we start looking at that from a digital experience is if the elderly parent needs help, what services can you wrap around that would bring the adult child to that relationship? I think one of the biggest challenges in that Baby Boomer demographic is fraud, and it’s completely rampant and accelerating and growing. And with AI, it’s exponentially growing.

One of the things that we think about is, how do you tie an adult child or adult child to the elderly parent to help them protect the assets? If grandma has an account at XYZ institution and there’s an opportunity to bring in her daughter to actually help protect her through keeping an eye on the account or watching out for anomalous transactions, things along that line, that becomes a hook into that institution that’s offering that service. Because it’s helping mom in a life event, which is having elderly parent to protect.

But then, on the opposite end of that, once you see that, “Oh, wow, this is interesting. This is really helping my mom helping protect her,” et cetera. “Oh wow, they actually have a youth banking solution as well.” That becomes a hook to bring in additional deposits and interchange and all those things that institutions are looking for. There’s a big opportunity if you have those ancillary products that cover those bookends, it can drive that [inaudible 00:29:12], the Gen X sandwicher is bringing additional services to that institution because it’s helping family members in that ecosystem be protected or being assisted in their financial health.

Devlin: How does a financial institution message that they are indeed and in fact doing a good job of preventing fraud and protecting seniors? How do they make that very apparent to their customers that they’re doing that?

Wetherington: I can tell you that any indication you give, if you’re already a trusted entity… I’m a Gen X customer and I’m sitting inside your financial institution, if you could just send a simple message to me in mobile banking, the digital platform, whatever it is to say, “Hey, we’ve got a co-managed account capability that will help monitor for elder fraud, that will make it really easy to monitor and pay your parents’ bills and keep on top of that, can automate even a bunch of that and track their spending,” et cetera, that kind of thing. I would be all over that. That I think-

King: All day. All day.

Wetherington: … all day long. And there’s a whole host of different fintechs out there. There’s a whole host of them that are out there. Really, making this a priority in the financial institution is having to acknowledge these larger structural realities and headwinds and deciding to do something about it.

The headwind is much bigger than we give it credit to. I was on a call with the controller of the currency, and this is front and center for his policy priorities in and around the OCC is helping understand the generational headwinds that all financial institutions are up against vis-a-vis the fintechs, the non-banks, and now the crypto concerns that are lining up at the OCC, by the way, for their national trust charters. Not understanding that macro view can sometimes rob urgency from taking those next best steps to solve for these structural challenges.

King: One last note on that, and you just touched on it, is the institution has to be thinking about how are they going to solve the financial challenges that customer or member is going to have, but not just for them but for their family ecosystem? And if you can find those nuggets of solving the problem… Because opening up a checking account is not solving it necessarily a problem, or moving deposits or having a credit card, those are opportunistic. But I think where the fintechs have excelled is that they have found very specific problems within the financial ecosystem and they create a solution to solve that problem, and they position it well with the right individual that can actually make the decision.

When you start thinking about this family ecosystem being in the sandwich generation, having elderly parents and kids, it’s not only just how do you help that individual parent solve their own problem, but also the problems that their family members may be having that you can solve for. Which is why these fintechs are opening accounts in the millions. I believe it’s somewhere around two trillion savings has been moved from traditional institutions to, call it the fintechs. And like I said, over half of new accounts in the last year were opened out of fintechs because they’re solving unique problems that traditional institutions are not.

Wetherington: That’s right, 56% of last year of all new checking accounts were opened at fintechs. And if you look at what that means in terms of deposit attrition, there’s been over three trillion in deposit attrition from banks and credit unions to fintech savings and investment accounts just over the past three years. This is a really big issue.

Devlin: A quick tag to the fraud issue. Do you have a sense about how tolerant Gen X is to the friction that is necessary to mitigate fraud at times? And whether that’s your payments aren’t clearing as quickly as you’d like, you have to answer several questions before you get access to your funds. Do they stack up any differently than you’d think are from different generations, and how would that affect other financial institutions?

Wetherington: First of all, I think if Gen X is experiencing that friction in service of protecting their elderly parents from fraud, got more of an appetite for that friction. For themselves, no. But here’s the reality, is that we’re now well into the age of AI, and now agentic AI. And the power of what can be done in real time automatically sussing out instances and shutting down automatically instances of suspected fraud means that you can have your cake and eat it too. The only friction is, hey, can you give us broader access to your total financial data that may be sitting at disparate financial service providers, aggregate that back to bank so that we can have a fuller picture and then we can better detect because we’re feeding a broader set of your financial data into these different models so that we can identify in real time anomalous or suspect behavior in terms of fraud?

The friction is really not on the way we used to do it. Because we didn’t have AI tools to help do this well, we would literally slow things down and just hope that time gave us enough of a window in which to identify something going wrong before somebody got hurt. That’s no longer the case, but you have to ask for the broader set of data if you want to take advantage of those easier, more effective automated tools.

Devlin: Final question. If you could distill all of your expertise and learnings and ideas on just a couple things, and I’ll start with Marcell. If you’re a bank executive, what could you change now or do differently to better serve Gen X?

King: I worked at Amazon for about four years, and it was the best experience I could have had. I felt like I was going through an MBA on the job. And the model, and I’m sure many of the folks who’ve read about Amazon or know about it, is that you start with your customer and you work your way backwards. And so, understanding what problems that customer is having outside of just their checking account, what are the biggest problems that they have, and how do you actually solve those problems at scale depending on the size of the institution? But in either case it’s about solving problems. If you are not solving a problem, you’re wasting your time.

Solving the problem, people will pay more for solving a problem than something that is just opportunistic. That was the big lesson that I learned, and what I’ve taken back into this space when I came back to fintech, is making sure whatever that I am working on building trying to solve for is for the problem of the customer of the institution. Because if you can satisfy them and make them happy, it makes the bank happy and it makes us happy.

Devlin: Great. Thanks so much. And Lee, any final thoughts on what you would try to achieve as that bank executive?

Wetherington: I would just tag and support what Marcell just said. I think strategically and technically and tactically banks should start thinking about family banking structures to put in place to do the things that Marcell is commending. You have Gen X in your bases, you can get messages to them because they are there. Getting them the right message about the right help they need as the sandwich generation is the key not only to them, inheritors of this 40 trillion in wealth that’s going to transfer, it is also your key into what is arguably the most important generation driving the next three to five years of financial services in the way of Gen Z. Give Gen X those family banking structures that help them more easily and more effectively take care of mom and dad and also take care of the kids, whether you’re just teaching them about money or you’re helping them in a downturn like we might be looking at for the balance of 2026.

Devlin: Great. Thanks so much, Lee and Marcell for sharing your perspectives with our ProSight Banking Strategies Podcast audience today. To our listeners, thanks for spending your valuable time with us. If you like it, please spread the word. I’m Frank Devlin.

The views expressed by the speakers are the speakers’ own and do not reflect the views of ProSight Financial Association, BAI, or RMA. The views expressed and information shared are of a general nature and are not intended to address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. No one should act upon any such views or information shared during this podcast without appropriate professional advice after a thorough examination of the particular situation.