How are leading financial institutions turning 2025’s biggest challenges into opportunities for deeper customer relationships?
We just returned from Las Vegas where we attended The Financial Brand Forum 2025 and connected with hundreds of banking and credit union leaders to find out. We heard firsthand how financial institutions like yours are modernizing their operations to meet evolving consumer expectations and build trust. After three days of discussion, we’re not just inspired—we’re energized by how strongly our solutions align with some of the top challenges you’re facing today.
Whether it’s increasing competition from non-traditional players, balancing digital innovation with operational stability, or pressure to justify physical locations while meeting digital demands, bank and credit union leaders have their work cut out for them this year. Despite the challenges, the event was overflowing with positivity as attendees were eager to share their experiences and learn from their peers.
👇If you missed this year’s event or want to refresh your memory, here’s what we heard and how Glia can help you address these 3 critical industry challenges:
Everyone Wants AI, but Security, Reliability and ROI Concerns Make Implementation Risky
Our recent survey of financial services leaders found that 91% see customer experience as the starting point for AI—a sentiment strongly reinforced at this year’s event. While enthusiasm for AI has never been higher, implementation concerns remain significant.
🧐For customer- or member-facing AI, we consistently heard concerns about:
- Maintaining authenticity and preserving context throughout AI-powered interactions
- Ensuring robust data privacy and security
- Preventing AI hallucinations that could damage trust
🤔For internal AI supporting managers and service teams, your concerns focused on:
- Having to retrain staff on new AI-powered systems
- Risk of losing important customer context in AI-assisted interactions
- Difficulty tracking ROI on AI investments
- Managing operational resilience when AI systems fail
Our contact center AI was purpose-built so that banks and credit unions can eliminate these very concerns and instead focus on strengthening meaningful customer relationships. Let’s break it down.
At Glia, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to contact center AI than traditional CCaaS vendors. Rather than rushing to market with standalone AI solutions, we’ve thoughtfully integrated AI capabilities within our existing platform—preserving context, maintaining security, and ensuring human oversight throughout the process. Our AI tools enhance rather than replace human agents, working alongside them to amplify their capabilities while protecting the authentic connections that drive loyalty.
We’ve built security guardrails that make hallucination impossible, while our continuous learning mechanisms allow AI-powered virtual assistants to generate responses based on your best human agents’ actual conversations. This ensures consistency between AI and human interactions. Meanwhile, our ChannelLess® architecture guarantees context is never lost—a critical difference that transforms fragmented touchpoints into coherent customer journeys.
When institutions focus only on the customer-facing value of AI, they’re missing out on opportunities to promote efficiency across the entire contact center. That’s why we believe in ✨AI for All™✨.
Our AI for All™ streamlines workflows by empowering all contact center stakeholders:
📲Customers get fast answers wherever and however they prefer to interact
⚡️Agents enjoy AI-assisted tools to make their jobs easier
📊Managers and executives receive real-time contact center reporting and insights at their fingertips
The result is responsible, practical AI that delivers measurable ROI while preserving the human touch that makes banking and credit union relationships meaningful.
Banks and Credit Unions Need to Build Market-Resistant Customer Relationships
Financial services is at a pivotal inflection point. With economic uncertainty and increasing demands for frictionless digital experiences, conventional growth strategies are yielding diminishing returns. To retain customers and members in this environment, you must treat every single interaction as the vital opportunity it is. This is how you strengthen relationships to withstand any economic environment.
Traditional contact center technology creates isolation between customer interactions across channels and departments. Each disconnected phone call, chat session, or text introduces friction, forcing customers to repeatedly explain their needs while valuable context is lost. This isolation frustrates customers expecting seamless experiences and prevents you from fully understanding their journey and anticipating their needs—missing critical opportunities to build the loyal relationships that sustain growth.
This is where our expertise at Glia becomes particularly valuable. Building market-resistant customer relationships requires transforming isolated interactions into continuous, contextual experiences. Through our ChannelLess® architecture, we help you meet customers at their moment of need—whether on your website, mobile app, or online banking platform—and guide them through complex financial decisions with seamless human and AI support.
By preserving context across every interaction, you create experiences that strengthen trust and foster relationships that withstand economic uncertainty. Umpqua Bank implemented The Glia Interaction Platform from 2018 to 2022—during some of the most turbulent times in modern banking—and achieved these remarkable results: a 980% increase in digital branch account openings, a 511% increase in digital branch loan dollars, and a 245% increase in total loans.
Just imagine what you could accomplish by eliminating interaction isolation in today’s environment.
Integrating New Technologies While Maintaining Existing Systems Is Nearly Impossible
Industry events present a great opportunity for bank and credit union leaders to meet peers and candidly share their experiences with emerging technologies. Throughout Financial Brand Forum 2025, we noticed that while everyone discusses how technology (Hello, AI) can address pain points, fewer conversations focus on tech stack consolidation—despite its critical importance.
As you evaluate technology investments to modernize your operations and fuel growth, you should ask yourself: Does this technology further fragment my operations or unify them? If it’s not the latter, consider the significant value of a consolidated tech stack. But first, what makes fragmented technology so problematic for financial institutions?
- It fragments customer data across systems, leading to inconsistent service, missed opportunities, and frustrated customers who expect seamless interactions.
- It increases operational inefficiency and costs, requiring complex integrations and specialized staff to maintain multiple disparate systems.
- It severely limits your ability to adapt quickly, as adding new features requires modifications across disconnected systems.
- It creates compliance and security vulnerabilities through inconsistent data management and security protocols.
Expecting a disjointed tech stack to deliver seamless customer experiences is fundamentally contradictory. It’s like giving every player on a football team a different playbook and expecting to win the Super Bowl. Instead of implementing yet another standalone solution, our platform serves as the connective tissue that brings everything together.
We combine all essential engagement tools—video, chat, voice, CoBrowsing, and AI—into one seamless interface that works across all your digital properties. The result is a simplified technology environment for your institution and a smoother experience for both your customers, service teams and leaders.
The Path Forward: AI-Powered, Unified Experiences That Build Trust
As we reflect on The Financial Brand Forum 2025, one truth stands out: the future of financial services lies not in isolated solutions but in using technology to create seamless, meaningful experiences that build lasting relationships capable of withstanding market volatility.
Whether you’re exploring AI adoption in banking, working to strengthen customer loyalty, or looking to simplify your tech stack, the key is unification, not isolation. At Glia, we’re proud to offer solutions that address these critical challenges while preserving what matters most—the human connections that make banks and credit unions so special.
Ready to see what AI for All™ looks like in action? Want to experience how our features drive efficiency at every level of your organization? We’d love to show you.
Schedule a live demo or follow us on LinkedIn to see what trade shows and events we’re headed to next!
