Ask someone what they think of their bank or credit union, and increasingly, what they’re describing is an app. Not a branch or a loan officer: an app they open several times a day, on a device they rarely put down.
That shift runs through nearly every conversation I have with financial institution leaders right now, whether we’re talking about a merger, an AI roadmap, or next year’s budget. The question beneath it all is the same: do you treat digital as an access point for your institution, or do you recognize that, for a growing number of users, digital is your institution?
About Lisa Daniels, COO, Lumin Digital
Lisa Daniels brings more than 31 years of fintech experience to Lumin Digital, with a career spanning customer service, operations, and client delivery. She has held leadership roles at TwinStar Credit Union, Online Resources, and Alkami Technology, and is known for her expertise in operational excellence, client engagement, and risk management. As Chief Operating Officer, she oversees Lumin’s operations, including implementation, client success, and client partnerships.
On the “Shared Accounts” podcast with CU Times, Lisa Daniels explains why digital deserves the same accountability as the branch, from the first login to decisions about platforms, AI and budgets.
The moment of truth
Nowhere is that question more exposed than during a merger. The deal gets announced, the transaction closes, and for months, nothing changes. Then one day, there’s a new login screen, new app, and new rules. That first post-merger login is the moment of truth. It's when users find out whether their institution truly knows their preferences.
The mistakes that erode trust are rarely dramatic. They're small decisions made without thinking through the friction they create: skipping data cleanup before conversion, requiring users to re-register instead of converting them automatically, or changing password complexity requirements right at first login. Nobody wants to deal with a forced password change in the middle of everything else that's new. They just want to get in and look around. If a change doesn't have to happen on conversion day, don't make it happen that day.
These decisions add up at exactly the moment you're asking people to trust you most. And the cost of getting them wrong doesn't show up until launch day.
That's why digital readiness needs to be part of the conversation from day one, with clear accountability for the user experience. Decisions that feel small in month one, like whether someone keeps a familiar username or starts over with new credentials, become expensive in month eleven, showing up in call center volume and satisfaction scores. Boards don't need to make those decisions. But leadership needs to ensure they're addressed early, while there's still time and flexibility to get them right.
It's also why I think leadership teams need to stop treating a technology conversion as an IT project. IT doesn't own the branch experience, and for the same reason, IT shouldn't be left to own the digital one. Banks and credit unions have always known who's accountable for how someone feels walking into a branch.
Digital deserves that same ownership: someone accountable for how the user feels, not just whether the system works.
Preserving the relationship through change
Here's something worth remembering in any digital transition, merger-driven or not: people didn't ask for this change. They've learned how to navigate the experience they have today. It may not be their favorite app, but it works for them, and now you're asking them to relearn it.
That doesn't mean the change isn't necessary. It usually is. But it means the transition deserves careful thought: communicating early and often, giving users time to understand what's changing, and preserving the service they're used to wherever possible. Small things matter here, like carrying user data forward in a way that says we know you, rather than asking someone to start from zero. That's how a financial institution preserves its relationship-driven culture even as the surrounding experience changes. Users have always wanted their financial institution to know them. What's changed is where they expect that relationship to happen, and how much friction they'll tolerate while it does. During a merger, that expectation gets distilled down to something very simple: is my money safe, and does my app work?
Users have always wanted their financial institution to know them. What's changed is where they expect that relationship to happen, and how much friction they'll tolerate while it does.
LISA DANIELS
COO, Lumin Digital
From utility to strategy
At the beginning of a project, it's important to define your digital channel as either a line item or a strategy. Because when the merger dust settles, an institution treating digital as a utility asks whether it functions. An institution treating it as a strategy asks whether it's generating user engagement. That difference shows up in where they invest: personalization, proactive notifications that flag something before a user notices it themselves, and financial wellness tools that help someone actually see where their money is going.
I've seen that distinction show up in the numbers, too. Banks and credit unions that treat digital as a strategy are the ones posting near-90 NPS scores, or seeing tens of millions of dollars in deposit growth in a single month. Those results don't come from a longer feature list. They come from users trusting the experience enough to actually engage with it, not just tolerate it.
That has implications for how executives should evaluate a platform. Feature checklists matter, but features come and go faster than a platform decision should. The better question is what a platform will be able to do next year, not just today. How often does this partner release updates? Is every client on the same version or are some of them three releases behind? How easily does it integrate with everything else you run? Those answers tell you how costly or easy it will be to evolve, and every hour your team spends managing a difficult upgrade is an hour not spent on work that actually advances the user experience. Beyond choosing features, you're choosing your ability to adapt.
The next iPhone moment
If I had to bet on the single technology that will reshape the user experience the most over the next few years, it's AI, and I say that fully aware that everyone is saying it right now. I don't think that means it's overhyped. I think it's still widely misunderstood, especially in personal finance.
The comparison I keep coming back to is the iPhone in 2007. Nobody at the time could have told you it would change how we navigate, pay, or communicate. Agentic experiences in banking feel like a similar moment: the shift from an app that shows you information to one that can act on your behalf, with permission at every step. That permission piece matters.
The value isn't in AI doing things to users. It's in users directing what gets done, and trusting that nothing happens until they say yes.
Banks and credit unions have a real journey ahead here, from curiosity to commitment, and there's a lot to work through along the way: cost, security, and trust. But that's the conversation every bank and credit union needs to be having now, not once the technology has already reshaped user expectations somewhere else first.
Prioritizing based on impact and risk
No financial institution has unlimited resources, so the real skill is prioritizing based on client or member impact and risk rather than whichever technology is getting the most attention that quarter.
Fraud prevention and cybersecurity come first. That's not optional spending; it's protecting the trust that got the user to bank with you in the first place. From there, look at where users are experiencing the most friction. Payments and the everyday digital experience are how users judge you now, and if moving money or logging in isn't fast and reliable, nothing else you build will make up for it. I'd treat AI less as its own category and more as something that makes the other priorities work better.
For anything under consideration, I ask four questions:
1
What problem are we solving?
2
What's the expected impact?
3
How fast can we show it's working?
4
Does it make the relationship with that user stronger?
If you can't answer those four questions clearly, the project isn't ready to be funded yet.
The accountability digital deserves
Every one of these conversations, whether about mergers, platform decisions, AI, or budget tradeoffs, comes back to the same idea. Banks and credit unions have always known how to build a relationship in a branch. The work now is building that same relationship in a place where most users spend far more of their time: on a screen, in their pocket, available around the clock. That's not a technology problem. It's the relationship, and it deserves the same accountability the branch always had.
Lisa Daniels
COO, Lumin Digital
