Power Breakfasts

Start your morning with actionable insights over breakfast. These intimate, sponsor-hosted sessions deliver focused strategies and real-world case studies from leading financial technology providers and industry practitioners.

More coming soon!

This is only one component of a three-day agenda packed with real-world case studies, how-to strategy sessions, and inspirational keynotes.

More content tracks will be released shortly, including the Executive Leadership Series.

Strategic Transformation: Balancing Digital Marketing with Technology

Panelist: Angel Everard, Vice President Growth Marketing at Elevations Credit Union

Panelist: Wesley McChristian, VP Delivery at Americaneagle.com

Panelist: Missy Hildebrand, Digital Marketing Strategist at Americaneagle.com

Why you should attend:

Discover how a Colorado credit union with 175,000+ members successfully balanced marketing needs with technical infrastructure in a comprehensive digital transformation. This session explores their strategic approach to moving from a developer-dependent platform to a solution that empowers marketers while maintaining technical excellence.

Walk away with practical frameworks for evaluating when technology serves your marketing goals versus when it creates barriers, and how to build cross-functional alignment for digital initiatives that deliver results.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • How to evaluate platforms that empower marketers without sacrificing technical standards or security.
  • Frameworks for redesigning digital experiences around accountholder engagement and journey continuity.
  • Integrating marketing automation to streamline workflows and reduce reliance on development cycles.
  • Building cross-functional alignment between marketing and IT for sustainable digital transformation.

How Leading Banks Scale Relationship Banking Without Losing the Human Touch

Instructor: Nora Staebler, Global Industry Head, Financial Services at Sitecore

Why you should attend:

This session examines how experience design, journey orchestration, and real-time decisioning are being used to replicate—and strategically augment—key aspects of effective relationship management at scale.

Attendees will see where human interaction creates the most value, where digital experiences can responsibly take the lead, and how both work together to deliver personal, compliant, and trust-building customer experiences across the lifecycle.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • Which elements of human touch accountholders value most — and how to replicate them digitally.
  • How to orchestrate human and digital interactions into one continuous relationship-driven experience.
  • Why journey orchestration matters more than personalization alone when building long-term trust.
  • Operating model shifts required to balance efficiency, compliance, and relationship depth at scale.
  • How to identify where digital should lead and where human engagement drives the greatest ROI.

Building a Digital Brand Portfolio: Reaching New Audiences and Scaling Specialized Banking

Instructor: Jeffery Kendall, Chairman and CEO at Nymbus

Why you should attend:

Business banking is one of the fastest-moving battlegrounds in financial services—and it’s also where “one-size-fits-all” digital experiences break down fastest. As small businesses expect consumer-grade onboarding, role-based access, faster cash-flow tools, and clearer value, many institutions are rethinking how they structure digital experiences and brand strategy to win—and keep—business customers without creating complexity behind the scenes.

In this interactive panel, Nymbus, MSU Federal Credit Union, and Cornerstone Advisors will explore how and why institutions are building specialized digital experiences to better reach and serve business owners. Anchored by MSUFCU’s multi-brand approach and exclusive business banking research from Cornerstone Advisors, the panel will unpack industry challenges, brand roles, and experience differentiation, plus the technology strategies that make specialization feasible—including sidecar-core approaches that add modern capabilities while keeping the primary core stable. Attendees will walk away with an analyst-informed framework and tested examples they can apply to their own business banking growth roadmap.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • Use business banking benchmarks based on new research from Cornerstone Research to identify the biggest gaps—and opportunities—in acquisition, onboarding, activation, and retention for SMB customers.
  • Build a portfolio of distinct digital brands that creates clarity (who each brand is for and why it exists), strengthens trust, and avoids diluted messaging.
  • Design frictionless, personalized experiences that reflect how target customers actually operate—so the digital journey feels tailored, not templated.
  • Modernize business capabilities without destabilizing the core: apply sidecar-core strategies to deliver targeted features and experiences for business customers while minimizing disruption to the primary environment.
  • Adopt proven lessons from MSUFCU’s multi-brand approach, with takeaways you can apply to your own digital brand and platform roadmap.

Turn “Huh?” into “Aha!” with Behavior-Led Marketing

Instructor: Kent Blacksher, Sales Executive IV at Alkami

Why you should attend:

Bankers need marketing that actually moves the needle, not another dashboard. In this Power Breakfast session, you’ll hear how leading financial institutions use Alkami’s Data and Marketing Solution to activate behavior-based insights and launch personalized engagement marketing that delivers measurable lift.
We’ll unpack what makes these campaigns work: the signals that mattered most, the light operational lift required to activate them, and the creative decisions that resonated with real account holders. You’ll walk away with practical plays that you can adopt regardless of where you are on your data maturity journey.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • The most effective plug-and-play campaigns banks and credit unions deploy with Alkami’s Data & Marketing Solution
  • A simple “signals-first” approach to go from insight to activation without long build times
  • How to measure meaningful lift (adoption, balances, engagement) with clarity and confidence

Behavioral Banking: Unconventional Ways to Drive Growth & Engagement

Panelist: Michael Stojda, CEO at Exagens

Panelist: Jorge Campos, Chief Behavioral Officer at Exagens

Why you should attend:

Institutions often default to expensive platforms or structural redesigns to drive growth, yet these efforts frequently underperform. This session challenges the “big results require big budgets” assumption.
Behavioral science transforms banking interactions into “butterfly effects,” where small, targeted changes trigger outsized results. You’ll learn to identify the handful of decision-shaping moments that truly drive confidence and retention.
Discover why many “strategic” hurdles are actually behavioral problems in disguise. By using behavioral leverage instead of tech complexity, you can outperform resource-heavy initiatives and uncover cost-effective opportunities for growth.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • How behavioral science uncovers high-impact, low-cost opportunities hidden in everyday interactions.
  • Solving member problems in fresh, non-obvious ways rather than defaulting to new products or systems.
  • Using behavioral leverage over tech complexity when budgets, resources, or timelines are constrained.
  • How small behavioral shifts drive engagement and retention without requiring large structural changes.
  • Tackling big goals like deposit growth or omnichannel gaps without expensive, long implementations.

Using AI to Fix Breakpoints in the Borrower Journey

Instructor: Matt Thomson, Head of Revenue at Blend

Why you should attend:

Unpack how top financial institutions are cutting costs, creating consistent user experiences and improving backend efficiencies that drive meaningful ROI.

Drawing on insights from Blend’s survey of banking leaders and industry trends across Blend’s Home Lending and Consumer Banking product suite, this session reveals where financial institutions are losing ground today.

Attendees will leave with a practical playbook to move from renting customer attention to earning long-term loyalty.

This session will teach banking executives:

  • Key breakpoints in accountholder journeys that erode conversion and fuel attrition to fintechs.
  • Practical AI use cases that improve both the borrower experience and the banker’s workflow.
  • How to turn existing accountholder data into a proactive sales and retention engine.
  • Strategies for building consistent digital experiences that reduce friction and increase long-term loyalty.
The Financial Brand Forum | April 13-15, 2026