From the floor at nCino’s nSight: the conversation beneath the keynotes

Rachael Shepherd

Sr Consultant, 4 x nCino Community Champion

What banking and lending executives believe about their AI readiness, and what the data shows

nCino released its inaugural AI in Banking Benchmark at nSight this month, surveying 150 senior technology and business decision-makers across U.S. banks and credit unions. The headline finding was that 89% of banking executives expect to be working alongside AI agents within five years. Sessions on the main stage reinforced the message: AI is no longer a future consideration, it’s an operational reality.

That framing is accurate, but it’s also incomplete. Further down in the same report is the finding that only 21% of respondents are currently tying their AI investments to increased revenue. Let’s investigate why that is.

Confidence is high. So is the overwhelm.

The keynotes at nSight were optimistic, and understandably so. The Benchmark found that 84% of institutions say they are using AI at an enterprise level, 91% say they have a defined strategy, and executives broadly described AI as having already changed how their teams operate. On the main stage, the message echoed this sentiment, the industry has made its decision on AI and is moving forward.

The conversations happening away from the main stage told a more nuanced story. At the booth, over lunch, and in the hallways between sessions, a different mood surfaced. Practitioners were candid about feeling behind, uncertain about where to prioritize, and quietly unsure whether the platforms they had already invested in were delivering what had been promised. The enthusiasm was real, but so was the undercurrent of overwhelm.

That tension, between the confidence the industry projects and the uncertainty many practitioners feel, is worth taking seriously.

What the data shows when executives aren't self-reporting

Zennify brought a different kind of measurement to Charlotte this year. Our Digital Maturity Assessment scores institutions not on what executives report about themselves, but on what 110+ public signals, including regulatory filings and technology indicators, reveal about what institutions have actually built. Across banks, credit unions, and agricultural lenders assessed in Q1 2026, we scored 163 specific business capabilities benchmarked against peers.

The picture that emerges is consistent with what we heard in those hallway conversations. The industry median across all assessed institutions landed at 2.30 out of 5, placing the majority in what the DMA framework calls the "Developing" band. At this level, digital tools exist but tend to operate in isolation, reporting still requires manual effort, and policy is documented but inconsistently applied. What struck us most about the distribution was how tightly clustered it was. Nearly all assessed institutions fall within a narrow range, which means the competitive distance between peers is smaller than most assume, and the finish line is further away than the conference energy might suggest.

‍

Strong back office, struggling borrower experience

The most consequential finding is not where institutions score lowest in isolation, but where their scores diverge from where borrowers are paying attention.

Operations and risk is the strongest pillar in the cohort, reflecting genuine investment in process controls, compliance infrastructure, and risk management accumulated over many years. That work matters and it shows. The challenge is that it is largely invisible to the borrower sitting across the desk or filling out an application on their phone at 9pm.

Customer and member experience is the weakest pillar across the entire cohort, with only 3% of assessed institutions reaching a score above 3.0. This is the dimension borrowers feel directly, how straightforward it is to apply, how quickly a decision arrives, how seamless the process feels end to end. Borrower expectations have been reset by experiences outside of banking, and the distance between what most institutions currently offer and what borrowers now consider standard is growing in ways that rarely surface in internal reporting.

When you look at what sits underneath that gap, a pattern emerges. A significant share of assessed institutions have technology deployed that has never been fully activated. Lending platforms are live, but credit decisions are still being made through processes that exist outside the platform. Automation tools have been implemented, but the manual workflows they were intended to replace are still running alongside them. This is where the connection to the Benchmark's 21% becomes clear. When AI is layered on top of infrastructure that was never fully operationalized, the gains that justified the investment stay just out of reach.

An organizational problem disguised as a technology problem

The persistence of this gap is less a technology story than an organizational one, which is perhaps why it is so rarely addressed directly. In a majority of assessed institutions, the strategic plan describes a future state that the underlying data architecture cannot yet support. Ambition has outpaced infrastructure, and in many cases there is no single person accountable for closing that distance. Without clear ownership, data governance decisions get made by committee, deferred to a future phase, or quietly absorbed into the backlog while the institution moves on to the next priority.

This is something we heard at nSight in more direct terms than usual. Leaders know the problem exists. What they struggle to articulate is whose job it is to fix it. The institutions in our cohort that are pulling ahead tend to share one structural characteristic: someone owns the data foundation with genuine authority that extends across business lines rather than sitting within a single team. That is an organizational design decision, and it turns out to be the one that determines whether everything else actually delivers.

Start with an honest picture

The nCino Benchmark and the Zennify DMA are measuring different things. The Benchmark reflects how the industry feels about where it stands. The DMA reflects what the industry has actually built. Read together, they describe an industry that is genuinely committed to transformation and, in many institutions, further from its goals than the main stage energy would suggest.

That gap is closeable, but it starts with an honest picture of where your institution actually stands today, across the capabilities that determine whether your technology investments reach the borrower and show up in your results.

Zennify's Digital Maturity Assessment provides that picture, scored across 163 capability areas, benchmarked against your peers, and delivered in under a week. It is free for financial institutions.

Learn more and request your Digital Maturity Assessment.