Innovation requires three things: great ideas; technologists who excel at execution; and leaders who can bulldoze through corporate politics, bureaucracy and inertia to make things happen.
American Banker's Innovation of the Year 2025 award honorees are teams that have brought groundbreaking technology to life within financial institutions. From AI-based tools to streamlined payment systems, these projects share common themes of efficiency, accessibility and enhanced customer experience.
From the 10 honorees, each representing a category, one overall winner will be announced at
Artificial intelligence is a dominant theme among the winning teams. JPMorganChase's LLM Suite, for instance, gives employees access to generative AI to boost productivity, helping staff handle tasks from email drafting to data analysis. Truist's Client Pulse uses AI and analytics to aggregate and interpret customer feedback from channels that are typically siloed, aiming to improve service and reduce complaints.
Financial inclusion is another common thread. Nubank's Under 18 Financial Empowerment program lets kids apply for debit cards and savings tools with parental oversight, helping them develop an understanding of money and finances at an early age. Starion Bank's embedded finance for contract workers extends banking services to previously unbanked people.
Honorees also focused on payments innovation. United Bankers' Bank's partnership with Pidgin enables faster payments for its network of community banks, leveraging the FedNow Service and other payment routes. First Internet Bank's High-Fidelity ACH system provides businesses with real-time tracking and visibility into wire transfers, resolving long-standing settlement uncertainties.
Enhanced security and fraud prevention is another issue honorees are tackling. Western Alliance's Triangle of Fraud Protection brings technology to address a surge in fraudulent class action claims.
The trend toward increased open banking and data accessibility is reflected in Citizens' Open Banking API project, which enables secure data sharing for all customers, including business clients, with the apps they want to use.
The awards also highlight banks' renewed interest in blockchain technology. Citi's Token Services project, which uses tokenized bank liabilities for instant cash management and trade finance solutions to improve efficiency and enable real-time services, is part of this trend.
As regulations change, banks are digitizing their interactions with regulators. Morgan Stanley's automation of regulatory inquiries has significantly reduced manual effort, improved data quality and ensured timely responses to regulatory inquiries, showing how regtech can help manage complex compliance requirements.
These innovations show where some forward-looking banks and their tech partners advanced in the past year, and where others in the industry are likely to follow.
Here are the honorees, each from a separate category of tech innovation.
Truist
Innovation: Truist Client Pulse
Category: AI + Analytics
What if a bank could see every piece of feedback every customer has ever provided, encompassing call center conversations, surveys, app store reviews and formal complaints, and incorporate that into decisions? This is the aim of Truist's Client Pulse system.
The bank has already aggregated 30 million client interactions and fed them into the Truist Client Pulse model, an AI-powered analytics system developed in-house by Truist's Digital, CX and Marketing teams. Throughout the $536 billion-asset bank, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, Truist will use this information in decision-making processes, aiming for continuous improvement in client experience, acquisition and retention.
The bank says that by building Client Pulse internally rather than contracting with a third party, it avoided about $10 million in cost. It anticipates $35 million in cost savings due to an expected 10% drop in customer complaints.
Truist Client Pulse uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze and interpret client conversations from multiple channels, including customer service calls, chat interactions (both human and automated), survey responses, formal complaints and Apple App Store and Google Play reviews. This information is fed into Truist's Enterprise Data Lake. A patented data tool aggregates feedback and turns it into key themes and sentiment trends in near real time, the bank said.
These insights are integrated into QlikSense dashboards that business teams use to help them make decisions.
The bank hopes Client Pulse will lead to overall better customer experience by proactively identifying and resolving top client concerns. It says it's improving operational efficiency by automating feedback rather than doing it manually. And it hopes to more precisely match its products and services to what customers actually want.
Truist conducted a proof of concept of Client Pulse in the first quarter of 2024 and officially launched it in the fourth quarter. —Penny Crosman
Western Alliance Bank
Innovation: Triangle of Fraud Protection
Partners: Digital Disbursements; ClaimScore
Category: Cybersecurity + Fraud
Triangle of Fraud Protection combines real‑time payment screening, AI‑driven fraud scoring, and settlement‑administrator tools to halt fraudulent mass tort and class action claims, which spiked 190‑fold between 2021 and 2023.
Developed by Digital Disbursements — a subsidiary of Western Alliance Bank — and partner ClaimScore, the solution launched in June 2024 in response to the surge in bogus filings.
In its inaugural deployment across nine nationwide settlements, the Triangle of Fraud flagged more than 800 million suspect submissions, preventing over $100 million in improper payouts while requiring less than $100,000 of development investment — a return on investment exceeding 99,900%.
By integrating Digital Disbursements' payments infrastructure, ClaimScore's AI and administrators' existing fraud‑detection tools into a unified dashboard, stakeholders gain real‑time visibility into emerging attack patterns and claim‑level risk scores.
This transparency enabled a year‑over‑year decline in fraudulent claims, helped restore trust in the class action process, and prompted courts, plaintiffs' and defense counsel, and administrators to adopt the framework as a new industry baseline.
Featured at major legal and mass tort conferences — including sessions with federal Judge Edward Davila and leading class action lawyers — the innovation has catalyzed competing solutions and established a durable paradigm shift in litigation finance security. —Carter Pape
NuBank
Innovation: Under 18 Financial Empowerment
Category: Digital + Mobile-First Banking
In Latin America, access to financial services is often limited to the privileged few who can afford high bank fees. NuBank, a Brazilian neobank, is expanding banking access to underserved Latin teenagers with Under 18 accounts.
Under 18 accounts, originally launched in 2022 and now available to people ages 10 to 17, allow minors to access their own debit card and create "Caixinhas" (money boxes) for high-yield savings. This helps them participate in household financial growth.
Kids can make free transfers, online debit purchases and ATM withdrawals. Parents or guardians can also request an additional credit card for their kids, sharing a portion of their limit at no extra cost and giving their kids an opportunity to build their credit score early.
New features introduced to the Under 18 accounts in 2024 include letting parents access their kids' account balances, view their kids' transaction histories and receive notifications for transactions.
Many family financial services help parents give money to their kids' accounts for allowances; NuBank makes this a two-way street where kids can give parents the money they earn as well. This is particularly important in the context of NuBank's target consumer base of multigenerational Latin American households, where teenagers often start working to support their families before they turn 18.
Under 18 complements Nubank's existing Family Space, where heads of households can share balances and split expenses. NuBank rolled out its shared balance feature in January 2024 to make deposits, payments and transfers for rent, bills and other family needs.
The feature includes an automatic proportional division based on amounts deposited by each Family Space member. For example, if someone deposits 40% of the total balance, they will automatically contribute 40% toward expenses paid with that balance. This feature helps families keep track of shared contributions and manage multigenerational household finances more effectively.
In April 2024, Nubank's Under 18 feature, which accounts for more than 18% of Nubank's new customers monthly, surpassed 3 million users. —Melinda Huspen
Starion Bank
Innovation: Delivering Embedded Finance to Contract Workers
Partners: Fiserv; Central Payments
Category: Embedded Finance
By focusing on contract workers, Starion Bank was able to expand its footprint across the country, massively increasing its customer base and total deposits.
The community bank, along with fintech partners Fiserv and Central Payments, teamed up with one of the nation's largest gig economy employers to launch an embedded finance initiative focused on helping contract workers manage their finances.
Many of Starion's new customers were previously unbanked or underbanked. Through the program, workers have access to a full-featured deposit account embedded within the employer's platform they already use to handle all other work-related tasks. Users receive their earnings instantly and can manage their money within the app — they can pay bills, send funds, and add other direct deposits or cash through the platform they already use.
Users immediately receive a virtual debit card upon creating an account and are given the option to receive a physical card as well. Customers have access to perks like cash-back incentives at places like gas stations and are able to withdraw cash fee-free from a network of 40,000 ATMs nationwide.
Thanks to the partnership, the gig employees' earnings are now subject to standard FDIC insurance. Before the arrangement, gig workers were paid via prepaid cards. The new method is safer and easier for users to manage.
For Starion, the upside has been huge: More than 3 million accounts had been opened in a little over three months as of March 2025. As a community bank based in Bismarck, North Dakota, with physical branches in Wisconsin, Starion found that the opportunity greatly expanded its footprint and reach. As Starion customers, the gig workers can access other products and services like mortgages and car loans.
A point of pride for the bank and its partners is the speed at which the program was developed. Initial discussions around the product began in late 2023 and the first accounts went live in October 2024. —Emma Kinery
JPMorganChase
Innovation: LLM Suite
Category: Generative AI
JPMorganChase created a buzz last year when it revealed its plan to provide generative AI technology to all employees, to let them do things like draft emails and reports. Several banks followed suit.
The bank's developers created a portal to give employees secure access to large language models, with the ability to swap any model in or out. 220,000 employees now use the platform, LLM Suite.
"It just makes people more efficient," Teresa Heitsenrether, the bank's chief data and analytics officer, told American Banker in October. She spearheaded the effort at the $4.4 trillion-asset bank, the country's largest.
LLM Suite looks and feels like ChatGPT. Employees use it for idea generation, document analysis and content drafting, including to create first drafts of PowerPoint presentations.
The bank piloted the system with a small number of employees, then launched it firmwide in the summer of 2024. Within eight months, it went from zero production users to 200,000. The bank offered in-person courses and demos to employees to help them understand how to use it.
Employees estimate using the tool saves them one to two hours per week. Heavy users of the tool say they save four hours a week.
Heitsenrether said the benefits of providing generative AI to all employees will play out in three phases. The initial phase is the productivity employees are reporting. "It adds up, but it's very hard to quantify that because it's a small portion of a lot of people's time in a day," she said.
The second phase will be more targeted use cases involving the bank's data, for instance, helping call center representatives answer customer questions based on their account histories and bank product information.
"If they can answer the question more quickly, if it's a better client experience, if they have access to information across all of those products, that's a real savings for us," Heitsenrether said. "Every second on those calls is actual, real bottom-line impact."
The third phase is combining generative AI with workflows to create agentic AI.
"The models are getting better at reasoning, they can do multiple steps," Heitsenrether said. "So you can think of the tool as being this capable analyst who can do a lot of work for you, as long as you explain to the analyst these are the steps that you should take to get something done. That's where we think we're going to see a lot more productivity kick in." —Penny Crosman
Citizens
Innovation: Citizens Open Banking API
Category: Open Banking + Open Finance
Open banking is rapidly becoming standard practice in the banking industry through the embrace of application programming interfaces, or APIs. Citizens Bank, with the launch of its open banking API, takes this standard a step further by folding in commercial customers as well.
Normally, commercial clients at a bank need to go through a series of processes involving extensive paperwork and implementation to move their data from their bank to an external platform. With Citizens' open banking API, a commercial customer simply links their Citizens accounts from within the external platform and the data starts to flow automatically.
An API is a type of software that exchanges data with other computers, both internal and external, focusing on only the specific data that a particular request requires at the time. The tool is designed to let customers securely access their financial data, such as balances and recent transactions, on external platforms such as budgeting or wealth management apps.
Open banking through APIs enables bank customers to voluntarily share their financial data with third-party financial products, such as those offered by fintechs. This approach also eliminates the risks associated with outdated and insecure data aggregation methods such as screen scraping.
Citizens has also combined data sharing for all of its customers — individual, retail, business, commercial and private bank consumers — into a single API. This allows data aggregators to connect once to get data for all Citizens customer types. That feature makes Citizens' open banking API easier to work with than banks that build multiple versions of their open banking APIs for each type of customer.
Citizens developed the API in 2023 and launched in beta in mid-2024. In the second half of 2024, Citizens saw a major increase in API traffic and a 95% reduction in screen scraping volume. The bank officially announced the API's launch in early 2025. —Melinda Huspen
Citi
Innovation: Citi Token Services
Category: On-chain finance (Crypto + Blockchain)
In the age of cross-continent, real-time payments, Citi has made it a priority to stay ahead of the curve. The bank's Treasury and Trade Solutions customers were asking for multinational cash management and trade services available 24/7, and that's where Citi Token Services was born.
The bank uses a private permissioned distributed ledger and a distributed database with embedded business logic to enable a range of services from intraday lending, cross-border payments and conditional transfer of funds, to supply chain financing, trade settlements and fractional ownership, to identity verification and know-your-customer compliance.
Citi Token Services adheres to the ERC-20 technical standard — a community-created framework for smart contract-enabled fungible tokens on the ethereum blockchain. The bank owns and manages all blockchain technology infrastructure that will be integrated into the bank's global network. Clients can access Citi Token Services through the CitiDirect online portal or API connectivity.
Key to its adoption success was the platform's ease of use. Citi's developers believed it was essential that the program be integrated seamlessly into its existing platform. Clients do not need to implement additional technology or accounting practices or own or host a blockchain to use it. They can enable transfers through existing methods and are not required to hold tokens.
Citi handles all token transfers through its back-end infrastructure using nostro accounts, which speeds up the settlement process. Currently, the service is being offered in the U.S., London and Singapore using live USD transfers. Citi intends to add more corridors and currencies as well as eventually offer automated transfers.
The bank successfully completed its first pilot of the program in September 2023 and a year later launched Citi Token Services for Cash for commercial users as well as Citi Token Services for Trade. The Trade product uses the same money movement process, adding a smart contract to facilitate a conditional payment, and is currently in the pilot phase in North America. —Emma Kinery
First Internet Bank
Innovation: High-Fidelity ACH
Partners: Increase
Category: Payments
When banks send large wire transfers on behalf of business clients, a lot can go wrong. Large automated clearinghouse, or ACH, files can exceed transaction limits and require manual approval. Sometimes transfers are bundled into ACH files and processed asynchronously, and it's not clear whether they will make the settlement window. The uncertainty around when payments will settle is a source of frustration for many businesses.
First Internet Bank was one of the first online-only banks; it was founded in 1999. The bank, which is headquartered in Fishers, Indiana, decided last year it wanted to be able to offer its business customers reliability, timeliness and visibility into their wire transfers.
The $5.7 billion-asset bank worked with Increase, a fintech that provides banking application programming interfaces to other fintechs, to develop a system in which the bank sends out test messages, so it knows when messages are being received by the Federal Reserve. Customers are given a dashboard that tracks the progress of every ACH file and its expected settlement time. Check and Ramp are among customers who have reported that they now know precisely when payments will clear.
"I think of us as a 25-year-old startup," Nicole Lorch, president and chief operating officer, told American Banker in a recent interview. "We've always been growing and launching new lines of business. There's always been something new and different, and it really invigorates me to be part of it." —Penny Crosman
Morgan Stanley
Innovation: Regulatory Inquiries Compliance Platform Automation
Category: Regulation + Compliance + Risk Management
When regulators ask a bank for information about transactions that occurred on its system, they expect a detailed answer quickly.
Morgan Stanley's compliance staffers used to answer these incoming requests by hand, logging inquiries in a database, finding the relevant data and responding to the regulatory agency. The bank wanted to automate this manual process so that inquiries wouldn't be delayed if an employee was out of the office; data wouldn't risk corruption by manual-entry errors; and supervisors could track the status of all cases to make sure they were answered by the regulatory deadline.
The firm's Regulatory Inquiries Technology team started by mapping out the workflows of the compliance analysts — a difficult task, since each analyst had their own system for handling queries — and then developed software to process and route the queries automatically, starting with stock trading in the first version and adding options in the second version.
The developers had to get two existing regulatory-query systems to work with their new bot, synchronizing them and conducting reconciliations at the end of the day to make sure all the queries coming into the bank matched with the answers going back to the regulator, as well as processes to alert compliance staffers if the bot wasn't working. The engineers also had to test everything to make sure it met regulatory standards.
The project saved the bank's compliance analysts 1,300 hours per year and introduced automated data-quality checks, getting rid of manual errors. Analysts can now spend less time on data entry and more time overseeing the compliance program, which the bank says they prefer. —Chana R. Schoenberger
United Bankers' Bank
Innovation: Faster Payments for a Network of Community Banks
Partner: Pidgin
Category: Other Innovation
For a community bank, being able to provide real-time payments can open up opportunities to offer customers new services, like person-to-person payments for consumers and the ability to pay employees or vendor invoices instantly for businesses. Customers are starting to expect real-time payments from their banks. But for small institutions with limited technology resources, connecting to a real-time system is challenging, especially for those with older core systems that process transactions in batch mode rather than real time.
Overall adoption of FedNow, the Federal Reserve's real-time payment rail that serves as an alternative to The Clearinghouse's big-bank-owned RTP network for community banks, has been slow. In April, the Federal Reserve said 1,300 community banks had signed up for FedNow Service, which started in 2023.
United Bankers' Bank, a correspondent bank based in Bloomington, Minnesota, and real‑time payments fintech Pidgin teamed up to develop a platform that provides the connective tissue and plumbing a bank needs to offer real-time payments through FedNow, RTP or the automated clearinghouse. The platform made instant payments a possibility for more than 1,000 community banks.
Piloted ahead of FedNow's launch, the solution went live immediately and then grew partner participation by 5% to 10% each month. The project is ISO 20022‑certified, ensuring standardized, secure data exchange among financial institutions.
By routing transactions across FedNow, RTP and same‑day ACH rails, banks optimize for speed and cost, according to the two companies, while Pidgin's end‑to‑end platform keeps funds within the institution and streamlines reconciliation.
Pidgin's APIs and early FedNow certification enabled UBB to scale across P2P, C2B, B2C and B2B use cases. The result: Community banks now deliver 24/7/365 instant payments with minimal risk and friction. —Carter Pape
