Episode notes
In this episode of Banking Reinvented, recorded live at ENGAGE Americas in Nashville, host Tim Rutten sits down with Steven Redden, Partner at McKinsey and Company and leader of McKinsey Digital's data and AI practice for the US and Canada. Steven brings ten years of experience at the intersection of data transformation and AI strategy, and a builder's instinct from founding a telecom startup before consulting.
The conversation covers why banks are trapped between two urgent mandates - fix your data foundations and show AI results now - and why most are solving both problems wrong. Steven makes the case that the banks getting real value from AI are picking a domain, reimagining the process end to end, and deliberately capturing the efficiency rather than redistributing it.
Steven also gets into the LLM dependency question - whether banks are ceding competitive ground by building on top of models they do not own. The competitive advantage, he argues, will never come from the model, but from the proprietary data and business context that sits on top of it.
The episode closes with a question about what comes next: AI-native bank startups, the divide between tier-one institutions and regional banks, and why Steven is more optimistic about smaller institutions than most expect.