John Hanley has spent 22 years in bank marketing, including 12 as CMO at Equity Bank and two direct bank launches. He now leads experience at Idaho First Bank, oversees its branchless brand Peak Bank, and teaches AI to bank marketers as faculty at the ABA’s Bank Marketing School.
We asked him where banks are leaving growth on the table. He didn’t name a channel — he named an assumption. From there the conversation covered why AI’s real value in bank marketing is research rather than creative, how Peak Bank gathered roughly half a billion in deposits without a single branch, and what he calls return on emotion: the case for tracking the results your CFO can’t tie to a clean ROI figure. He also walked us through the toaster giveaway that produced the best leads of his career and almost no funded accounts.
