Microsoft envisions a future where any company’s artificial intelligence agents can work together with agents from other firms and have better memories of their interactions, its chief technologist said on Sunday ahead of the company’s annual software developer conference. Microsoft is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May 19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools for developers building AI systems. Speaking at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry that will let agents from different makers collaborate. Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own.
Capital One closes Discover acquisition with stipulations to address Discover’s outstanding enforcement actions; will reportedly pay $425 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of cheating savings account depositors
Armed with Discover’s payments network, which competes with those of Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., Capital One is poised to capture an even greater share of spending on credit and debit cards that Americans so heavily rely upon. “We are well-positioned to continue our quest to change banking for good for millions of customers,” Capital One Chief Executive Officer Richard Fairbank said. The acquisition wasn’t assured, given the last presidential administration’s skepticism of mergers — and especially those involving finance firms. Bank dealmaking activity was stunted during Joe Biden’s presidency, and some Congressional Democrats opposed the Capital One takeover of Discover, saying it may harm consumers and put the stability of the US financial system at risk. With Donald Trump now in the Oval Office, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency approved the deal last month after the US Department of Justice decided not to challenge it. But the approval came with stipulations: the OCC mandated that Capital One outline the corrective actions it planned to take to address Discover’s outstanding enforcement actions. In 2023, the firm disclosed that, starting in 2007, it had been charging merchants more than it should have to accept payments on certain credit cards. In connection with the acquisition, Capital One is expanding its board of directors to 15 members from 12. Capital One and Discover customer accounts and banking relationships remain unchanged for now, and information in advance of any forthcoming changes will be provided, according to the statement.
Citi Community Capital retained its spot at the top in Affordable Housing Finance’s Top 25 affordable housing lenders of 2024; KeyBank was second and BoA ranked third
Despite difficulties many lenders lent more in 2024 to affordable housing properties. Affordable Housing Finance’s Top 25 affordable housing lenders provided $60.1 billion in permanent and construction loans in 2024 to developments that serve households up to 80% of the area median income (AMI). That’s an increase from the more than $55.7 billion in loans provided by 2023’s top lender list. Citi Community Capital retained its spot at the top of the list. It lent just over $7 billion to affordable housing properties last year, just slightly above the nearly $6.5 billion in 2023. Because of today’s uncertainties, Citi forecasts it will lend just $6 billion to affordable housing properties this year. However, if federal funding levels stabilize, Citi could easily beat that conservative forecast and build on the amount it lent in 2024, Johnson notes. Citi is also confident that the forecast will not sink lower than $6 billion for 2025. A portion of those loans are conversions of construction loans to permanent financing for projects that have already fixed their sources and uses of funds. Bank of America Community Development Banking provided a construction loan in mid-2024 and invested in tax credits for the $83.5 million project. Grants, soft financing, and a partially deferred developer fee provided much of the rest of the financing, including a Rhode Island Renewable Energy Grant and funds from the Providence Housing Trust Fund, the Rhode Island Housing Rebounds Fund, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. J.P. Morgan created its Workforce Housing Solutions group to finance projects like this. It closed its first construction loan in December 2023 to finance a new community built with modular housing, now scheduled to open this summer in Los Angeles. In June 2024, Roers Cos., a national multifamily real estate investment firm, closed the financing to develop 200 new apartments at Allers Landing in Austin, Texas. J.P. Morgan provided a $29.2 million construction loan to help build Allers Landing. The $55.9 million project will include 110 workforce housing apartments reserved for households earning up to 80% of the area median income.
U.S. Bank launches extension of The Power of Us campaign to “demonstrate the power of the interconnected bank” and highlighting goal savings digital budgeting, business growth and cash back features
Last May, U.S. Bank launched its brand campaign, The Power of Us, which highlighted how it supports clients at every stage of their journey to help them reach their goals. Now, U.S. Bank is building on that momentum by launching an extension of last year’s campaign that is focused on how great things can be achieved by working alongside its clients. The new campaign focuses on sharing stories that reflect the diversity of its businesses, reinforce its distinct style of partnership and demonstrate the interconnected nature of its products and services. “This new campaign builds on the strong foundation we laid last year,” said Michael Lacorazza, chief marketing officer for U.S. Bank. “It brings to life the collaborative spirit that defines our brand. By showcasing the range of our businesses and the strength of our partnerships, we’re telling a powerful story about what we can achieve together.” Like last year’s brand campaign, U.S. Bank is putting a spotlight on the brand’s most iconic assets—name, shield, color palette — and continuing to infuse multicultural insights throughout the brand campaign assets. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal also is back as the voice of the campaign spots, adding a distinct tone with subtle gravitas.
- The Power of Jess: Featuring Jess Sims, an entrepreneur, Peloton Instructor, educator, sideline reporter and game changer, this spot shows how U.S. Bank Smartly® Checking and Savings helps her achieve her goals faster.
- The Power of Mia: This highlights an entrepreneur who uses U.S. Bank Business Essentials® to manage her growing business with ease.
Under Control: Mari surprises her dad with a car and explains how Bank Smartly® digital budgeting tools and cash back from her U.S. Bank Smartly™ Checking and Savings helped make it possible. This spot grew from an insight about the daughter’s role as the CFO for her family and was produced as a bilingual commercial that will run in both English- and Spanish-language media.
Chime wants to expand its customer base beyond those earning less than $100,000, to target the 227 million Americans earning up to $200,000 each year
After much anticipation and speculation, Chime Financial filed the paperwork for its initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 13. While Chime frequently compares itself to banks in its document, it doesn’t accept that label itself — and there isn’t a whiff of the company wanting a charter at any time, even as the Trump administration attitudes on charters appear to be loosening. “Chime is a technology company, not a bank,” according to the document. The fintech partners with FDIC-insured The Bancorp Bank, N.A., and Stride Bank, N.A., as the banking engines behind the growing family of services that Chime provides customers that it refers to as members. Chime considers its key market — at least, up until now — to be American households with annual income of $100,000 or less, which the company says represent 75% of U.S. households. At present the plan is to continue to emphasize that revenue source, which drives Chime’s focus on increasing member usage of its payment cards. The document states that 72% of Chime revenue came from payments in the first quarter (76% for 2024). Most of the rest comes from fees such as for accessing out-of-network ATMs, voluntary tips for its SpotMe fee-free overdraft services, and fees for MyPay instant transfers. MyPay allows members to access up to $500 of their paycheck in advance. Filling its shelves with more products, and drawing in more consumers to use them, is a key part of Chime’s game plan.
- Chime Wants to Expand its Customer Base Beyond Those Earning Less Than $100,000: Chime’s filing paints a picture of a company that has succeeded in reaching a piece of its target audience, people earning under $100,000, many of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck, with a huge amount of growth to go. (We’ll come to those numbers later.) That market is estimated to comprise 196 million people. The company wants to tackle the next demographic layer: the 227 million Americans earning up to $200,000 each year. “Given nearly half of Americans earning more than $100,000 annually are estimated to live paycheck to paycheck, many of these Americans’ financial priorities overlap with those of our current target audience,” the document says. “However, they are also looking for solutions that provide broader access to credit, investing, insurance, and saving on expenses.”
- Chime Hopes to Introduce Additional Products Beyond Its Original Niche: The filing dwells in places on the strength of the company’s technology, especially in accommodating rapid new product development. The company likes to describe its operation as a “flywheel.” This includes mechanisms to drive new membership through member referrals, which it says has been its heaviest driver of signups of active members since 2022. Chime has expanded past the basic accounts it began with, which in general are designed for the paycheck-to-paycheck segment. The filing says that the company wants to introduce additional products, including installment loans, unsecured credit cards, longer-term savings accounts, retirement accounts, investment accounts, wealth management, and insurance.
- Chime’s Growth Drives Membership as Well as Product Use: The company now has 8.6 million “active members.” In March 2025, active Chime members used an average of 3.3 company products. The measurement of average revenue per active member, a number Chime monitors closely, came to $251 in the same period, up from $210 in 2022. As of the end of March, Chime says, 67% of the active members consider Chime to be their primary financial provider. To put that in perspective, in the first quarter, the company says that active members performed an average of 54 transactions a month. Of those, three quarters were making purchases with Chime debit and credit cards. Of those, 70% were for non-discretionary expenses such as food and fuel. Chime believes it has infiltrated its $100,000 and below market by less than 3%, indicating potential for much more growth even if it doesn’t reach for the $200,000 group.
- Chime is Embracing a Hybrid Human/GenAI Approach to Marketing Content: A key part of the company’s approach to digital marketing relies of search engine optimization and targeted paid media. The SEO effort uses the company’s AI-powered Chime Content GPT. The document describes that as GenAI that looks at its most successful blogs, editorial articles and videos. Those form the basis of new content, “in partnership with our internal editorial team and certified financial writers.” “We believe our content generation strategy has put Chime in a strong position compared to traditional banks in organic search results for the key financial categories that resonate most with everyday Americans,” the document says. For those readers who like to see what other players are spending on marketing, Chime spent $519.8 million in 2024 on sales and marketing, up nearly 15% from 2023.
J.P. Morgan Payments supports Amtrak for enhanced cash reconciliation and centralized treasury management on SAP’s S/4 HANA |
Amtrak needed a way to better forecast the company’s cash flow.4 Most cash flow forecasts in the industry rely on a generally accepted accounting principles view of accounting and transactions. However, Amtrak’s treasury team knew that a liquidity-based view would be more effective for its unique situation. “We needed to become a data-driven treasury department,” says Ashmore. “And we recognized that the best source of data was the bank.” While meeting with J.P. Morgan Payments in October 2022, Ashmore requested a forecasting tool and learned that the bank already had such a solution in beta mode.4 Amtrak then implemented the beta solution and provided feedback as J.P. Morgan Payments finished enhancing and building out the tool. Amtrak went live using the Cash Flow Intelligence* tool, which is built into the J.P. Morgan Access® platform, in May 2023. After increasing visibility into its cash flow position, the Amtrak treasury team wanted to further strengthen their financial controls by sharing insights with their colleagues in finance. The company began using the J.P. Morgan Payments SAP plug-in for real-time treasury (SAP RTT) to manage station cash reconciliation as part of an ongoing effort to centralize its treasury management system through SAP implementation.4 Leveraging SAP RTT’s real-time cash position, reporting, reconciliation and real-time payment tracking, Amtrak could track payments end-to-end across the company and enable real-time processing for accounts payable and receivable. Ashmore shared that after working closely with J.P. Morgan Payments, Amtrak implemented the solution with only a few clicks. Doing so meant Amtrak had access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning technology without having had to invest significant internal resources. Right away, Amtrak put the Cash Flow Intelligence tool to use to find previously invisible patterns in the company’s cash flow and used the tool to segregate cash flows into categories.4 For example, it separated daily credit card receipts, monthly receipts from state and agency partners, and more infrequent federal receipts throughout the year. Ashmore shared that this significantly increased projection accuracy because the large payments no longer interfered with daily and monthly forecasting. This accuracy helped Amtrak free up balances that they had set aside to cover cash flow issues. By investing these idle balances, Amtrak generated better returns for the company. It also provided an opportunity to receive more grant-based funding for large infrastructure projects. Through its relationship with J.P. Morgan Payments, Amtrak discovered a cash forecasting solution that supported the company’s overall business goals of increasing ridership and maintaining excellence in customer service. With J.P. Morgan’s digital dashboard within SAP, Amtrak can view balances and transactions received from the bank during the day and more precisely manage its overall cash position.4 The company plans to continue pursuing digital evolution and system enhancement as the company expands its routes and improves its services.
Chase Home Lending CEO expects AI to enable a superior CX by digitizing voice, documents and data
As a key player in correspondent lending, Chase maintains a complex relationship with independent mortgage banks, and Sean Grzebin CEO of Chase Home Lending Grzebin highlighted how the bank balances those connections. ” We’ll continue to invest in our digital capability so that we can take advantage of our advantage, which is the data. We have relationships with almost half of the customers in the United States, and that relationship gives us a tremendous amount of access into the things that they’re looking to accomplish in their financial lives. Through that, we get a lot of clues about ways that we can help customers on the mortgage side. We’re one of the few that has both amazing digital capabilities, as well as a physical presence, with about 1,300 folks out in branches sitting knee-to-knee with customers every day. We’re always paying attention to macro indicators and how they impact the market, how they impact customer behavior, and how they impact competitor behavior. It’s something that’s unique to 2024, 2025 that the interest rate environment has been really volatile. Sometimes it looks like it’s going to improve and go our way, and then some news comes out and it goes a different way. It is really about positioning for those episodes. I think that the big shift in our strategy is not so much a shift, but more of a focus on when rates drop for some period of time. Whether it’s a day, a week or two weeks, you need to be able to be very quick and responsive to the fact that that happened. The notional market size isn’t what it used to be. You have a lot of competitors going for even a smaller amount of units. Even though the notional market size looks like it’s kind of getting healthier. It’s still very competitive and very tight. More often than not, we’re getting a shot at the next purchase when the customers in our servicing book. I think that’s healthy and a good trend for us in our business. But again, we continue to look at all of the customers. The reality is anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million Chase customers buy homes every year. The opportunity for us is just very unique because of their otherwise relationship with the bank. I think retention will continue to improve as our capabilities keep evolving. We’re getting more ‘at bats’ than we have historically on the retention customer, is how I would put it. AI is going to be a pretty dramatic change for the industry, and not just at Chase. When you look at it and boil it down, obviously it’s relationships first, but after relationships, the manufacturing process is voice, documents and data. If you want to know what’s ripe for disruption from AI, it’s docs, voice and data. There is going to be a lot of evolution. The jobs are going to change. The relationships are going to matter over time, which plays nicely into our strategy with our customer base and how we’re trying to serve them. When you think about the process in general, it is just very ripe for that, because it’s very rules-based, which AI does better than human beings most times. Ultimately, if the documents can become digitized and it all becomes data, I think it can become very fast for customers, a great customer experience, and very efficient for mortgage companies through time. I think the loan officer’s value is the relationships they have and their ability to talk and manage anxiety through the process as well as present the best deal and the best terms for a customer. The winners in today’s business are the ones that do that more often than they do docs, data and chasing things. The successful loan officers today have a process whereby they rely on their back office to deliver the actual experience to the customer, and they manage the anxiety, they manage the relationship with a customer, and at the end of that, there’s a winner there. What you’re going to see with loan officers is not elimination, but the ability to scale way bigger than they’ve ever been able to go. You’re going to see that productivity ramp pretty dramatically. I see a lot of efficiency through the servicing process as well, through AI. In the secondary markets, it’s going to make a difference in terms of speed and execution. Every basis point matters. I think there’s going to be an evolution here that is going to be pretty seismic for the industry, is my prediction. When it comes to just nuts and bolts, we’re using it already in all of our processing. We’ve rolled out a large language model to all 14,000 of the employees that are in the home lending business today, and we’ve been using AI for all of our modeling for years. When it comes to core AI, that’s been in our DNA for several years. The use cases around voice are pretty robust. Particularly if they’re update calls or status calls, those are pretty easy for the machines to handle today. So there are going to be a lot of use cases around voice again, to make everyone more productive, to make the customer service process better. The machines don’t get fatigued, they can handle most of the actual use cases. It’s going to create scale for anybody that buys into it. We’re not going to be ignorant to anything. We’re going to look at every single thing that can make our process efficient. It’s very difficult to make money in an environment like we’re in right now, markets the way they are.
Boomi and AWS suggest multi-agent model systems can help design and govern a team of AI agents; hierarchical ones that can have a supervisor agent enabled by MCP
Boomi LP and Amazon Web Services Inc. are not only harnessing current artificial intelligence technology, but preparing for a future of multi-agent model systems. Boomi Agentstudio, which just received a general release, supports designing and, crucially, governing a team of agents. “We [AWS] innovate massively,” Nicole Bradley, ISV principle account executive at AWS said. “But we can’t keep up with all the features and functions and the ease of the UI capability, and that’s what Boomi brings to table. It was really the perfect synergy of [Boomi CEO Steve Lucas’] vision, his ability to move fast, his commitment to move fast and our recognition of … we need to make sure that this agent sprawl doesn’t go crazy.” The potential of losing control over AI agents has many businesses concerned, so Boomi and AWS are focused on creating a robust management system. Ann Maya, EMEA chief technology officer of Boomi foresees rapid growth for agentic AI tools with a corresponding need for the governing tools Boomi offers.
Successful deployment of agentic AI requires building workforce AI fluency through role-based training and cross-function collaboration, redesigning workflows for upskilling, and developing new ‘supervising’ AI roles
As a founder of an AI-powered digital transformation and product development company helping businesses innovate, automate and scale, here’s a short guide. 1) Empower your workforce with AI fluency: Maintaining a nimble and knowledgeable workforce is critical, fostering a culture that embraces technological change. Team collaboration in this sense could take the form of regular training about agentic AI, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses and focusing on successful human-AI collaborations. For more established companies, role-based training courses could successfully show employees in different capacities and roles to use generative AI appropriately. Executives should make sure a feedback mechanism is in place to optimize this human-AI collaboration. By having employees actively participate in error identification and mitigation, they can develop an attitude of appreciation toward evolving technologies while also seeing the importance of continuous learning. AI fluency also comes from collaboration across departments and specialists; for example, between engineers, AI specialists and developers. They must share knowledge and concerns to effectively integrate agentic AI into workflows. For your workforce to feel empowered, there must be a mindset change: We don’t need to compete with AI, we (and our cognitive abilities) are evolving with it. 2) Redesign your workflows around: According to a recent McKinsey survey, redesigning workflows when implementing generative AI has had the most significant impact on earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) in organizations of all sizes. In other words: AI’s true value comes when companies rewire how they run. The strategy involves a dedication to upskilling, as well as a complete overhaul of core business processes and aggressive scaling, keeping a keen eye on financial and operational performance. Although machines can’t be left entirely unattended and humans can’t stay on top of processing data in real-time, constant human-AI collaboration may not be the answer to everything when redesigning workflows. 3) Develop new ‘supervising’ AI roles: When recruiting, business leaders should seek candidates who are: 1) Adept at testing for model bias to ensure accuracy and identification of problems early in AI development; and 2) Experienced in cross-departmental collaboration, to ensure that AI solutions are meeting all the team’s needs. If you are an SVP or CTO — and unsure where to start — you may need a strategic partner to gain access to quality talent. This is table stakes to build enterprise-grade, AI-powered technology products to de-risk AI adoption.
Microsoft announced a significant expansion of its Copilot Studio platform, introducing multi-agent systems that allow different AI agents to collaborate on complex business tasks, along with new developer tools, security enhancements, and integration with WhatsApp. At the heart of the announcements is Microsoft’s new multi-agent system, which enables agents built with Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365, Azure AI Agents Service, and Azure Fabric to work together, delegating tasks to one another to complete complex business processes. The system enables scenarios such as a Copilot Studio agent pulling sales data from a CRM, handing it to a Microsoft 365 agent to draft a proposal in Word, and then triggering another agent to schedule follow-ups in Outlook. Microsoft is also emphasizing interoperability through support for the agent-to-agent protocol recently announced by Google, potentially enabling cross-platform agent communication. Another key announcement is “computer use” for Copilot Studio agents, which allows agents to interact with desktop applications and websites by controlling interfaces directly — clicking buttons, navigating menus, and typing in fields — even when APIs aren’t available. Microsoft is giving organizations more flexibility with their AI models by enabling them to bring custom models from Azure AI Foundry into Copilot Studio. This includes access to over 1,900 models, including the latest from OpenAI GPT-4.1, Llama, and DeepSeek. The company is also adding a code interpreter feature that brings Python capabilities to Copilot Studio agents, enabling data analysis, visualization, and complex calculations without leaving the Copilot Studio environment. Deep reasoning models, powered by reinforcement learning, can effectively self-verify any process that produces quantifiable outputs. Starting in early July, organizations will be able to publish Copilot Studio agents to WhatsApp, enabling them to reach customers through one of the world’s most popular messaging platforms. For professional developers, Microsoft is launching a Visual Studio Code extension for Copilot Studio, bringing familiar tooling and workflows to agent development. The extension provides features like IntelliSense, color formatting, and “find all references” functionality, enabling developers to edit agents directly from within Visual Studio Code. By addressing key enterprise requirements like security, governance, and interoperability, while simultaneously expanding the platform’s capabilities through features like computer use and code interpretation, Microsoft is creating a more complete offering for organizations looking to deploy AI agents at scale.