Banking on Intelligence: Sean Desmond on Powering a New Era in Financial Services
nCino's CEO discusses industry optimism, AI transformation, and the path to automated banking workflows
In this episode of Banking on Intelligence, nCino's Brandon Lokits sits down with Sean Desmond, CEO of nCino, to explore the current banking landscape and how financial institutions are embracing a new era of technology-driven transformation.
Sean Desmond leads nCino as CEO during a pivotal moment in financial services. Under his leadership, nCino has expanded beyond its commercial lending roots to deliver a comprehensive platform spanning onboarding, account opening, portfolio management, and loan origination across commercial, consumer, small business, and mortgage sectors. The company's platform now serves banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage banks worldwide, leveraging what Desmond describes as "one of the richest data sets in the world" to drive AI-powered banking solutions.
Hear from nCino CEO Sean Desmond in this episode of Banking on Intelligence.
Brandon Lokits: Where do you see the banking landscape today?
Sean Desmond: Over the past several years, we've had headwinds in the industry—constant speculation on interest rate movement, the liquidity crisis, and the longest inverted yield curve banks have experienced in almost 50 years. But we've turned the corner. Early this year there's been optimism from our customer base. What we're hearing is that's largely behind us. There's really a posture of growth around projected loan origination portfolios, deposit positions, and confidence around EPS for banks in general. That said, there's still a healthy, cautious optimism given the volatility we see.
Brandon Lokits: How are you empowering change within the financial services industry?
Sean Desmond: We talk about a new era in financial services here at nCino. The industry is hitting tailwinds, and there's this massive inflection point in technology—these only come around every 8 to 10 years. As the era of AI is well underway, we're finishing the hard work on our platform to bring together a single, consistent experience for our customers, bankers, and their customers. We have a very focused AI strategy: continue building out our Banking Advisor skills, wrap agents around our entire workflow, automate everything we do, and deliver on a unified API layer.
Brandon Lokits: What does the future look like for the end customer?
Sean Desmond: Despite rapid change, certain things don't change. At the end of the day, customers want two things: they want to know how much money they can get approved for, and when they can get the money. It means trust and speed. They want a great technology experience with a trusted bank, served up with speed and efficiency. The current opportunity is to drive acceleration that folks didn't imagine 3 to 5 years ago—taking processes from months to days, days to minutes, and minutes to seconds.
Brandon Lokits: How is nCino leveraging AI internally?
Sean Desmond: We have this foundation of customers using our workflow, automating collaboration from manual processes to digital workflow. Now we're saying we can take that digital workflow and collapse many steps into one. We're working toward "the path to one"—agents wrapped around workflow, stringing multiple tasks together seamlessly in the background. We automate everything, validate everything, and deliver that speed and efficiency to the customer. You'll always have a human in the loop because there's a trust element, but we serve it up in an automated fashion.
Sean Desmond's perspective captures a banking industry at an inflection point. After weathering significant headwinds, from interest rate volatility to liquidity challenges, financial institutions are embracing a cautious but genuine optimism about growth prospects. This shift coincides perfectly with what Desmond identifies as a once-in-a-decade technology transformation driven by artificial intelligence.
What sets nCino apart in this moment is the depth of its platform integration and data advantage. With comprehensive coverage across all banking workflows and aggregate data insights from institutions worldwide, nCino is uniquely positioned to deliver AI solutions that don't just add features but fundamentally transform how banking gets done.
The vision Desmond outlines—"automate, validate, deliver"—represents more than operational efficiency. It's about reimagining the banking experience to meet customer expectations for speed while maintaining the trust and human oversight that financial services require. The "path to one" concept, where AI agents seamlessly orchestrate complex workflows behind the scenes, points toward a future where technology amplifies rather than replaces human expertise.
As banking enters this new era, institutions partnering with nCino aren't just adopting new software, they're positioning themselves to deliver the trust and speed combination that customers increasingly demand. This technological foundation becomes the competitive advantage that allows banks to focus on what they do best: building relationships and serving their communities.
Banking on Intelligence is nCino's thought leadership series featuring conversations with industry leaders about the future of financial services. Explore more about nCino’s approach to data and artificial intelligence.
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