Banking on Change: Sean Desmond on AI, Uncertainty and What's Next for Financial Services

Financial institutions are navigating one of the most complex operating environments in decades, facing rising regulatory pressure, economic uncertainty and a wave of AI innovation that's moving faster than anyone anticipated. nCino’s CEO Sean Desmond recently joined Kristina Ayanian, host of Nasdaq Live from Marketsite, to share how nCino is helping banks make sense of it all and why he believes the most exciting chapter is still ahead.

Kristina Ayanian: Financial services transformation is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean in practice for your customers?

Sean Desmond: Financial institutions the world over deal with overburdened, regulatory compliance-driven processes, complex documentation, and some cultural resistance to change. What we do at nCino is streamline those processes and remove that friction from onboarding, account opening, loan origination and portfolio monitoring for credit risk. And we do that across commercial, consumer and mortgage lines of business.

That's a lot of breadth and scale. But two founding principles have guided us since day one. The first: if we could change the way bankers do their jobs and interact with their customers, we'd be on to something special. The second: change is hard. People have an inherent fear of it. That's true whether you're talking about a new software implementation or the AI transformation happening right now. Change management is part of our DNA. It's what we do.

Kristina Ayanian: Banks are juggling a lot — interest rate pressure, economic uncertainty, regulatory scrutiny. How do you help them navigate all of that?

Sean Desmond: I've been in software for 30 years, and this is probably the most uncertain time I've seen for financial institutions to operate. At the same time, it's the most exciting by far. That's why we're in tech, right? We love constant change.

What I'd point to is that our customer base today is in a position of strength despite the conditions. Banks, particularly in the U.S. market, have healthy balance sheets showing strong liquidity, solid capital positions, and good credit risk management. From an income statement standpoint, they’re showing profitability, momentum and growth. And in the current environment, deregulation is actually a good thing for banks, credit unions and IMBs. That frees them up to think about technology investment in ways the past several years haven't allowed.

Kristina Ayanian: AI is dominating the conversation in banking right now. You've talked about moving "from promise to value" in previous conversations. What do you mean by that?

Sean Desmond: AI comes up in every conversation. At this point, there's no doubt about it. What we focus on is time and value. We can't manufacture time for our customers. What we can do is save it.

To financial institutions, I’d say this is not an inflection point you can sit out. You can't be on the sidelines with AI because the technology is moving too fast. At the same time, the technology is ahead of regulation and ahead of people's ability to adopt it. So, we at nCino try to strike the right balance of taking customers on that journey in a thoughtful way, while always anchoring on the outcomes we deliver: speed, efficiency, and productivity.

Kristina Ayanian: How does talent play into all of this? The competition for tech expertise is intense right now.

Sean Desmond: The talent war is real, for both software companies and financial institutions. And when you have an inflection point like we're experiencing today, it creates a bigger divide and widens the skills gap.

What we think is this: Banks are banks. Credit unions are credit unions. Software companies are software companies. It's hard to be all those things at once. What we see is that our customers are validating they want to partner with nCino because we have the skills and the technology stack to deliver. When a customer comes to nCino, they're not just getting our software — they're getting engagement with some of the best talent in the industry, working to solve their problems in a very unique way.

Kristina Ayanian: How do customer conversations shape nCino's innovation roadmap?

Sean Desmond: For us, it's all about customer conversations. And honestly, there's an irony there given all the talk about automating everything through AI. You still have to step back, sit down and listen. You have to find what we call design partners.

I was having dinner a few weeks ago with an executive from one of the top 30 banks in the U.S. and in the middle of the meal, he said: "Sean, tell me about something that's early in your innovation cycle — something none of my competitors have seen yet. I want to partner with you on that journey." That's where the magic happens. That's where we have fun.

Kristina Ayanian: nCino is celebrating five years listed on Nasdaq, and you've now reached more than 2,700 financial institutions on your platform. What's driving that growth?

Sean Desmond: I think it’s simple: the Platform wins. Our value proposition spans onboarding, account opening, loan origination, and credit portfolio monitoring — across lines of business, across the globe. There are no other companies doing this at this scale.

We had a vision early on that some called audacious. Nobody else wanted to tackle it. But we're playing the long game, and our customers have validated over and over that they want an interconnected platform that can scale and grow with them. Over the past five years, and over the past 15 years of nCino, that's proven out. And we're looking forward to proving it for the next five.

Kristina Ayanian: Looking ahead, what opportunity excites you most?

Sean Desmond: We anchor on outcomes. There's a lot of noise in the market with people claiming they can automate an entire enterprise bank through a public cloud dataset. That doesn't excite me. Honestly, it concerns me a little.

What excites me is that we're embedded in the fabric and infrastructure of our customers' operations. We're a mission-critical, tier-one application for some of the largest banks, credit unions, and IMBs in the world. And the paradigm shift we're seeing is remarkable: in nCino's first chapter, we helped customers go from years to months, and sometimes months to weeks. With AI, we're delivering months to minutes — and sometimes seconds. That's what's really exciting. That's how we're going to continue to deliver for our customers.

To learn more about how nCino is helping financial institutions move from AI promise to AI value, visit our Data, AI and Analytics page.