Building a Modern Bank Around Partnerships

There is a quiet danger in banking. You get very good at one thing, and you keep doing it right up until the market shifts under you. Barclays built one of the largest card businesses in the US without a single branch, reaching customers through trusted brands like JetBlue, AARP, and General Motors rather than its own name. Peter Gasparro, Chief Development Officer at Barclays US Consumer Bank, joins Jim Marous to talk through moving a model-line credit card company into deposits and lending, building around customer journeys rather than product silos, and the discipline of running just 22 partnerships rather than hundreds. The conversation covers what separates a strategic partnership from a distribution deal, how customer expectations set by Netflix and Amazon are reshaping banking, why making products discoverable to AI agents is now a major project, and the one question Peter would ask first if he ran a community or regional bank: Do you really need to own everything end-to-end? Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.