I recently read an article in The Financial Brand titled “The Omnichannel Gap Is Growing Faster Than Banks Can Close It.” It’s well-researched and, frankly, a bit of a gut punch, though not for the reasons the author may have intended. The author of the article correctly points out that banks are struggling mightily with fragmented data, inconsistent messaging, and disjointed customer experiences across channels. It also highlights a newer wrinkle to the problem: Generative AI (GenAI) and influencer content amplifying inconsistencies that banks themselves haven’t addressed. These are important issues and the author is right in highlighting them. But here’s my take: the omnichannel “problem” is not a technology problem — it’s a management and mindset problem. Until community banks come to terms with that reality, GenAI will not save them. In fact, GenAI usage will likely make the problem far more evident, especially for customers. Was the whole point of being “Omnichannel” about “Being Everywhere”? Let’s start with a little history. When omnichannel entered the banking lexicon a decade or so ago, it was largely interpreted as “we need to be in all the channels.” Branch, call center, website, mobile app – check, check, check and check. We largely congratulated ourselves for showing up everywhere customers might appear. What we didn’t do was stop and ask a far more important question: What does the customer expect to accomplish in each channel — and do we actually support that? Instead, we assumed we needed to make every channel do … everything. The result? Bloated interfaces, inconsistent answers, and customers being told one thing in the branch, another thing by the call center, and something entirely different online. That isn’t omnichannel. That’s orchestrated chaos. The author of the Financial Brand article spends a good deal of time discussing fragmented data, and rightly so. If customer data lives in silos: core system data here, CRM data there, online/mobile data somewhere else, any insight the bank hoped to achieve will be inconsistent, even inaccurate. But here’s the uncomfortable truth, most banks know their data is fragmented and have simply learned to live with it. Why? Because fixing it is hard. It requires prioritization, budget, executive sponsorship, and ugh … ownership. Fragmented data is not an IT problem. It’s a leadership problem that leadership delegated away and then swept under the rug. This leads us to absurd outcomes: Customers are marketed products they already have. Disclosures differ slightly depending on where you read them. Fees are explained one way online and another way in the branch. AI search engines scrape conflicting content and confidently deliver the wrong answer. GenAI didn’t create this mess, but increased use of GenAI tools is shining a very bright spotlight on it. One of the more subtle but important points in the article is that GenAI platforms are becoming trusted advisors for customers, whether banks like it or not. When customers ask Gemini, ChatGPT, CoPilot or some other AI-powered assistant about banking products, those tools will reflect whatever content they can find. If a bank’s content is inconsistent, GenAI will faithfully reproduce those inconsistencies at scale. Some banks seem to believe the solution is to “optimize for AI.” That’s backwards. The real solution is to get your house in order first. You don’t fix a structural crack by repainting the wall. Before accelerating GenAI outcomes, banks need to: Establish a single source of truth for products, pricing, and policies. Enforce disciplined content governance. Decide who actually owns messaging across the enterprise. Absent those steps, GenAI becomes an accelerant of confusion, likely spinning messaging out of control with customers being the collateral damage. One of the more interesting sections of the article discusses influencer content. I agree with the premise that authenticity matters, and nobody wants influencers reading from legal scripts. Yet, let’s be honest – authenticity without oversight is just brand roulette. Banks cannot abdicate responsibility for what others say on their behalf. That doesn’t mean suffocating creativity; it means establishing guardrails, review processes, and accountability. I am a huge proponent of banks using influencers, especially to target younger customers. However, outsourcing messaging to a third party does not absolve the bank of responsibility. It merely changes who made the mistake first. In my opinion, the most important idea in the article is that omnichannel is no longer about “sameness.”. It is about intentional, contextual experiences. I’ve been advocating for a focus on the customer experience for years. Each “channel” should be uniquely contextual to the user’s expectations about that experience. It’s often tied to where they are, body posture (i.e.: sitting or “on the go”) and attitude towards the task (a quick transaction versus detailed research). Consider this abbreviated list of channels to expected outcomes: Mobile should excel at quick, routine tasks. Desktop should support more complex workflows. Branches should focus on engagement, education, and problem solving — not transactions. Call centers should resolve issues, not bounce customers around. Trying to make every channel “omni-purpose” is not customer-centric. It’s a counter-intuitive structure. If you are a community bank executive reading this, here’s my straightforward advice: 1) Stop thinking of omnichannel as a marketing initiative. It’s an enterprise operating model. 2) Assign real ownership. If no one owns message consistency, no one is accountable. 3) Fix data before chasing AI. GenAI tools will not rescue bad foundations. 4) Aggressively audit your own content. Scrape your website. Compare disclosures. Read your own app content. You will be surprised and maybe not in a good way. Finally, 5) Decide what each channel is for. Not what it could do, but what it should do. The omnichannel gap is real, and it is growing. The good news? It is fixable, but only if banks focus on fixing fundamentals that ultimately strengthen the customer experience across all touchpoints. Resources Author’s Note: Background data for this article was compiled using ChatGPT 5.2. https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/digital-marketing-banking/the-omnichannel-gap-is-growing-faster-than-banks-can-close-it-193741