We’re in a trust recession – AI is making it worse, with Alice Sesay Pope.

In the latest episode of the Digital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar of Tyfone welcomed Alice Sesay Pope, a customer experience executive and author who spent her career transforming service organizations at Capital One, Visa, USAA, and Amazon. Pope trained as a chemical engineer before moving into financial services, where she learned to pair rigorous process design with the soft skills that let frontline employees actually help people.

Pope described the current moment as a “trust recession,” pointing to Pew Research showing that the population using generative AI tools the most also trusted it the least. She and DeTar traced how quickly usage grew anyway, citing a TD Bank survey in which the share of consumers using AI to help with their finances jumped from 10% in 2025 to 55% in 2026. DeTar shared his own experience with SoFi repeatedly pitching him student loan refinancing despite never having attended college, an example Pope used to illustrate how disconnected data could be from an actual customer relationship.

The conversation turned to what financial institutions could do about it: building an enterprise-wide view of the customer instead of operating in departmental silos, offering secure and accurate generative AI tools of their own so members did not have to hand statements to outside platforms, and knowing when a human interaction mattered more than an automated one. Pope closed by connecting the discussion back to her book, The Trust Algorithm, and her belief that institutions willing to build the right guardrails could still earn back the trust AI had put at risk.

Key Insights

Banks Were in a Trust Recession Before AI Made It Worse

Pope described a global “trust recession” that predated generative AI but had been sharpened by it. She cited Pew Research showing that the population using generative AI tools most heavily also trusted it the least, a group aware that a voice could be cloned from under 30 seconds of audio and used to commit wire fraud. For an industry built entirely on trust, Pope argued that meant financial institutions needed to treat AI security and transparency as core to the member relationship, not a back-office technical concern.

Siloed Departments Quietly Break the Customer Relationship

Pope pointed to DeTar’s own experience getting repeated SoFi emails pitching student loan refinancing despite never having attended college as a symptom of a much bigger problem: departments that never talked to each other. A marketing team could launch a campaign without checking with the data science or product teams, and the result read as disingenuous rather than helpful. Pope’s fix, learned transforming service organizations at Capital One, Visa, and USAA, was mapping the end-to-end customer journey from the member’s perspective rather than the org chart’s, and giving customers real control over which offers they kept receiving.

Members Are Already Telling AI Everything, Without Their Bank in the Room

DeTar cited a TD Bank survey showing consumer use of AI for personal finances jumped from 10% in 2025 to 55% in 2026, with tools like ChatGPT now able to connect directly to a member’s accounts through Plaid. Pope argued that members gravitated to outside AI tools because they trusted the accuracy, not because they preferred a stranger’s model over their own bank. Her conclusion: financial institutions that built fast, accurate generative AI tools of their own, backed by real guardrails, stood a real chance of pulling that conversation back in-house instead of losing it entirely.