Budget planning shapes what actually gets done. Melissa Haire, senior vice president of Customer Success at Q2, talks through how financial institutions can move from a project-by-project mindset to a connected strategy where every dollar ties back to desired outcomes. From digital engagement and commercial growth to fraud prevention and AI investment, Melissa shares what the best-performing institutions have in common when they sit down to plan.
[Blog] Planning for 2027: The Priorities Shaping Budget Decisions
[Guide] 2027 Budget Planning Guide
[Podcast] Cut to Context
Cheryl Brown
Welcome to The Purposeful Banker, the broadcast brought to you by Q2, where we discuss the big topics on the minds of today’s best bankers. I’m Cheryl Brown. Welcome to the show.
Each year for the past few years, Q2 has published a budget planning guide to help financial institutions think through where to invest their technology dollars. This year’s guide covers a lot of ground: digital engagement, commercial growth, fraud, onboarding, financial wellness, and all the systems underneath all that. But what I find compelling is what the guide really asks leaders to do. Move from a project-to-project mindset to a connected, strategic one.
Today I’m joined by someone who helps financial institutions do exactly that every day. Melissa Haire is senior vice president of Customer Success at Q2, and she recently wrote a blog for us that accompanies our 2027 budget planning guide. So, Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Haire
Thank you, Cheryl. Glad to be here. Should be a fun day to talk about things that are not that exciting or sexy, but are super important to our financial institutions.
Cheryl Brown
Well, you never know if you’re the one tasked with this, maybe it is the sexiest thing you do all day. And hey, there’s a podcast just for you. How exciting can that be?
So in your role with customer success, you do spend a lot of time working directly with our financial institution customers—the leaders making the kinds of budget decisions that we’re going to talk about today. So let’s start with that vantage point. You work with banks and credit unions of all sizes. How have those conversations shaped the priorities that we’ve included in the budget guide this year?
Melissa Haire
My team works with banks and credit unions of all sizes, as you said. I joke about budget guides, but they’re critically important to a financial institution’s success. They provide intent, they show us what they’re committed to, they sort of give line of sight into what the next year might look like as far as decisions and strategy and what their priorities are. So they’re super important.
When I think about the conversations that we have with customers today, everyone’s trying to do more, more, more with same, same, same, right? They’re not getting more resources. They know that their solutions are being compared to other app providers, other digital banking providers, other financial institutions. And so their customers and members expect easy and simplicity and fast. And so they’re under tremendous amounts of pressure to make sure that they deliver great solutions for their customers. Budgeting conversations are really the line of sight to what’s most important for a financial institution today.
Cheryl Brown
Yeah, and in your blog, you open with this assertion that even though budget planning can look routine on paper, in practice it really isn’t. It rarely is, actually. What do you mean by that? Why does it matter for financial institution leaders to really dig into the strategy behind budget planning?
Melissa Haire
When you think about budget, you think about a traditional Excel spreadsheet. And I don’t know anyone other than Jake Rand, who is in our Finance Department, that loves themselves a good Excel spreadsheet, right? But the importance of the budget is that it allows us to look at the ecosystem across not just Q2 products, but those AI initiatives that are underway for many of our financial institutions. We look at off-platform products, we get to look at integrated partners and what they’re offering from the lens of AI services or automation around different segments within the market space—small business, elder care.
And so when we think about financial institutions and how they’re looking at budgets today, it’s more about what does the landscape look like. We’ve seen that fraud is just blown up, right? The fraudsters are getting more and more sophisticated. So what does that look like? Do I need to invest in fraud as a separate line item or is it part of my digital banking strategy?
We think about the compliance requirements that banks and credit unions have. It continues to expand. And we think about the technology ecosystem, all the different players in the market and how they’re integrating themselves into the Q2 platform. All that comes into play. We think about what are the dollars we’re going to spend and what does that look like? Who’s going to get the resources? What problems are we trying to solve? All those things come into play. So it’s not just a spreadsheet. It’s leaders making decisions around what that next thing looks like so that they’re successful in their competitive landscape.
Cheryl Brown
And I would imagine that there’s also this tendency to look at your budget by projects—on a project-by-project basis. But we assert from Q2 that the thinking should be a bit more connected. So what does that actually look like for a bank or a credit union in the planning stage to be thinking more connected when it comes to developing the budget?
Melissa Haire
When we think about the way banks and credit unions make buying decisions, they tend to lean into sort of product features. So a fraud tool or a mobile X, whatever that is, versus how do these things knit together? How are they connected? What is the journey that we’re trying to solve for our end users? It’s not just about the widget, it’s about how do you bring them to that next best thing that they need so that they’re successful in their financial journey.
And so when we think about the way that financial institutions look at products that they deliver to their customers and members, it’s really that knitted journey. If I want to deliver a new account opening solution or a new account for a first-time customer, a young customer, it’s not about, here’s the product—it’s a student checking account. That onboarding experience has to be phenomenal. And then how am I going to help them fund that account? And then how am I going to ensure that their direct deposits are coming over so that they can seamlessly leverage the solutions to go manage their financial lives? So it’s not just about a product or a widget, it’s about that journey.
When you think about the olden days of digital banking, and I may date myself here because I’ve only been in this space like 27-ish years, so a long time, but it was all about access. I want to log in, I want to move money, or I want to check a balance. But now it’s about you should know me, Mr. and Mrs. Financial Institution. You should know who I am. You should know what products I use today. You should know what products I might need. And that’s that journey and that’s the connectivity. It’s not a feature widget. It’s about bringing the customer along the journey with you.
Cheryl Brown
I’ve been reviewing some of the videos that we took of sessions from CONNECT. We recently had our CONNECT 26 customer conference, and there’s so much good content that comes out of that thing. And even us Q2ers, we can’t see it all. I’ve been watching some of the review videos, and there was this one session with Michelle Annett talking about automation and specifically in commercial. She talked about when she was at the bank and they were trying to roll out some automation and figure out where to invest, and they went to document the processes. And it took rooms and hallways.
Melissa Haire
Not just sticky notes
Cheryl Brown
It was literally a building’s worth of process documentation. You talk about the customer journey, but I would think also that automation, that efficiency journey.
Efficiency is a word that we’re all really talking about right now. That’s not something to lose sight of either. Don’t just think about feature functionality that maybe your frontline has been asking for. I want to be able to hover over something and see what it is. But it’s like, what does that do to the down-funnel process? It’s really about having that big picture rather than just will that make Sue, who sits at this desk, happy because she’s been wanting that for a long time.
So let’s walk through the priority areas the guide covers because I think each one has something worth pulling apart for our listeners. The first one is digital experience. You’ve written about this idea that digital banking is no longer just about access, it’s about helping people make progress. What does that mean for how institutions should be thinking about their 2027 investments in this space?
Melissa Haire
We just talked about how it’s no longer checking a balance. It’s about you should know me, not just as a customer, but you should know me as Melissa. And you should know that Melissa has two kids, one’s about to go to college, and perhaps there’s a cross-sell opportunity. What’s that next best product that I might need? Because I am funding college now for someone that’s going out of state. So it’s the access to not just the solutions, but what does that mean for me, Melissa? How do our financial institutions electronically engage with our customers? How do they onboard them successfully? How do they cross-sell that next product to the customer? And all that comes around personalization. You’ve got to know who your customers are, and you’ve got to serve them the way they want to be served. And you’ve got to know the products that are meaningful to them that are going to move the needle along their financial journey.
Cheryl Brown
What are some of the things that, when you’re working with a bank or a credit union, and we all to make choices. We have competing priorities. What are some of the things that you say when they’re trying to choose between this or that? Where do I put my funding this year? What will move the needle for my bank?
Melissa Haire
I find that our most successful financial institutions don’t have the biggest budget. What they know is that they look at what they’re strategically trying to accomplish. And it’s not 10 things. They’ve got to prioritize. What are those one to two, three things that are going to move the needle for our financial institutions based on what they’re trying to achieve? And so when you narrow it down to what are our strategic priorities, then you go backward. You don’t look at the cost of the widget or the product, you look at what are those outcomes. How do we measure success? What does success mean?
If you think about, OK, we want to grow deposits, but you think about a high-yield savings account, that’s a product. That’s not a journey for a customer. So when you flip it, what is the outcome that you’re trying to achieve by growing deposits? I want to grow deposits by 12%. So then you flip it, you go backward. How do we grow deposits by 12%? Because that’s the outcome we want to achieve. And so we know that we’ve got to have a really clean onboarding process and we’ve got to have an engagement tool that helps onboard those new customers, those new deposits that are coming to the institution. And then we’ve got to help them fund them. It’s how do we go through this journey of growing deposits by 12% versus just, hey, we want to offer a high-yield savings account. And that’s when the ROI becomes really compelling, really meaningful. That helps justify the spend versus, hey, we want to offer a high-yield savings account. It’s very different because then you’re looking at the outcomes. You’re looking at compelling ROIs that help justify the spend. Does that help?
Cheryl Brown
It makes a lot of sense. And the opposite could be true too. You put all your eggs in this basket of this tool or this capability that you think is going to drive the outcome. And then it turns out that wasn’t the thing. You don’t get the results that you were looking for. It’s like, well, we misplaced our bet. We should have bet instead of looking at the outcome and thinking about all the things that may hit that outcome. We put everything into this one capability and it was a miss. I love that way of thinking.
I want to move over to commercial banking and talk a little bit about commercial growth and operational connectivity because the guide talks a lot about growth priorities and how they’re becoming more operational, more connected across functions. We’ve got a pretty wide range here. We’ve got commercial pricing, treasury onboarding, instant payments, cross-border receivables. What is the common thread, and why should that connectivity matter to bank leaders making budget decisions on the commercial side?
Melissa Haire
Commercial’s interesting in itself because if you think about the businesses using the commercial solutions with the bank, they want it seamless. Friction is a bad thing. They’re not looking at just relationship pricing or real-time payments or fraud prevention tools within their commercial banking experience, their business banking experience with the bank. They’re looking at how they run their business and what are the tools that seamlessly can connect them to their customers, their businesses, back to their financial institution with very little friction.
And so when we look at buying behaviors of banks and credit unions, specifically in the commercial space, they’re focused on that connectivity of how do I tie lots of products that our business customers need to successfully run their businesses and avoid any of the friction. The friction is almost invisible because they’re moving from one part of the relationship to the next part of the relationship. And while they’re different products, the business doesn’t feel they’re different products because they’re able to effectively run their business as if it’s under one umbrella with one set of solutions. That’s really important for commercial entities.
Cheryl Brown
Yeah, and I live a lot in the commercial realm. The Purposeful Banker actually used to be completely just focused on commercial, and we’ve expanded our reach quite a bit, but I still find myself going back to commercial. And something that we’re hearing a lot in commercial is this wait-and-see approach. We saw it with instant payments, we saw it quite a bit with stablecoins. What do you say to a bank that has this wait-and-see approach before they’re jumping in? The thing we hear a lot is I’m going to wait and see how it works for them. And then the retort to that is, well, then you’re going to be left behind. Instant payments is such a great example. When the businesses finally discover how powerful instant payments are for them and the capabilities it has, then you’re going to be left behind.
But that’s not the truth for every bank. It’s not the truth for every credit union. So what do you say to a bank with a wait-and-see approach? Is that really a case-by-case basis where it might be the right approach for some banks?
Melissa Haire
It depends on the product, and real-time payments is a good example. Because a couple of years ago it was a differentiator. It was new to the market, people were trying to figure out how they get it. What do I need to do to implement and what does that look like. But they’re table stakes today. If you don’t offer instant payments across the different rails, then you’re behind. And that’s the expectation of a business. So if you’re going upstream with larger commercial entities, it’s sort of like the ERP integration. You’ve got to have those capabilities.
I think it’s up to the relationship manager to help the business customers understand that if you take a wait-and-see approach, it’s risk. It brings risk to the business and it brings risk to the bank or credit union, because they’re not thinking forward about what does this mean for our commercial customers and how can we help them successfully run their businesses.
Even if you think about the wait-and-see approach from a core perspective. You know, Matt Flake will … I’ve been in many a customer call with Matt, and he’ll talk about we still get hammered by the street because we’re spending 17%, 20% on R&D, but we’ve never had a customer say, well, you’re done. And that’s the way we look at it from our customer perspective. We’re never done. And so our banks should have that same lens. You should never feel that you’re done offering the right solutions for your customers. And if you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for something to be—air quotes, I’m using air quotes here—perfect or completely delivered, then you will be lapped. Even nimble institutions could potentially lap you because you’ve gotten too conservative in your approach.
Now I understand there’s a risk play here, and we’re highly regulated. But my advice would be to create pilots. Like what we’re doing on the AI side of the house. It’s never going to be perfect. But if you take the opportunity to build pilots and know potentially that some may succeed and some may fail. You’ve got to take those risks to understand what’s relevant for your customers and what’s going to move the needle for the bank so that you’re successfully out in the marketplace winning business. If you take a wait-and-see approach, you’re going to be lapped. And given the M&A activity that we’re seeing in the marketplace, the last thing you want to do is not have the right products for customers to successfully run their business, so they leave the institution to go find someone that does.
Cheryl Brown
Speaking of risk, you talked a little bit earlier about fraud. Fraud has a way of ending up in its own bucket in budget conversations, like a line item you have to fund rather than a real strategic investment. But you’ve written about why that framing is limiting. How should bank leaders think about fraud investment going into 2027, and not as a line item, but as a true strategy?
Melissa Haire
When we think about fraud in the marketplace and what we’re seeing, and the sophistication that we’re seeing from fraudsters and that fact that if you think about our own Centrix solutions, they stopped almost $30 billion of fraud last year. And it continues to grow. The sophistication levels around what we’re seeing are just unheard of.
Fraud is not just a singular line item in a budget conversation. It actually connects the entire ecosystem of solutions that you have in play for your consumers and your businesses. If you think about what we’re doing with fraud, it’s no longer this reactive situation of, OK, there’s been fraud, now I’ve got to strain the back office to go figure out how to chase it and what was the issue and who’s at fault and what happened.
The line item that you’re thinking about with the fraud solutions are integrated across all Q2 solutions. What are those proactive signals? How are we monitoring sessions? What are we looking at as far as transactions go? But that’s across the consumer experience. The digital account opening process. How do we identify this is a fraudster trying to open an account within our institution?
And that’s front end. So when you think of the line item of fraud as one event or one product within the Q2 solutions, you’re not thinking about it the right way. You should be looking at fraud across the entire digital ecosystem because it directly impacts consumers and businesses. And when you have fraud and your consumers and businesses experience fraud in their day-to-day interactions with you, that could lead to attrition. There’s a trust issue.
Fraud is everyone’s business, not just Ops or Compliance or Security. And that’s the same for the solutions you offer. While we built the budget guide around conversations that institutions are having internally around what the next thing might look like in ‘27, fraud touches every element of the business. It’s not just fraud, it’s how do we deter fraud? How do we get more proactive in understanding the signals? How do we understand what those transactions might look like before fraud happens? And then how do we take the knowledge and the data that we’re learning and spread that across the digital banking ecosystem so that we could deter it before it ever happens?
Cheryl Brown
Yeah, you also mentioned AI, and my next question is around AI, of course, because everything we’re talking about is AI-driven.
Melissa Haire
Last year I’ll just say this because AI, AI, AI. I would say data was the drinking word. So we were all really drunk. This year, AI is absolutely the drinking word.
Cheryl Brown
We’re under the table.
Melissa Haire
Listen, if you like a good chardonnay, I’m your girl. But if I took a sip of chardonnay every time someone said the word “AI,” I’d be soused.
Cheryl Brown
Other than gaining a thousand pounds, we’re all drunk and laying under the table. But there’s a reason. It’s fundamentally changing the way we work. It’s fundamentally changing the way we approach projects. And I’ll give this opportunity to plug the Cut to Context podcast that we’re doing with our CTO Adam Blue. He’s covering some really interesting conversations over on that podcast.
But when it comes to the budget guide, it shows up in a way that feels different from past years. It’s not a separate category. It’s embedded in almost every priority area. So how are you seeing financial institutions actually thinking about AI investment as a reality? We’re not talking about it in the clouds anymore. We’re talking about it fundamentally. It’s tangible now. How are they thinking about how they’re going to fund it?
Melissa Haire
You’re spot on. A couple years ago it was all about how do we explore. And the way I define it now is how do we deploy. What are the things that we’re going to do to leverage AI? We think about some of our integrated partners and the work they’ve done around embedding AI in their tools. We encourage our customers to go out and really understand the partners that have sort of leaned fully into how to leverage AI for signals within their product sets.
When I think about AI specifically for banks and credit unions, you’ve got to have an executive sponsor. That’s A number one. It can’t be a technology project anymore. It has to have real ownership across the ecosystem at a bank or credit union. And then you’ve got to find those problems that you’re trying to solve. And they have to be real problems, with real metrics around what does it look like today? If you think about support tickets. What we’re doing within Q2 support to better support our customers so that they can successfully run the platforms with little to no intervention from Q2. What are we building within our support tools to allow customers to be more productive, to self-serve? And what does that look like? And that’s the way we think about AI at Q2. What are those problems that we’re trying to solve? And what does success look like?
And then the third piece is you’ve got to think about, OK, everything we’re doing around AI is not going to be successful. You can’t be afraid of the fail-first mentality. But it’s the deploy mentality, not the exploring, it’s deploying.
When I think about financial institutions, they sort of fall into three buckets. They have budget items around running the business: security, compliance. Growing the business. And then transforming the business. When we think about an AI budget, that’s typically where it lives, in the transforming-the-business budget. And that’s where the dollars should live when you think about investments in AI.
But you also have got to have in place a slush fund, if you will, because typically institutions go through the budget process once a year. But what they don’t do is go back and check in. How are we tracking against what we said we were going to do in mid-to-end 2026? So if you create this slush fund around new technology—some we may not even know yet—then when you see an opportunity to lean in with something like AI to help solve a business problem, you don’t have to go back through the budget process to figure out how to reallocate funds because you already have money set aside to lean into those ideas and test things that you may not have been able to test.
Cheryl Brown
And I would assume … I don’t assume, I know that working with the right partners is so important. We had a conversation on Cut to Context just recently about how to vet the right partners. And one of the key thoughts was get them to show you the use cases that failed. Get them to show you the bad demos so that you’re not taking on all of the risk for AI. And I would think that banks and credit unions—not being technology companies—this is not their first priority. But us as a technology provider, it is our first priority because we’re working really hard to incorporate AI in a way that makes sense, in a way that is built within the regulations that our banks and credit unions have to live in, so that we’re taking on some of that risk for them in helping them find ways that AI can drive their businesses forward without them having to do all the work.
Melissa Haire
Cheryl, you’re right. When you think about CONNECT and the conversations that we had at CONNECT, every conversation was around AI and what are you doing for AI? And our customers are really leaning into us to help sort out what that means because they’re also on this journey of where do they plan to deploy AI in their own businesses? And so we’ve got a seat at the table to help our customers be successful, but we’ve also got to figure out ways that we’re going to deploy AI within our own business to help our customers be successful and help them make the right kinds of decisions.
That’s part of what the Success organization does. We look at what are those strategic priorities, what are those initiatives? And if AI is a strong initiative with an institution—which I assure you it’s an initiative at every institution—how is the Success team leaning in to share best practices? What is Q2 doing to leverage the tools around AI? What are the things that we’ve seen fail? To your point, where do we realize that was the wrong path or the wrong way to go at the Y in the road? And then we tee up another pilot. And then how do we lean in to help our customers learn from us so that we can successfully partner together going down the road?
Cheryl Brown
Well, I couldn’t have asked you to provide me a better ending to this podcast than that right there. Quotable. Excellent.
Melissa Haire
Yeah. I will just say that when you think about the FIs that win in 2027, it really won’t be the ones with the biggest budget. It’ll be the ones that have the clearest connection between every dollar spent and the account holder outcomes that they’re trying to create. And if you tie back to the dollar spent, that’s when you begin to put together funded roadmaps that help with expectations of the institution that ultimately end up with measurable outcomes. And that’s what 2027 budgeting looks like.
Cheryl Brown
Excellent. Excellent. Well, for anyone who wants to go deeper, I’ll link to Melissa’s blog in the show notes. I’ll also link to the planning guide itself so you can download that and take a look.
But that’s it for another episode of The Purposeful Banker. As always, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. And you can see our archive of podcasts at q2.com. Until next time, this is Cheryl Brown, and you’ve been listening to The Purposeful Banker.
Melissa Haire
Thank you, Cheryl.