AI in Banking: How Valley Bank Scales the Human Touch

In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall sits down with Izge Cengiz Ercan, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank. They discuss how the bank deploys smart AI solutions across commercial lending, prospect outreach, and internal workflows without losing its human core.

Izge Cengiz Ercan is Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank, a 95-year-old relationship-focused financial institution. With over 20 years of experience in highly regulated industries, she combines deep technical fluency with a conviction that technology should enhance human connection.

Izge Cengiz Ercan LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/izgecengiz
Valley Bank Website - https://www.valley.com

What You’ll Learn:

How to shift your organizational mindset from seeing AI as a workforce threat to treating it as a connectivity solution.
Why data trustworthiness is the absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite before implementing any AI strategy.
How to engage compliance, legal, and risk partners early as co-builders rather than final checkboxes.
Why the hardest part of digital transformation isn't the technological rollout, but preparing and empowering your team.
How to scale customer-centricity and use “invisible” AI to deepen real-world human connection.

Quotes:

“What makes a relationship term real is the context that's around it. So you might know that your customer needs a loan for expansion, but the real relationship piece of it is knowing that they're nervous about this and they need assurances that taking the right steps and with your support will set them for success.”
“The reason I believe AI can make us more human is that if we let AI do the non-value-adding transactional pieces of banking.”
“I think the starting point for everyone is data trustworthiness. So if you can't trust the data you have, you can't trust the decisions AI can suggest or the direction it can point to.”
“In banking, you have to innovate within the limits. We are a regulated industry, and there is no getting around that. So what really worked for us is engaging our partners, like our compliance partners, our legal partners very early on and really paving the road to bringing AI into the bank together.”
“If we approach AI as a connectivity solution rather than a workforce threat, we can modernize how work gets done and free our bankers to do more of the human work the clients actually value.”

Resources:

Insait Website - https://insait.io

Insait LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/insait-io

Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128