Glia helps 700 regional and community banks and credit unions unlock efficiency, accelerate loan growth, drive deposits, and deliver experiences that win against megabanks and fintechs.
In April we wrote that Universal Bankers are built, not found. This post is about the building. It covers how regional and community banks and credit unions can upskill their staff without running into the obstacles that so often stall Universal Banker building and training.
Imagine a member who calls about a lost card. While speaking to a frontline agent, she asks what happens to her CD when it matures next month, and whether she could refinance her car. The frontline agent can handle the card. For the CD, he puts her on hold and walks down the row to the colleague who knows the current rates. For the car, he transfers her to lending, where she explains herself all over again. That is three people and two handoffs for one phone call.
The fix is one person who can handle all of it, and the usual plan is to teach that person more: more product training, more policy binders, more shadowing. But as interaction volumes rise and account holders expect faster service, who picks up the phones while the team is in training?
Banking AI changes the formula for training and upskilling your team in a Universal Banker world. Banking AI takes routine work off your team's plate, puts expertise in front of them during the conversation, automates complex banking processes only specialists could previously run, empowers your team to grow loans and deposits, and gives them the full picture for every single customer and member interaction.
A Universal Banker is a customer-facing employee who handles both teller transactions and personal banking services such as account opening and loans. At Glia, we define a Universal Banker as a team member enabled by banking AI, like Glia CoPilot and Glia Agentic Workflows, to open accounts, process transactions, and provide comprehensive customer service.
Megabanks and fintechs compete on scale and automation. Community institutions compete on relationships, and slow service puts that advantage at risk. In Glia's 2026 Banking AI Consumer and Leader Survey, consumers said ease and speed can be just as important as feeling known and cared for when they choose a financial institution. In the same survey, 55% said a wait longer than 10 minutes would affect their loyalty.
At a community institution, that wait usually means the customer or member is in line for the one specialist who can answer. Or that customer may first be connected with a frontline agent who lacks the expertise to answer their specific question, places them on hold, and further drives up the wait time.
A Universal Banker model means whoever picks up can offer the expertise that specialist would offer. Your financial institution adds skills rather than headcount while filling a role that’s been historically hard to staff: the Universal Banker vacancy rate sits above 19%, nearly four times the professional average.
The Universal Banker model serves three core objectives for regional and community banks and credit unions:
Here are five steps to build it. The order matters, because capacity comes first.
You cannot upskill a team that has no time to learn. When your frontline team spends the day answering the same 20 questions, every training hour comes out of a queue that’s already overloaded.
Balance checks, routing numbers, transfers, and direct-deposit questions become automated inquiries handled by Glia Banker. With a 95% understanding rate for banking inquiries, it’s built to automate up to 80% of interactions so you can offload repetitive questions from your frontline staff. Banking AI also automates post-call wrap-up, and that alone gives frontline staff an average of 12.7% more time in their day.
Thomaston Savings Bank shows what happens next. Glia Banker Voice now fully handles 63% of calls, while Glia Banker Digital handles 72% of digital inquiries, saving 43 hours of agent time every single week.
“With our consultants no longer consumed with questions about branch hours, locations, and basic OLB navigation, they can now shift to more meaningful conversations while also driving new business for our institution,” said Melissa Cipriano, Officer / Contact Center Manager.
Decide where your freed-up time will go before it arrives. Put coaching on the schedule and rewrite your Universal Banker role around the new work, so you turn capacity into more time to train and upskill your team.
In most institutions, expertise lives with a few specialists or long-tenured employees. Everyone else searches a PDF, conducts questionable AI searches, or leans over a cubicle wall to ask a colleague while putting a caller on hold.
Glia changes that by surfacing knowledge in real-time during interactions with Glia CoPilot.
"Our call center manager used to have sticky notes all over her desktop," said Rachel Winn, Systems Administrator at Granite Credit Union. "Glia has transformed this into a virtual system, pulling in information exactly when it's needed."
Glia CoPilot draws on your approved knowledge articles, past interactions where similar questions were resolved, and the live transcript to assist your Universal Banker during the conversation. As a result, a frontline team member who once handled only cards can answer a mortgage process question without placing anyone on hold. Every Glia CoPilot answer shows its sources so your team can get more information as they need it, and your institution controls which sources and topics it draws on.
Glia CoPilot helps you upskill your Universal Banker team in two ways:
With Glia CoPilot providing source-backed answers the moment they’re needed, Universal Banker training shifts from memorizing the policy manual to learning by doing.
Even when your Universal Banker knows an answer, they still need to complete the work. In our August post, a banker handling an online banking unlock puts a member on hold, swivels her chair toward a colleague who specializes in this process, and waits. The member waits too.
Glia Agentic Workflows automate that process, turning complex banking workflows into approved actions any banker can run from one screen, across connected systems like your banking core, online banking platform, loan origination system, or dispute system. Glia CoPilot scans the interaction as it happens and suggests a relevant workflow. The banker runs the agentic workflow, either fully automated or with human oversight at the steps you decide ahead of time. That means if a customer or member asks whether their card will work on a trip to Paris next month, the Universal Banker can not only answer that question, but authorize the card in just a few clicks.
For requests that Agentic Workflows handles, your team no longer has to memorize or look up complex procedures across systems. Instead of being trained on complex workflows, your Universal Banker can focus on empathy, judgment, and conversation skills—so you strengthen the personalized service community institutions are known for. Your Universal Bankers resolve requests faster, with fewer escalations, and your specialists also get time back in their day instead of constantly interrupting their work to share their expertise with peers.
Glia Agentic Workflows gives your institution the power to control where AI acts autonomously and where a live agent approves, with full audit trails and end-to-end reporting. Start with pre-built templates for a few high-volume requests, such as online banking unlocks, card freezes and travel notifications. Create your own workflows by uploading your approved standard operating procedures (SOPs) and documentation, or simply by describing the workflow you’d like to automate, so you begin driving efficiency without tedious, time-intensive back-end development.
By surfacing knowledge and automating complex workflows, you set up your Universal Bankers to convert more loan and deposit opportunities. The next step is to increase the amount of growth opportunities they handle in the first place. That’s when it’s time to deploy outbound Banking AI built specifically to drive growth.
Glia Outreach follows up with account holders before their share certificates or CDs mature, starting conversations encouraging them to renew. Glia Outreach handles the dialing, runs two-way conversations over voice and SMS, schedules text follow-ups after unanswered calls, and passes customers and members to a Universal Banker when they’re ready to convert. A banker steps in when the person is ready to act, with an interaction summary and customer history so they can immediately offer assistance. Two campaigns show the fit:
For your Universal Bankers, their day changes from navigating dialing lists between inbound calls to stepping into warm conversations where members, customers, or prospects are ready to convert.
Every interaction, whether over voice, chat, or in a branch, is rich with information about who a customer or member is and what they need. Unfortunately for community institutions, what customers or members say during a branch visit has usually disappeared by the time they reach the parking lot.
Consider this: A customer mentions during a branch visit that she is thinking of buying a home. In the past, the teller who assists her would have to manually record a note about that in her customer record, flagging a possible opportunity to talk about a home loan during the next interaction.
But as the teller shifts to the next customer, the moment for manually recording that note passes. Glia Branch changes that.
With a customer’s permission, Glia Branch records and transcribes the conversation, and the customer’s comment becomes a logged opportunity. Weeks later she calls the contact center about something else. The moment the call starts, a scannable profile from Glia Relationship Management (GRM)—an AI CRM built for banking—appears on your Universal Banker's screen, with a note about the potential home purchase in it.
"I saw you were looking at homes when you stopped by the branch,” your Universal Banker says. “Would it help if I walked you through our home loan options?"
Glia Branch gives branch staff the same CoPilot, workflows and knowledge your team uses for voice and digital support, so one Universal Banker training approach covers teams across every channel. GRM unifies voice, digital and branch history with core banking data. It updates records after every interaction with no manual logging and can sit alongside an existing CRM or fully replace it. Either way, it ensures your Universal Bankers always have the full customer or member info they need to offer personalized service and act on growth opportunities.
Your team will ask what this means for their jobs, so answer before the first rollout. AI expands what each banker can do. "Rather than reducing staff, we've expanded our team's capabilities," said Adam Goetzke of Heritage Federal Credit Union .
Megabanks will keep spending on scale, and fintechs will keep competing on speed. A community bank or credit union can win in a different way: one Universal Banker who knows the member, has the answer to their question, can handle even complex workflows, and has time to ask what comes next. The Glia Banking AI platform, which unifies voice, digital and branch, helps you build that Universal Banker model.
Want to see how much capacity you could create? Request an impact study, or see a demo.
Start by freeing time, then build skills during real work. Automate routine inquiries so staff have time to learn, give them source-backed answers and coaching during live conversations, and let them run approved workflows for complex banking tasks. Then, use Banking AI to proactively remind customers and members before CDs or share certificates mature, passing only to your Universal Bankers when leads are ready to convert.
Move routine volume to voice AI first, then use the reclaimed hours for scheduled coaching. Service 1st Federal Credit Union used its time savings to provide more coaching and training for agents. Glia Analyst also helps managers unlock coaching and performance insights instantly, from 100% of interactions, so they can skip the manual interaction reviews and go straight to coaching.
Glia Banker is an AI agent that automates routine banking inquiries for banks and credit unions. A Universal Banker is a person, a cross-trained employee who handles both transactions and personal banking services. Glia Banker takes on the routine volume so Universal Bankers have time for complex, relationship-building work and to grow loans and deposits.
It does not have to. Service 1st grew its digital loan team with time savings it gained from Glia. Heritage Federal Credit Union redirected its frontline team toward account openings, CDs, and loan opportunities, and banking AI eased the pressure to backfill when attrition shrank its loan team.
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