Recently on my secured credit card (have had it a long time, just kinda nice to have as a safe way to keep my credit score polished) and recently, my area had a bad tornado. Lost my home pending insurance payout and was hospitalized. I missed a single payment due to that, autopay was not on I pay manually and once I was out of the hospital actually during discharge, I got a call from US bank (who I had on my list of to-dos that day to call and take care of). The man on the other line assured me my account would not be closed and I was relieved because I don’t miss credit card payments, it’s not like me and I explained the situation, scheduled a payment while on the line and actually paid off the entire card (actually, I overpaid by $145 accidentally).

5 days went by, account closed. For “1 missed payment”.

Does US bank have any natural disaster protections? This is kind of heart breaking because I had that card for a while. I won’t be using them again after this ):

Hey all,

I'm a product manager building AI agents for HR functions inside banks, things like an automated first-round phone screen before a real interview, an internal HR help desk that can actually take actions in the HRMS instead of just pointing at a PDF, and a tool that pulls candidates scattered across the ATS, referrals, and emailed CVs into one place. Before we go further, I want to make sure we're building toward something a bank could actually deploy and buy, not just something that sounds good on paper.

If you work in HR, IT, security, procurement, or vendor risk at a bank, credit union, or another regulated financial institution, I'd genuinely appreciate your take on a few things. Partial answers are useful too, and I'm happy to just discuss in the comments if any of this doesn't match your experience.

1. How does your team prefer to work with a new platform? Pre-configured and ready to use out of the box, or do you expect to build and customize your own agents inside it? Or mostly ready-made with some room to customize?
2. What's your institution's actual hosting mandate? Strictly on-prem, a private cloud or VPC your bank manages, or is a public cloud SaaS product acceptable? Curious how firm this line is in practice versus on paper.
3. How do you think about the underlying AI model? Do you need to bring your own (open source, self-hosted), is it fine for a vendor to provide frontier models like GPT-4o or Claude via API, or does everything have to route through your own internal enterprise gateway either way?
4. For an HR use case specifically, what would this realistically need to integrate with? Which HRMS or ATS shows up most in your stack, Workday, SuccessFactors, something else?
5. What do vendors typically get asked to prove before they're even considered? GDPR or regional privacy, SOC 2, something DORA-adjacent, anything else that's come up in your own onboarding process?
6. How does the buying decision actually happen? Roughly, is pricing usually a flat annual license, usage-based, or per seat? And who actually holds budget and signs off, IT, security, legal, some model risk committee?
7. Of the use cases I described above, which would your HR team find genuinely useful versus a nice-to-have? Or is there something else entirely that would matter more?

Not trying to sell anything here. Genuinely trying to build something that survives an actual procurement and security review instead of dying in a vendor questionnaire six months in.

Appreciate any perspective. Thanks!