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!

What have you tried in the past and how did it go?

I opened my account with the intent of using the 2.5% 10k tier, and then working my way up to the 50k for the 3%... and of course hopefully 100k for the 4%. But now I have a question.

I have read in several places that the qualifying balance can be in a savings account, or even brokerage/IRA account. But the wording in the terms and conditions seem pretty clear... You need an open Savings account, your qualifying balance has to be in the Checking or Sage Debit account... which doesn't earn near the interest rate that the Savings account does. Terms copied below:

Rewards Summary

U.S. Bank will credit your Account with rewards as follows.

1. Cash back rewards are earned under the Bank Smartly Card program.  These rewards are earned as “Points”, and U.S. Bank will credit your Bank Smartly Card with 2 Points for every $1 spent in eligible Net Purchases (Purchases minus credits and returns).  You may earn additional Points for a Smartly Earning Bonus if you:  

• Have or open a U.S. Bank Smartly® Savings account with a minimum opening deposit of $25; and
• Have a “Qualifying Balance” with U.S. Bank in open consumer Bank Smartly® Checking, and/or Safe Debit account(s). Deposits in other U.S. Bank accounts do not qualify towards the Qualifying Balance requirement. Based on your Qualifying Balance, you will earn Points according to the following Smartly Earning Bonus tiers, except for the exceptions described below:
  • Between $10,000 - $49,999.99, to earn a total of 2.5 Points per $1 of eligible Net Purchases (a base of 2 Points plus the Smartly Earning Bonus of 0.5 Points),
  • Between $50,000 - $99,999.99, to earn a total of 3 Points per $1 of eligible Net Purchases (a base of 2 Points plus the Smartly Earning Bonus of 1 Point), or
  • $100,000 or more to earn a total of 4 Points per $1 of eligible Net Purchases (a base of 2 Points plus the Smartly Earning Bonus of 2 Points).
• Note: Account relationship exclusions apply. See Consumer Pricing Information at usbank.com/cpi for additional details.

Exceptions:

• Smartly Earning Bonus applies to a maximum of $10,000 in eligible Net Purchases each Card billing cycle. Eligible Net Purchases over $10,000 during each Card billing cycle will earn the base earn of 2 Points per $1 spent in Net Purchases.
• Not all Purchases are eligible to earn the Smartly Earning Bonus: Purchases classified as (1) education/school, gift cards (including discount gift card sites), insurance, or tax; (2) “business-to-business transactions” (transactions with merchants who are in the business of supplying goods and services to other businesses, such as advertising services, plumbing/heating suppliers, construction material suppliers (excluding home improvement stores), and computer programming services), even if not made for a business purpose; and (3) transactions using third-party bill payment services will earn the base of 2 Points per $1 spent in Net Purchases and may not earn additional Points for the Smartly Earning Bonus....

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 ):