Product Design · AI
Q2 Digital Banking MCP
overview
AI agents are becoming a new banking channel. Account holders are already going to ChatGPT with questions about their money — and when those conversations happen outside a financial institution's experience, there's a real risk the AI becomes the primary relationship. The institution fades into the background.
I led design on Q2's MCP integration — a two-week sprint responding directly to market signals and executive direction to defend Q2's position in the evolving digital banking ecosystem. The goal: a working demo ready for a media blitz, with a user experience that kept financial institutions at the center of the AI agent conversation.
challenge
Giving up part of the user experience feels existential. For most of our careers, the interface was the product. When that interface is now ChatGPT, the question isn't whether to show up there — it's what you put there, and how you keep the brand and trust intact in an alien environment.
The execution challenge matched the product challenge: two weeks, an executive mandate, and a cross-functional effort spanning engineering, sales, and marketing. It required dropping into the dev effort immediately — no runway, no discovery phase.
approach
Q2 already had the answer in an unexpected place. Composable content blocks are an existing part of digital banking — modular, contextual, mapped to what an account holder actually asked. They were designed to compose into a banking experience. Turns out they compose into a conversation just as well.
I embedded directly with the engineering team to define the user experience as it was being built. Working with the sales demo team, I helped design the auth workflow — an FI-hosted, fully branded login screen that keeps authentication in the institution's hands before any data is shared inside ChatGPT. The content blocks that surface in the agent carry the FI's brand and link back to digital banking, using Q2's established ecosystem rather than building from scratch.
A few guardrails shaped the experience. Sign-in happens with the institution itself, not the assistant, and nothing sensitive is stored along the way. The connection is read-only. And every content block is labeled as the institution's own, so account holders always know whose answer they're looking at.
In parallel, I worked with marketing to shape how the story was told externally — contributing to white papers, media briefs, and executive blog content about the UX implications of personal agents in banking, including the piece Q2's COO published on personal agents as an emerging banking channel.
outcome
The demo shipped on time for the media blitz. Account holders can connect their financial institution to ChatGPT like any other plug-in — logging in through the bank's own branded experience, seeing their institution's identity inside the conversation, with a direct path back to digital banking.
Q2 previewed the Digital Banking MCP to developers at Dev Days in Austin in October 2026. In the preview, asking for your last ten transactions brings real account data back through the assistant in seconds. ChatGPT is supported first, with more assistants planned as the standard spreads, and institutions decide which actions agents are allowed to take.
It's now in testing with early-access customers, positioning Q2-powered institutions to stay at the center of their account holders' financial lives as personal agents become a primary channel — not as a raw data feed, but as a trusted, branded presence inside the conversation.
further reading