nCino Team
nSight 2026 brought more than 1,700 decision-makers from over 300 financial institutions to Charlotte, NC under a single theme: "Banking Intelligence Lives Here."
The Empiric team were proud to sponsor this year's event and excited to be back in Charlotte, immersing ourselves in the wider nCino community. We left the event with 50-plus conversations worth of notes, opinions and frustrations from banking leaders, nCino practitioners and transformation teams. Some took place in conference halls and breakout sessions. Others happened over coffee, at happy hours and during the countless post-event discussions that make conferences like nSight so valuable.
Below, Kyle Kuhn and Emma McCarthy from our New York nCino desk share what they heard - and what it means for hiring managers and professionals right now as we head into the second half of 2026 in the nCino world.
Key Takeaways
- AI dominated the main stage and the conversations happening between sessions were mostly about change management, adoption and ROI.
- Consumer, SBA and Treasury are driving much of the hiring demand we are seeing across the nCino ecosystem.
- Data quality, customization debt and release management are holding many institutions back from their AI ambitions.
- M&A activity is creating integration work that many banks underestimated.
- The hardest people to hire are those who understand both the business and the technology.
"AI Is Coming For My Job" - Or Is It?
AI dominated the agenda. Most conversations were about adoption, process and execution.
Take this one, which I heard more than once: "We're not getting adoption and ROI with nCino because our credit department doesn't want to go to page 7 of the credit memo to get the six things they need to approve a deal."
That isn't a technology problem. That's a change management and product management issue.
nCino's own AI in Banking Benchmark, launched at nSight 2026, put a number on it: 84% of banking executives say AI is now embedded at an enterprise level, but only 21% are tying those investments to increased revenue.
Software is only as good as the people who design and implement it to meet the business's needs. You can buy a Lamborghini that goes 0-60 in 1.2 seconds, but if you need to haul 40,000 pounds it might as well be a tin box.
Many of the best nCino professionals started in commercial lending or credit and learned the technology later.
Roughly 90% of the time we're engaged to bring in independent nCino SME contract support, the brief is to clean up a technology-driven implementation that didn't account for the business well enough.
Where Are the Biggest nCino Projects Happening Right Now?
Most major US banks already have a commercial LOS strategy in place. Consumer, Treasury and SBA implementations are - for the most part - the largest projects happening across the space right now. Two in every three roles we've picked up over the past six months have been for Consumer or SBA projects.
This creates a specific talent problem. nCino's Consumer solution is similar enough to Commercial that people assume the talent is interchangeable - but it's different enough in design and layout to require distinct expertise. Banks expanding from Commercial into Consumer or SBA are finding they need specialists who don't exist on their current teams.
There's a compounding issue too. Many institutions that completed Commercial implementations three to five years ago watched their specialist knowledge walk out the door when the system integrator's engagement wound down. What's left is a production environment the internal team maintains but doesn't fully own. It's one of the most consistent patterns we see - and it's driving a significant portion of the contract SME demand we're handling right now.
We've covered the hiring and retention strategies that work in this space in our nCino Talent Playbook and our piece on effective strategies for finding and retaining nCino professionals. If you're building out a Consumer or SBA team, those are the right starting points.
Why the nCino Talent Market Is More Insulated Than You Think
Because nCino training is limited to customers and partners, the talent market is tighter than the wider Salesforce ecosystem. I could technically run through some Trailheads and earn my Salesforce Admin certification. There's no equivalent open path into nCino.
That barrier to entry, combined with continued platform growth, keeps the hiring market constrained. nCino closed FY2026 with annual contract value of $602.4 million, up 17% year-on-year, and posted Q1 FY2027 revenues of $159.4 million, up 11% year-on-year. Each new bank signing can create implementation, support and optimisation roles in a market where experienced people are already limited.
The strongest nCino professionals are rarely active job seekers. They're known quantities in a small market, approached constantly and often move for reasons that have as much to do with project quality as compensation. Posting a job description and waiting for inbound applications doesn't reach this population. Getting to the right people requires relationships built inside the nCino ecosystem - the SI community, nCino University's certification network and the practitioner circles that form around events like nSight.
What Does This Mean If You're an nCino Technologist Right Now?
AI is not the main threat to nCino jobs. If you're currently in the nCino ecosystem, look into upskilling across different business lines - Consumer, SBA, Treasury. Demand is concentrated there and supply is limited.
Let your business drive your implementation, but make sure the stakeholders around you understand change management, nCino as a technology and the problems it's actually built to solve. Professionals who can sit between the platform and the business - translating one for the other - are in short supply.
You're also operating in an insulated niche inside a heavily regulated industry that continues to create demand for experienced nCino talent.
We flagged Consumer and SBA as the next wave in our post-nSight analysis from 2025. That wave is here.
Being the first recruitment firm invited to sponsor nSight gave us a different kind of access to the conference - and being already known in the nCino ecosystem meant conversations opened up fast. Most conversations weren't about product features or AI roadmaps. They were about getting more value from systems banks already have.
Multi-LOB Expansion Is More Complex Than Banks Planned For
Most banks rolled out nCino starting with Commercial Lending. Now they want to scale into Consumer, SBA, Mortgage and Treasury - and they're discovering it's a different exercise entirely. Each line of business brings its own credit policies, its own workflows and its own compliance requirements. Many banks are discovering that success in Commercial doesn't automatically translate into Consumer, SBA or Treasury.
This connects directly to change management. As banks scale nCino usage across more teams, internal adoption and process standardisation are often lagging behind the technology. The platform may be ready, but the people and processes around it still need work.
Customization Debt Is Leaving Banks on the Wrong Side of Their Own Roadmap
Heavily customised environments are causing banks to get stuck on outdated nCino versions. If an environment can't absorb a platform upgrade cleanly, AI capability becomes harder to access and deploy. Banks with lean, well-governed implementations are better placed to move forward. Banks with heavy customisation are spending more time managing technical debt.
AI Ambitions Are Running Ahead of the Data
Banks are excited about AI, but many are still sitting on messy data - siloed, inconsistent or not clean enough for AI to work the way they want it to. Configuration debt and legacy customisation are also leaving some banks without a practical path forward, even where the platform supports it.
nCino's AI in Banking Benchmark found that 93% of banking executives report at least one data governance issue, despite 87% feeling confident about their data quality. Until the data infrastructure gets sorted, the AI ambitions are running ahead of what most nCino environments can actually support.
M&A Is Creating Talent Problems Banks Didn't See Coming
There's significant consolidation happening across US banking right now - roughly 181 bank deals were announced in 2025, a 45% increase over 2024.
The first thing that tends to happen after a merger is some version of headcount rationalization. Teams overlap, nCino environments overlap and organizations start cutting.
What kept coming up at nSight was what happens six or twelve months later - when banks realize the people they let go took institutional knowledge with them that they still need, and that merging two separate nCino environments across a newly combined organization is far more technically complex than anyone budgeted for.
The talent impact cuts both ways. Mergers create redundancies, but they also create integration work that requires specialist nCino knowledge. Several conversations at nSight centred on banks discovering they still needed expertise they thought they no longer needed.
Banks Want People Who Can Bridge Business and Technology
Banks aren't looking for single-function hires anymore. They want people who can flex across different job functions - professionals who can sit with business stakeholders, understand the process requirements and then make the technology work. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge both worlds.
Closing Thoughts
Across AI, expansion, M&A and talent, most of the nSight conversations came back to the same operational problem. Banks have bought the platform. Many are still working through the people, process and adoption work needed to get value from it.
If you're planning a Consumer or SBA expansion, navigating an M&A integration, building internal nCino capability or thinking about where to take your nCino career next, the hiring market is rewarding people who understand both the platform and the banking process around it.
Connect with Kyle Kuhn for contract and interim nCino talent, or Emma McCarthy for permanent hiring. Explore current roles and our nCino capabilities on our dedicated nCino practice page.
