BOCA RATON, Fla – You might call it “must-see banking.”

Financial institutions are testing out ways that would allow their customers to access and interact with their banking accounts while watching television, Bank Innovation has learned.

Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions Financial Corp., which has $127 billion in assets, has a user-experience (UX) unit experimenting with ways to incorporate its banking services into wider formats, including large screen televisions, said Chris Cox, EVP of e-business services at Regions, at this week’s Retail Financial Services Symposium.

“We are exploring it,” said Cox. “It’s just in the test phase.”

Bank of America Corp., the second-largest bank in the nation by assets, is also brainstorming ways in which to integrate its banking services into TV programming.

“We think of those types of engagements as apps,” said Marc Warshawsky, senior vice president mobile channel planning and design executive at BofA. “A lot on television is app-driven.”

Still, integrating banking into the television is still “so emerging,” said Warshawsky. At this early stage, BofA is investigating how the customer would want to interact with the bank through the TV and what experience a bank would want to provide. For now, there are still a lot of questions to answer before deploying a service.

“Why would someone interact with their bank on their TV rather than their PC?” Warshawsky asked. “We must make it a compelling use case.”

No matter what new digital offering a bank deploys to its customers, Warshawsky stressed that the service needs to be vastly simple to use in order to avoid customers calling into the bank with customer-service questions. Plus, new technology must offer the consumer value that goes beyond “cool,” Warshawsky said.

No word on whether a laugh track is under consideration for future TV banking.