The Growth Opportunity in Your Data

Lifecycle campaigns beat acquisition by 2 to 6 times. Acquisition still gets the budget. Marquis analyzed thousands of campaigns across more than 100 banks and credit unions and found that lifecycle programs, the work an institution does with the account holders it already has, run 2 to 6 times more efficient than acquisition and prospecting. Our 2026 State of Financial Marketing report puts acquisition first among priorities, with retention and cross-sell well behind. The priority order and the return order point in opposite directions, and most institutions have not noticed. Satin Mirchandani, Chairman and CEO of Marquis, joins Jim Marous to get specific about what an institution's own data already knows. An auto loan at month 32 of a 36-month term. An account holder whose transaction frequency has quietly dropped. A household whose product mix has fallen behind the cohort that looks just like it. Each is a signal the institution already owns, and each one has a campaign attached to it that mostly never runs. The conversation also covers what counts as a response versus a funded account, why purchased intent data can spook the people it is aimed at, why messy data is a poor excuse for waiting, and why the explosion in side businesses is breaking the way most banks and credit unions group a household. Satin brings an outside perspective on why our industry keeps funding its lowest-returning work while the higher-return work sits untouched in the core system. Download Marquis 2026 FI Trend Report here: https://mktg.gomarquis.com/2026-marketing-trend-report About Banking Transformed: Hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report, Banking Transformed brings banking and credit union leaders the perspectives shaping the future of financial services. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

Somebody is going to walk an extra lap around the block tonight because the ring on their watch isn't closed. Nobody is paying them to do it. That is gamification, and it is the most reliable behavior change tool built in the last 20 years. It also runs on a number somebody invented. 10,000 steps was never a medical standard. It was the name of a pedometer sold in 1965, and no study sat behind it. Jim Marous opens this Banking Insights episode by explaining what the mechanic really does, and that most banks and credit unions have never put a progress bar in front of a customer at all. Applied well, it moves the numbers that decide a relationship. Swaystack reports a 24% increase in meaningful first-month funding across the institutions using it, with Peak Credit Union live in 81 days and Think Bank in 90, both on digital banking platforms they already ran. The step customers stall on most often is the direct deposit switch, which also decides primacy, and Cornerstone Advisors finds institutions lose 3.36 digital applications for every one they complete. The episode then argues the mechanic should not stop when onboarding does. It covers the CFPB finding that the most popular savings rule was not the one associated with the most saved, the field experiment showing that crediting progress already nearly doubles completion, and Fifth Third's Life360, the planning platform that already answers the question everyone else's progress bar cannot. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

The most valuable thing a rewards program does has almost nothing to do with the reward. Bank of America reopened its rewards program this year and has enrolled more than five million people since May. Jim Marous opened a checking account at one of its branches specifically to hear how the associate would explain it, and what he got was not a product pitch. The program gave that employee a legitimate reason to talk about his whole relationship with the bank, what he would receive right away, and what would change if he brought more of his banking over. That conversation, rather than the cash back, is the part a community bank or credit union can learn from. The episode looks at why most programs cannot have that conversation. The average customer now keeps deposit accounts at three different institutions, and one in five moved money away from their primary institution in the previous three months. Under a typical tiered construct, 80% of customers account for only 14% of deposits, so most of the book sits outside anything the institution would call premium recognition. Jim frames the design problem as a door and a ladder: the door decides who gets in at all, the ladder tells them where they can go next, and most institutions put the hurdle at the door and build nothing above it. He also takes on the affordability objection directly, separating merchant-funded offers from the debit interchange exemption, and he shows what a useful relationship conversation sounds like in three sentences. The episode closes with four decisions any institution can make, including one that costs nothing: deciding which group of customers you will recognize automatically, because of who they are rather than what they hold. Research from Curinos, J.D. Power, PYMNTS Intelligence and the Federal Reserve, with examples from Bank of America and PNC, and material from Jim's interview with Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Bank of America dropped the $20,000 minimum. 5 million clients enrolled. For most of the last decade, a large bank rewards program was something a client earned their way into. Bank of America’s preferred rewards program required $20,000 in balances, making loyalty a benefit of affluence rather than a feature of everyday relationships. BofA Rewards moved the entry point to any eligible checking account, making 30 million clients eligible immediately. More than 5 million have enrolled since, with 1.5 million of those in the first month. Shikha Narula, Head of Consumer Deposits and Rewards at Bank of America, joins Jim Marous to explain why checking was the non-negotiable anchor, how the higher tiers were made better rather than diluted, and why the lifestyle benefit threshold came down from $1 million in assets to $100,000. She also details what a primacy shift actually looks like in the data: direct deposits moving over, more card transacting, and a change in the top-of-wallet card. The most useful finding for other banks and credit unions is about channels. 80% of enrollments happen digitally in two taps, but Narula is clear that digital is the fulfillment channel and financial center associates are the catalyst. Roughly 20,000 new-to-bank clients open a checking account and enroll every week, 2.5 times the pre-launch rate. Narula closes with her advice to any leader planning a change at this scale, starting with associate education long before launch. Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Owner of the Digital Banking Report. Subscribe for new episodes multiple times each week.

2026 State of Financial Marketing report is available for free at https://www.digitalbankingreport.com/trends/2026-state-of-financial-marketing/?YouTube More than half of the banks and credit unions in our 2026 State of Financial Marketing research have generative AI operational or better inside marketing. Not one of them describes its customer data as real-time and AI-ready. That gap runs in a straight line through the study. Generative AI raised production capacity, while thin data and almost no predictive decisioning keep the output from being relevant. 55% are not using predictive AI at all. 1% rate AI-driven content and creative as effective, the lowest score on the tactics chart, against the largest planned budget increase in the research. We funded the layer that produces marketing and held flat the layer that decides who should receive it, when it should arrive, and whether it worked. It also explains the distance between what this industry says about personalization and what it does. 83% sit at segment-based personalization or below and 1% call themselves hyper-personalized. Two-thirds of what we call personalization is choosing which audience receives a message, which is list selection under a newer name. Jim walks through what that looked like when he ran marketing at a bank, sorting a core tape by ZIP code and balance tier, and what has genuinely improved since. None of it is a reason to wait. Good solution providers build strong targeting on imperfect data every day. Imperfect data can't recognize what just happened to a customer and respond while it is still happening. Personalization and decisioning is also the least outsourced marketing function in the study at 13%, even though a lack of internal talent is the second-largest barrier, which means this industry outsources its strengths and protects its weaknesses. ABOUT: Jim Marous is Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast.

Your vendor may own the technology debt. Your institution owns the consequences. Technical debt is usually discussed as a money-center bank problem, so community banks and credit unions hear it and go back to work, because they don't write code. But institutions still contracting with a legacy core are paying the maintenance on that provider's accumulated debt. Outsourcing didn't remove the debt; it changed the relationship to it: a large bank can inspect its own and decide what to repair, while a smaller institution can only live with the consequences. In this episode, Jim Marous argues that the real difference is ownership. At a large bank the problem has a department, a register and a budget line. At a community institution it has no owner, no number and no seat at the strategy table, so it surfaces every 5 to 7 years as a procurement conversation about price per account. He puts the argument inside a scene every banker will recognize: a small product change, a room that likes it, an estimate that comes back at 9 months, and an idea that goes on a list nobody reads again. The stakes have changed, because AI is the first technology whose value depends almost entirely on whether the institution can absorb it. The answer is selective decoupling rather than core replacement: hundreds of single-solution providers now run alongside a large core, so the core can remain a stable system of record while the capabilities that need to move fast are free to do so. With a guardrail, because collecting providers badly trades core debt for integration debt. Stop making your core the answer to every technology question. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Melissa Stevens has a rule at Fifth Third: your employees are your brand. The chief marketing officer of one of banking's strongest regional brands joins Jim Marous to explain how Fifth Third grows relationships from the inside out, by giving its people the data, the insight, and even the influencer status to become the bank's most trusted voices. Stevens makes the case that customers never experience a bank as a marketing campaign. They experience it as the colleague who answers the question and solves the problem, and she has built her whole approach around that. That means letting employees post about the bank on social media without fully scripting what they say, because you can't script authenticity. It means arming bankers with insight, not just data, so a conversation is about the customer rather than the product. And it means watching for the quiet signals of a customer drifting away, like a direct deposit that suddenly splits in two, and reaching out before they're gone. She's also candid about the tradeoffs. Fifth Third deliberately kept generative AI away from its customers, choosing accuracy over personality, after growing its Jeanie assistant from barely 20 percent accuracy in its early days to the low 90s. She talks through carrying 500,000 Comerica customers into a new brand without breaking their trust. And she grades herself an honest C-minus on the one thing she worries about most as the company grows. For any bank or credit union trying to grow relationships in a crowded market, this is a clear look at what works and what most institutions get wrong about their own people. Hosted by Jim Marous. Subscribe to Banking Transformed for new episodes multiple times each week.

We won the adoption argument. Every hand in the room. And the income statement didn't notice. Four years ago, Jim Marous asked a room of bankers how many had used an AI tool in their work, and fewer than one in four hands went up. Last week he asked the same question and nearly every hand in the room went up, many of them belonging to bankers over 50. Adoption in the banking industry has moved faster than almost anything Jim has watched in his career. Over the same period, the share of organizations that can point to any impact of AI on their earnings has not changed. This episode opens with a recurring pragmatic check-in on where banking actually is with AI, and it locates the gap elsewhere than in the technology. Banking has digitized the same way three times: paper became PDF, PDF moved behind a portal, and now the work inside the queue has been sped up. Every round improved the surface the work sits on. None of them touched the space between two departments. Mortgage lending shows the result on the income statement, where closings have come down roughly two weeks since 2021 while the cost to originate at a bank or credit union has stayed flat and pull-through has declined. Retirement rollovers show the same failure landing on the customer, where an IRA application takes five minutes, and the transfer still runs on a paper check in the mail, during which about a third of job changers cash out instead. The argument lands on ownership rather than tooling. Every step inside a department has an owner, a budget line, and a number. The space between two departments has none of the three, which is why three waves of digitalization kept landing on documents and never on the gaps. Jim closes with three moves: picking a process instead of a task, assigning one owner across the whole span, and measuring end-to-end. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Most institutions aren't undifferentiated. Their differences are unwitnessed. Cover the logo on the mobile app, the website and the branch sign, and most leadership teams cannot pick their own institution out of a lineup. Jim Marous opens this episode with that test, then turns it around: the problem is rarely that a bank or credit union has nothing worth choosing. The problem is that the advantage was built somewhere no customer will ever see or feel it. The spine of the episode is an exercise Jim ran with a board recently. Everybody writes one sentence explaining why a customer banks with them, in the customer's words, and then the room crosses out anything that fails three tests. Distinctive, meaning the institution down the street could not write the same sentence. Valuable, meaning a customer has actually named it as the reason they chose or stayed, which most rooms cannot answer because nobody ever asked. And witnessed, meaning a customer can see, feel, measure or describe it through the channels they really use, and so can the prospect still deciding whether to start. From the diagnosis come four moves: capture the customer's own words at the opening, at the anniversary, and on the way out; put a number in front of the customer once a year; publish real voices rather than institutional language; and approve nothing that cannot survive the same three tests. The episode closes on the harder question, which is what an institution should do when nothing survives at all. About: Banking Transformed is hosted by Jim Marous, a top five banking industry influencer and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Banking Insights episodes deliver the most important strategic ideas in under ten minutes, for the executive who wants the takeaway without the deep dive. Subscribe to the Digital Banking Report at digitalbankingreport.com.

Customer experience expert Jay Baer is stepping away from the keynote stage after 17 years and moving deeper into the world of tequila. He joins Jim Marous for a Banking Transformed conversation centered on five pours and five customer-experience questions for banks and credit unions. Tequilas tasted, in order: → Nosotros Blanco → Lost Lore Joven → Arette Reposado → Wild Common Añejo → Cazcáñes #7 Extra Añejo Each tequila opens a different discussion: first impressions, disconnected experiences across channels, the role of AI and automation, the difference between satisfaction and loyalty, and the advice Jay wants financial leaders to carry into the next decade. Jay explains why connected customer experience is usually a culture and leadership challenge rather than a technology problem. He also argues that as AI tools become widely available, the human touch becomes more valuable, especially when something goes wrong. His parting warning is direct: the more customers are treated like numbers, the more they will treat their financial institution as replaceable. Jay Baer is the author of Talk Triggers and Hug Your Haters and co-founder of The Tequila Report.