Welcome to the Spring 2025 issue.
Stubbornly high rates persist, home lending remains sluggish, and doubts linger about growing the asset side of the balance sheet. Still, Curinos believes the recent industry headwinds will soon be at our backs and now’s the time prepare for significant growth. That’s why we’ve titled our Spring issue of the Curinos Review It’s Grow Time—Buckle Up! Each article contains thought-provoking strategies for taking advantage of the opportunity before us.
Our cover story charts a course for growth to the balance sheet in an economic environment that’s likely to be more favorable and less encumbered by regulation. For regional banks to take advantage, we outline three imperatives for them to embrace: top-line growth, recovering from spread compression and managing LDR. Our feature on retail deposits explores the complexity of managing portfolio rates and volumes in a rate cycle that’s defying earlier expectations of gradually declining rates. And with betas lagging Fed actions, any expectation from analysts and bank treasurers for relief from high funding costs may also need to be reset.
The 10th Annual Curinos Shoppers Survey is out, and we look at a few of the more notable findings. Customer primacy is changing from direct deposit more toward payments, wallet fragmentation is making primacy more difficult, and digital players continue to make inroads. One way to capitalize on these trends is to focus on affluent customers, where primacy can pay higher dividends. We share the good news from our latest Segmentation Survey that they’re less rate-sensitive than many industry observers may have thought.
Turning to marketing, we cite four use cases in which Amplero, our AI-fueled decisioning engine, has yielded significant tangible results—to click-through rates, onboarding, cross-sell conversions and private wealth. They’re great examples of how the promise and power of AI can make an exponential difference in marketing productivity.
In commercial, we present the case that banks may need to fundamentally rethink where and how they’re going to find growth and that the best place to start is with a rigorous focus on retooling portfolios and on balance sheet and credit mix. To succeed on the smaller end of the commercial scale, we observe that banks will need to adopt a more mature set of interlinked core competencies for small businesses that include go-to-market sales, marketing and segmentation.
Finally, we look into what’s likely to be a more active year in bank M&A and how acquirers can make the most of it. Determining the correct value of core deposits is essential because the long-term success of any deal depends on them. But this can be harder than it seems initially, and sufficient due diligence requires a deep dive with the help of the right data and analytics.
We’re bullish on the upcoming year and hope you share our enthusiasm. As always, we greatly appreciate the trust you’ve placed in us. It’s a privilege to serve you, and we thank you for your continuing support.
Respectfully,
Al Aguirre
Chairman of the Board
