Connect with the author: sarah.welch@curinos.com
Meet Olivia. She’s a Manhattan professional who takes the subway, has never financed a car, and has never made an auto inquiry anywhere. A few months ago, this is an email she got from her bank:
Information wasn’t the problem. Her bank knew a lot about Olivia. It just saw a segment instead of Olivia.
That segment, under-35, over-$100K, urban professional, isn’t wrong. It’s nearly useless. The average new customer in it opens with $7-10K, and that number looks the same at the best banks and the worst. Segments describe the population. They tell you almost nothing about the one customer in front of you. Fewer than 1 in 100 prospects in any segment will drive meaningful deposit growth, and the segment can’t tell you which one.
What the segment misses about Olivia lives in her file: a standing payday transfer into savings, a zip code where a down payment is years away. The difference between treating her as “under-35 high-income urban” and treating her as Olivia is the difference between a $7K opening balance and a multi-decade relationship.
Olivia is one face of a bigger shift. Acquisition is moving online, and online relationships are thinner. Curinos data show that digitally acquired relationships retain at 41% after 12 months, against 75% for branch. Digital was 40% of acquisitions in 2025 and will pass 55% by 2027. The thin relationships are becoming the majority.
The fix isn’t more data. It’s a decisioning layer that turns what a bank already knows into the next action. Sometimes an offer, sometimes deliberately not one. Always measured against a bank-wide objective, not a campaign KPI.
Curinos One is that layer. It’s banking-native, trained on millions of retail customers across hundreds of institutions, and it learns from every action so the next one lands closer.
The bank that can’t see Olivia today won’t see the next 99 either.
