Curinos was pleased to welcome senior retail banking leaders from deposits product, pricing, finance and balance sheet management from more than 20 financial institutions to its Retail Deposit Optimizer Executive Forum for 2026 in Nashville, June 1 and 2. Guests, representing Curinos’ current customer institutions, focused on the forces shaping the future of retail deposits, from funding pressures and rate sensitivity to growth, pricing strategy and decision intelligence. One of the most valuable benefits of the forum was the candid exchange between peers facing similar growth, margin, and funding challenges. At the same time, explicit care was taken to avoid disclosure or discussion of institution-specific pricing.
Participants were also introduced to Curinos One, a decision layer that connects data, decisions and execution at the customer level, across silos, learning continuously. It’s the decision intelligence platform for banking that closes the gap between data and outcomes. Here are some of the key takeaways from the forum’s presentations and discussions:
1. Curinos is cautiously optimistic about deposit growth for the balance of the year.
We’ve seen a moderately strong start, with clearer winners and losers than in years past. Direct banks and smaller FIs will benefit from the momentum of their solid growth in 2025, when they significantly outperformed their larger rivals—direct banks now capture 16% of industry consumer deposits. Traditional banks have outperformed past year trends across all product groups: checking and savings have continued to grow, while CD runoff has slowed. With $1.7 trillion in consumer CDs expected to mature in the next 12 months, retention remains a key priority. But because uncertainties persist in the rate environment, FIs will need to be flexible in deploying tailored growth strategies.
Growth by Bank Type Segment | Q1 2026
Source(s): Curinos Consumer Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Analysis. | Note(s): Asset size thresholds are adjusted quarterly in line with changes in total industry assets; baseline thresholds as of Q4’25. Nationals defined as having greater than $1.5T in Assets. Super Regionals defined as having $100B – $1.5T in Assets. Regionals defined as having $10B – $100B in Assets. Small Banks defined as having $0 – $10B in Assets.
2. Four key themes have emerged in 2025 and 2026.
- The tax season in 2026 was slightly stronger than in 2025, resulting in fewer inflows in March and outflows in April. FIs need to prepare for the eventuality that the trend will continue, but results could depend on their mix of mass market versus affluent.
- The affluent segment ($250K+) has continued to power overall deposit growth—almost three times greater than the average. This emphasizes the need for a strategy to attract and retain affluent depositors as part of overall growth goals.
- Banks that have seen the highest growth have kept CD rates higher than peers. Those that have prioritized larger savings rate cuts rather than those on CDs have outgrown the industry.
- Checking balances and acquisition have remained stable over the past several years, but intensifying competition means the value of cash offers is on the rise.
Cash Offers | Incremental Checking Acquisition vs. Cash Offer Reward | 2014 - 2026
Source(s): Curinos Consumer Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Analysis
3. Curinos’ deposit pricing and analytics platform continues to drive data and insight accessibility.
This includes the launch of Curinos CoPilot, a platform-native, generative AI capability that helps users build understanding and drive decisions with more speed and precision. We heard from our clients that interpreting the outputs of a scenario or optimization can be challenging, so we developed a chat experience to explore the outputs using natural language. Questions can be asked in plain English and CoPilot interprets the underlying model data and responds with precise, contextual answers, which obviates the need for dashboard reading. And built-in guardrails ensure that users can query their bank’s own data, restricted to the specific scenario or optimization being worked in. Proprietary data and insights are always protected.
4. Data and insight are everywhere, but coordination and execution aren’t.
Departments making locally correct decisions destroy enterprise value over time. The Curinos One platform marries product and customer intelligence in a decision layer that gets the Marketing, Product and Pricing functions on the same page to move faster and drive real outcomes. It connects data, decisions and execution at the customer level, across silos, continuously learning from each outcome. While pricing may not be the only growth lever (and often not the best one to drive sustainable efficient growth), it’s often the easiest to pull, with the clearest short-term impact. Decision intelligence, on the other hand, incorporates the myriad factors that drive sustainable growth into a holistic, outcome-focused framework at scale.
5. Curinos is building an AI layer that surfaces insights and shortens the analysis cycle.
As we move toward more dynamic pricing, surfacing insights and using human-approved agentic AI will enable teams to operate at increased scale and speed. It will:
- Identify and summarize what matters. AI generates concise summaries highlighting key metric changes and trends, simplifying complex data to allow for a quick grasp on important shifts.
- Assess the impact of decisions from the start. Automatic baseline scenario modeling is packaged with insight delivery, quantifying the predicted impact of inaction so users can immediately gauge materiality.
- Generate potential pricing responses to jumpstart analysis. Agentic scenario creation provides multiple tailored runs showing predicted portfolio outcomes based on user-defined pricing strategies and rules.
