Consumer Bankers Association hosted its 17th annual CBA LIVE 2026, in San Diego March 30 – April 1, where it encouraged its 1,800 participants to “Make Headway”—use ever-accelerating and empowering technology to learn new trends, improve business strategies and better serve customers. AI was certainly front and center and, with it, the cautionary reminder that a customer’s trust is the industry’s most valuable asset. Maintaining the latter while embracing the former, especially with the heightened potential for noncompliance and fraud, was a recurring theme. The conference was the perfect environment for Curinos to stress the need for AI-enabled decision intelligence, which unlike agentic AI, determines optimal strategies under uncertainty, testing real decisions against real outcomes using reinforming learning. It was also the perfect opportunity for the company to introduce the first of its five modules of Curinos One. Curinos One is a system that surfaces specific recommended actions from our proprietary data across 4,000+ institutions and first- and third-party signals and then learns from the outcomes so the next decision is better than the last—continuously, not episodically. Curinos also sponsored or co-sponsored three in-depth sessions. Here are several takeaways from those sessions, and from other presentations of note.
1. “Curinos One: Capture” has been designed to remove coordination friction.
Banks are under pressure to grow customers and deposits while facing longer payoff times, rising acquisition costs and declining efficiency. What we consistently see isn’t a lack of data or models but coordination friction: disconnected teams, fragmented decisions and a widening gap between insight and action, all within the constraints of a regulated environment. Curinos One: Capture was designed to remove that friction. It reframes acquisition as a governed, end-to-end decision process, starting with a clear growth objective, evaluating market and audience opportunities, acting within human-defined rules and guardrails and continuously learning from outcomes. Agentic AI plays a critical role, not by replacing people but by orchestrating complex analysis, surfacing tradeoffs and making every recommendation explainable and auditable.
We chose acquisition as the starting point for our Curinos One decision intelligence platform because it’s where strategy, analytics, execution and compliance collide most critically, and where better coordination creates measurable impact. When teams can predict outcomes before spending, compare scenarios with confidence and adapt based on actual performance, growth becomes more efficient and more durable.
Branch Bank Consumer Portfolio Rates (All Products Interest Expense)
Source(s): Curinos Consumer Deposit Analyzer, FRED | Note(s): Betas calculated against the upper limit of the target Fed Funds range. Simple averages displayed. Traditional FIs only. Consumer rates only.
Average Customer Balance Change
Over Time, by Segment
Source(s): Curinos Deposit Analyzer; Curinos Distribution Analyzer; Curinos Analysis
Note(s): 1. Customer base established as those who are with the bank at three months on book (does not account for attrition in first three months) 2. Average balance indexed to customer balances at three months on book. Based on consumer customers who entered through checking | Mass Market defined as <$10K deposit balances at M3, Mass Affluent >$10K deposit balances at M3 | Proforma view assumes 3MOB starting dep. balance of $10K (MA) and $1K (MM)
Relationship Balances by
Origination Channel2
Preferred Way to Open
New Checking Account – Trended
Source(s): Curinos Analysis | 1Curinos Marketing Analyzer | 2Curinos Digital Benchmarking | 3Curinos Deposit Analyzer
Home Equity Application to Booking Cycle Time Range Distribution (2025 Summary)
Source: Curinos Home Equity LendersBenchmark Originations
First Mortgage Rate Distribution
Refi-Cashout vs. HELOC Supplement – Illustrative Example
Source: LendersBenchmark FM Originations, FHFA
7. Quick takes: Decision intelligence, behavioral science, consumer sentiment, and more.
The value of decision intelligence. Marketing optimizes for engagement. Pricing optimizes for margin. Treasury optimizes for funding costs. AI agents can be deployed across each function in the chain, but the chain will still produce suboptimal results. That’s because the decisions feeding the agents are disconnected from each other and from any durable measure of customer value. That’s Curinos’ Sarah Welch’s observation in her article in the Spring issue of Curinos Review. Decision intelligence systems, on the other hand, are specifically designed to close this loop, connecting upstream decisions (where to grow, which customers to prioritize, how to price) to downstream outcomes (did they fund, did they stay, what were they worth) and learning which decisions produce better results over time.
Money is emotional. Jeff Kreisler, Head of Behavioral Science at JPMorganChase, reminded us that you can’t change human behavior, but you can understand it and empathize. Keep in mind that money is emotional. An expenditure of the same dollar amount from one mental bucket may seem extravagant coming from another. The pain of loss is greater than the pleasure of gain. Present bias often outweighs future considerations. To maintain trust, consider the human factor. What would you do if the customer you’re talking to were your best friend (whom you may treat better than even yourself)?
Best of times and worst? The economy is still growing, but wages and income not so much, especially on the downward slope of the K economy. Unemployment remains low, but good luck finding a job you want. AI is producing productivity gains, but white collar recession is imminent and may last years. Boomers are throwing a retirement party while Gen Z is feeling the affordability squeeze. These are a few contradictory trends of the 10 trends delivered in 10 minutes by Experian’s chief economist Joseph Mayans.
Consumer confidence, such as it is. Because consumer confidence, or lack thereof, is a leading indicator, what’s ahead for the economy this year may be a little rocky. According to the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, consumer sentiment fell back 6% in March to its lowest level since December, as reported by the surveys’ director Joanne Hsu. The short-run economic outlook plunged 14%, and year-ahead expected personal finances sank 10%. That may put a crimp in spending and in financing big-ticket items. After a pre-pandemic decade of negligible inflation and low rates, consumers are still coming to grips with the persistently high cost of borrowing.
Empowering the front lines with AI. Customer-facing representatives face a wide range of customers, so they need to be ready for anything. But fully six in 10 of them struggle to come up with the right answers when facing those customers. The information is there, somewhere, but retrieving it in the moment is another matter. AI can help. Multi-agent orchestration serving up the right actions at the right time is one of the most visible examples of AI’s power in action. The result? According to Greg Blausey and Anu Agarwal of Salesforce, the representative feels more confident, the customer feels validated and their trust in the institution, and the rep, strengthens.
