From the webinar From Insight to Impact: How Decision Intelligence is Redefining Retail Banking, presented by Curinos in cooperation with the Consumer Banking Association on May 27, 2026, featuring Sarah Welch, General Manger Consumer, and Olly Downs, Chief Technology, Product and AI Officer.
Growth in retail banking has not stalled for lack of investment but because decisions are still fragmented. Most FIs continue to optimize in silos: marketing reallocates spend; product adjusts pricing, retail rethinks distribution. Each lever improves in isolation, but enterprise growth remains constrained. The strategy might be fine, but what’s needed is orchestration—how to align decisions across the entire customer lifecycle so impact compounds—in real time, at scale.
Leading banks are moving beyond disconnected optimization toward decision intelligence—a coordinated, customer-centric approach that integrates acquisition, engagement, pricing and retention into a single growth system to unlock measurable, durable growth. Here are some key takeaways from the webinar.
1. Retail growth is hard and getting harder.
The cost to acquire a checking customer has doubled from 2018 to 2025, ballooning to $559—that’s the average. More than half of all switchers hold 4+ banking relationships, up from a mere 7% in only six years. And while most customers may be sticking around, this wallet fragmentation means that their balances have shrunk. Attrition has increased by 25% since 2019. Meanwhile, only half of all banks realized growth to both customers and deposits in 2025, and only 10% reached their target growth of 3% for both. You might say the math isn’t working. Banks needs to find a way to grow differently.
Source: Curinos Marketing Analyzer, Curinos 2025 Shopper Survey, Curinos Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Analysis
2. Consumers continue to favor digital, but the quality remains elusive.
After 12 months, a scant 41% of digitally acquired relationships remain on the books, compared with three out of four for those sourced at the branch. And after two years, digitally acquired accounts display only 35% of the balances that are initiated in branches. But by next year well over half of all new accounts will be sourced digitally. To make up for the 29% in lost balances of what had been $1 billion of deposits in 2023, retail bankers will have to add 54,000 new customers—a staggering 41% increase from four years ago. The cost of inaction is sky high, but the answer can’t be simply to outspend or outbranch.
Source: Curinos Distribution Analyzer, Curinos Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Analysis
3. Only 1% of prospects will contribute to meaningful deposit growth.
The value that customers within a segment bring to a bank are remarkably consistent, even across all age bands. But less than 1% of prospects contribute to meaningful deposit growth over time. That’s because regional banks end up in the “consideration set” only 7% of the time and only 15% of these prospects bring $10k or more with them. That means that Fis need to be able to find the right prospects within those segments if they’re looking to make a consequential impact on their balances. But traditional funnel metrics such as response rates and acquisition volume are insufficient. What’s needed is customer-level decisioning—identifying individuals most likely to deepen balances, consolidate relationships and respond positively to specific engagement strategies.
Source: Curinos Deposit Analyzer, Curinos Capture, Curinos Analysis
4. Disconnected decisions need to give way to a customer-centered focus.
What’s heartening is that banks have a near-limitless amount of data. What’s not so heartening is that it’s stored in many different wells and applied in siloes, each of which looks out for its own well-intentioned objectives. Any durable success needs to transcend organizational siloes and be centered squarely on the customer. This is the crux of the shift in an omnichannel world. Decisions that may be entirely rational but disconnected need to coalesce around the customer. The “old world” approach is no longer sufficient in an environment where customers expect highly personalized, contextual experiences similar to those delivered by leading digital platforms. The “new world” begins with the customer and dynamically determines the right product, offer, pricing action or engagement strategy in near-real time against a unified enterprise objective. Easy to say, but how? By putting in place a decision layer that converts data and insights that most banks already have into impactful executions.
5. The Curinos One platform closes the gap between data and customer outcomes.
Curinos’ entry in decision intelligence is Curinos One, built expressly for financial institutions. It uses AI to close the gap between data and outcomes to drive revenue by using data from third-party and first-party signals and Curinos’ proprietary benchmark data. Learning feeds directly back into the engine as it observes customer signals, decides optimal actions, acts through existing channels and continuously improves from outcomes. It’s one native platform, not individual products stitched together. Offers, channels and timing are selected by the engine, governance and compliance guardrails are built in, and models update automatically from every interaction. Curinos One Capture is already making a marked difference in acquiring customers efficiently. Over time, Curinos One will respond to four more imperatives of customer growth and profitability: growing balances, accelerating primacy, retaining and deepening relationships, and optimizing the overall portfolio.
Curinos One: The Decision Intelligence Platform for Financial Institutions
