From Efficient Acquisition is Not a Marketing Problem, a webinar presented by Curinos in cooperation with the Consumer Banking Association on March 25, 2026, that featured Brandon Larson, Chief Advisory Officer, Advisory, and managing director Sarah Welch.
Banks have historically treated acquisition as a marketing function, optimizing for awareness, response rates and cost per account. But the reality is that acquisition outcomes are shaped by decisions across product, pricing, distribution, risk and digital experience, not just marketing. Tradeoffs between customer growth, deposit growth and long-term value can’t be solved within a single function. Winning banks are reframing acquisition as a coordinated, enterprise-wide strategy anchored in customer value rather than channel metrics. Here are what leading banks are doing differently along with some other key takeaways from the webinar:
1. Customer fragmentation is eroding primacy and driving lower-quality growth.
Retail banking customers are increasingly spreading their financial relationships across multiple institutions, with more than half now holding four or more checking accounts, compared with only 7% of all customers in 2019. This wallet fragmentation is even more pronounced among affluent customers. As a result, newly acquired customers are bringing lower balances at origination, and primacy is becoming more and more frayed. Traditional assumptions about “winning the customer” no longer hold—banks are often acquiring only a slice of the wallet. This makes understanding customer’s intent, usage and role of the account critical at acquisition. Growth is no longer about acquiring accounts—it’s about acquiring the right role in a customer’s financial ecosystem.
The cost to acquire customers is trending up as banks increase marketing spend…
…yet customers are fragmenting their wallet make quality harder to win
Note: CPA includes Brand, Consumer Checking, and Sponsorship spend
Source: Curinos Analysis
2. Only 10% of banks achieve targeted growth of both customers and deposits.
When many FIs are asked to quantify their growth goals, they tend not to distinguish between customer growth and deposit growth and assume they’re achieving both. But realizing growth to both isn’t easy. While almost half of FIs managed it in 2025, only a small fraction—only 10%—reached their target growth of 3% for both. With the U.S. population growing at between .5% to 1% and GDP modest, that means any appreciable increases to an FI’s customers and deposit balances need to come from its competitors rather than from organic growth to the industry.
Net Checking Customer Growth vs Net Total Retail Deposit Growth
Jan 2025 – Dec 2025
Source(s): Curinos Deposit Analyzer | Net checking-tied customer count growth, all retail consumers total relationship balances, institutions with significant M&A activity removed as outliers | Curinos Analysis
3. A small portion of customers is driving the meaningful portion of growth.
While acquisition contributes to near-term growth, most growth to deposits comes over time—particularly from those customers acquired within the last one to five years. And not all of those customers contribute equally: roughly 20% of customers drive the majority of balance growth—and it’s not always from those who are affluent—while about 10% actively destroy value through attrition or balance decline. For most FIs, the remaining 70% is of unknown potential. This reinforces the need for acquisition quality—not just volume—as the primary determinant of long-term performance. Banks that fail to target and activate high-potential customers early in the process miss the compounding effect of relationship growth. Acquisition isn’t a one-time event—it’s the starting point for multi-year value.
Customer balance change over 4 years | Decile (Median)
Note: Measures change in absolute relationship balances for consumers comparing month 3-on-book to month 48-on-book
Source: Curinos Analysis
4. The industry is optimizing for the wrong metrics—and paying for it.
Marketing costs per account are rising significantly, yet switching rates remain relatively flat, meaning banks are paying more for the same—or lower—quality outcomes. At the same time, success metrics remain fragmented across functions: marketing focuses on CPA, product teams on funded accounts and retention teams on churn. This lack of alignment leads to inefficient spend, including costly cannibalization of existing balances and missed opportunities to capture new ones. That’s why leading institutions are shifting toward unified success metrics centered on customer lifetime value and balance quality rather than short-term acquisition volume.
Key Obstacles to Making Value-Based Choices
Source(s): Curinos Analysis
5. Decision intelligence is emerging as the key enabler of efficient growth.
The core barriers to effective acquisition today—fragmented data, poor orchestration, and misaligned objectives—can’t be solved through incremental improvements. Banks need a unified decisioning framework that connects prospect targeting, onboarding, engagement and retention into a single system. The answer is decision intelligence. It solves for foundational problems through connected data that is continuously learning to coordinate decisioning across functions and evaluate tradeoffs before deploying capital. When applied effectively, it allows banks to target higher-value customers, improve response rates and significantly increase balances without proportionally increasing spend. Ultimately, it can transform acquisition from a series of disconnected campaigns into a continuous, optimized growth engine.
Decision Intelligence
Connected Data Continuously Learning To Optimize Strategy
