From The Struggle for LTV: Let’s Find Growth!, a Curinos webinar on June 3, 2025, presented in conjunction with Consumer Bankers Association and featuring Curinos Managing Directors Hank Israel and Sarah Welch with Curinos Senior Vice President Olivia Lui moderating.
In today’s high-cost, high-stakes environment, Marketing’s focus needs to be not on acquiring accounts but maximizing lifetime value. That’s why leading banks and credit unions are using segmentation, AI-powered decisioning and modern incentive strategies to drive faster payback on marketing investments. They’ve found ways to reduce early attrition and customer churn while at the same time boosting customer lifetime value (CLV) without ratcheting up acquisition costs.
In this webinar, presenters explored practical ways to use segmentation and incentives to grow CLV, shorten payback in a high-cost environment and apply AI to marketing decisioning. Here are some of the key takeaways:
1. The acquisition triple-whammy: Fewer customers, more competition, more channels.
There are 260 million banking customers in the U.S., but only 20 million, or 7.6%, switch providers in any given year, and only 14% of them—less than three million people—have appreciable assets. Almost 60%, on the other hand, live paycheck to paycheck and represent a scant 1% of the new-to-bank deposits. With retail fees diminishing, these customers are becoming less and less viable as a segment. At the same time, all segments have more choices than ever, thanks to the surge of fintechs and a proliferation of digital media. It all adds up to costs per acquisition (CPA) that have now reached $520. Clearly, acceptable CLVs in the future will depend increasingly on homing in on enough of the right prospects.
Annual Customer Acquisition Opportunity
Primary Checking Relationships
Note(s): *% of Churning Deposits and Loans held at Primary Banks | Paycheck to Paycheck: Consumers with less than 1 month of income in liquidity; Stable Mass: Consumers with less than $100K income who are not within the Paycheck to Paycheck segment; HENRY: Younger than 35 years old, have $100K+ income, and are not part of the Paycheck to Paycheck segment; Affluent: Consumers 35 or over, have $100K+ income | Source(s): Curinos Analysis | 2024 US Shopper Survey
2. Customer mix matters: Small shifts to more affluent segments can make a big difference.
One affluent customer can be worth as much as 22 paycheck-to-paycheck (P2P) customers. That means investments in marketing and incentives need to be calibrated to the potential that each customer segment represents. High earners not rich yet (HENRY) are outnumbered by P2Ps by 12x, but they’re moving into affluent territory and could be worth receiving what may now seem like an outsize cash incentive. This kind of early intervention may not only pay dividends down the road but it also take these high-potential customers off the table for competitors, who will have to invest all the more in high-value customer acquisition in the future.
Customer Segment Profiles and Composition
Note(s): Paycheck to Paycheck: Consumers with less than 1 month of income in liquidity; Stable Mass: Consumers with less than $100K income who are not within the Vulnerable Mass segment; Emerging Affluent: Younger than 35 years old, have $100K+ income, and are not part of the Vulnerable Mass segment; Affluent: Consumers 35 or over, have $100K+ income, and have $100K+ in investments | Sample sizes greater than n=50 for each segment 2024 Curinos Shopper Research
3. Relationships, especially affluent ones, are more fragmented than ever.
In 2019, 7% of “switchers,” those opening a new-to-bank checking account, had four or more checking relationships. By 2024, that figure had ballooned to 50%—a sevenfold increase. To say the consumer wallet has become fragmented is a huge understatement. Last year, affluent switchers had an average of 6.57 relationships, and they held on average more than two products with their secondary providers. Even paycheck-to-paycheck switchers were shown to have four relationships. That means more alternative sources than ever are asking an FI’s primary customers for their next transaction. Amid that kind of competitive noise, any hope of significantly improving CLV will increasingly require greater nurturing and deepening of the relationship. That means communicating just enough and knowing what to ask for when the time is right, and asking for it.
Average Number of Products and Relationships | by Segment
Source(s): Curinos Customer Knowledge | 2024 Shopper Survey | Q8_New: Which of the following products do you keep with each of the following banks? Select all that apply. | Curinos Analysis
4. Relationships aren’t linear: Customers don’t go from account opening to cross-sell in a neat little arc.
One day a customer may log in three times, then do nothing for two weeks. They may click a savings offer but open a CD. They may talk to a rep about a loan—but apply six months later. These aren’t exceptions—they are the relationship. Messy, dynamic and, most important, not following the mapped journey. That’s why the tools built around linear paths—journeys, flows, pre-set sequences—eventually break down. And it’s why decision intelligence matters more here than anywhere else. When the job is to support a relationship—not just trigger a transaction—any system needs to learn, listen, adapt and, when necessary, react. Banks don’t need just automation. They need intelligence.
The Reality of Customer Relationships
5. In a case study, AI-optimized cross-sell outperformed business as usual—and kept getting smarter.
Optimization through machine learning really works. Over a recent seven-month stretch, “Bank A” compared its results in converting targeted products to account opening between its control tactics (business as usual) to those same tactics plus Amplero Personalization Optimizer. Consistently, adding Amplero to business as usual outperformed control by 3x. That’s a staggering improvement. Imagine reducing the incremental cost of opening an additional account from, say, $400 to $133. And those are only the direct costs. Amplero has also been shown to reduce personnel and agency hours by as much as 80% over time.
Case Study: Initial Program Conversion | Targeted Products*
Note(s): *Targeted Products include CD, Investment, CC, HELOC, Mortgage | 1 Within 30 days prior of account open
Source(s): Amplero, Curinos Analysis
