Change How You Think About Primacy and Spark a Fresh Sense of Mission
I. What The Financial Institution Sees
When bank or credit union strategists think about the drivers of organic growth, they likely think first about primacy. How can they become the “go-to” hub for more of their accountholders? After all, these customers hold significantly more deposits, use more products, and offer much greater lifetime value than non-primary customers. Across the industry, primacy is accepted as a strong indicator of retention and profitability.
But working definitions of primacy can vary from one institution to another. And, despite institutions’ efforts to boost engagement, these definitions tend to be narrow. At some banks, primacy is declared when the customer routes payroll direct deposit to their account. Others use a simple threshold number of products or services. For commercial bankers, the tipping point may be hosting the client’s payments or cash management functions.
For all of the attention banks dedicate to it, primacy is mostly a check-the-box process a numbers game. The path to success is tracked through onboarding flows, cross-sell ratios, and campaign performance: To measure something you have to count something, and accumulation of products signals a stronger tie and, by implication, a higher degree of loyalty and engagement. The question is, do such numbers truly capture a customer relationship’s strength?
II. What The Customer Sees
Customers, of course, aren’t counting products. They’re worrying about whether they can cover next week’s bills, whether a subscription they forgot has been draining their hard-earned cash, or whether an overdraft fee is about to hit. They’re worried about staying on track for big savings goals, like a car or home downpayment.
Data bears this out. In a recent global consumer survey by Personetics, a digital banking technology provider that specializes in AI-enabled customer experiences, respondents ranked financial health as their top day-to-day concern above even family and physical health. In fact, the survey data suggests that, if customers were to come up with their own working definition of primacy, they would emphatically not count products.
When asked why and whether they’d stay or leave an institution a not unreasonable proxy for primacy from the customer’s point of view they give preference to advice and help. Some 84% of the consumers surveyed by Personetics say they’d consider switching banks to get more timely, relevant tips and advice to improve their financial health.
Interestingly, Gen Z ranks financial wellness highest, likely because they are building healthy habits and investments for future security, according to Personetics. Gen Zers are also most likely to make a switch based on their desire for a relationship that supports their financial health. Baby boomers despite their accumulated wealth also prioritize financial wellness above all other concerns.
From the customer’s perspective, primacy is a byproduct of trust. In a marketplace where most people use multiple financial providers, the primary bank is the one that shows up when it matters. Even more important: most customers don’t think of banking as a series of discrete products. They see money as one flow income, spending, obligations, and goals — shaping their choices day by day. And they want their financial institution to understand how it all works together.
III. Why Banks and Their Customers Are Misaligned
When banks pursue primacy, the tools and tactics they lean on tend to be campaign-based and oriented toward cross-sell or upsell. Such approaches start with a product in mind and push it toward the accountholder based on defined parameters using various “push” marketing techniques. Even when targets are highly segmented, the institution is still pushing campaigns that are rooted in its own objectives first and only tuned to consumer attributes second.
The thing is, customers have trained themselves to ignore marketing messages and ads. Studies show that banner ads often don’t have an impact on users the so-called banner blindness phenomenon likely because people view them as irrelevant to their immediate situation.
Personetics’ CEO Udi Ziv describes this as a gap between intention and impact. On one hand, the institution sees a series of actions: offers launched, messages delivered, and conversions achieved. But the customer sees something else entirely: “Mostly what banks are doing is sending text messages or banners or emails we have a great offer for you but it’s completely out of context,” says Ziv. “Instead of strengthening the relationship, these interactions remind the customer how little the bank knows them.”
The difference becomes even clearer when banks and credit unions compare their own customer experiences to those hosted by top digital retailers outside of financial services. Amazon and Netflix use digital channels to anticipate needs and place the right options within easy reach: They are context aware. Banks, in contrast, treat digital as a part of their larger distribution network. Within that network, they’re working harder and harder to sell. Meanwhile, their customers are waiting for someone to notice what they actually need.
IV. Have We Traded Humanity for Efficiency?
For the banking industry arguably the world’s oldest information business the transition from brick and mortar-dominant to digital-dominant operations was a hard-fought battle. Today, it’s a given that routine transactions happen fast and customers can access their accounts wherever and whenever they want. Most importantly, institutions have gained meaningful efficiencies; they’re able to serve more customers at lower cost. But as transformative as the shift has been, it fell short in two important ways.
First, the digital platforms of most banks and credit unions don’t leverage the full potential of the modern data management and analytic technologies; never mind Gen AI, they’re still catching up with Big Data. Institutions collect vast amounts of customer information but rarely use it to shape experiences in real time. The best online retailers today embed recommendations deeply into their user experiences. Each next step in a session or relationship is relevant and natural. In this way, product by product, category by category, companies like Amazon and Netflix have made themselves central to daily life. Banking, despite financial services’ potential for even greater relevance and centrality in people’s lives, has not achieved this.
The second way in which the digital transformation of banks and credit unions has fallen short is the loss of human touch. Banking customers of a certain age might remember opening a first savings account with a parent at a local branch, aided by a banker who knew their name and offered some advice, guidance and maybe a lollipop. That kind of everyday relationship has all but disappeared. Today, only a small minority of people worldwide have access to financial advice, typically the individuals and households with the greatest wealth; for most others, banking relationships deliver efficiency but little support or sense of connection.
V. When Mission Meets Moment
To get past this disconnect, banks and credit unions must take the next big technology step, putting context at the center of relationship building and the quest for primacy and using the power of AI to activate it. Personetics’ chief executive Ziv sees this opportunity as the driving force behind what some in the industry are calling cognitive banking.
“If you’re in a mindset of a product looking for a customer, you have the product in mind and not the customer in mind,” he says. “Cognitive banking is the exact opposite. It means that I will spend all my effort analyzing the individual, identifying their needs what’s important for them and when it’s important in a specific context. And then I will look for the right product.”
Instead of running campaigns targeting 2% or 6% or 20% of your accountholders, cognitive banking envisions targeting 100% of your accountholders all the time. It means, in a sense, bringing back the financial advice a banker once informally provided at its main brick-and-mortar touchpoint, and allowing everyone to have the same type of experience.
Ziv takes it one step further, describing cognitive banking as a way to democratize access to advice and a cause for the industry to rally around. “For a consumer who wants to navigate today’s very complex financial world, it may ultimately prove mandatory,” he says.
So cognitive banking is more than a new application of leading-edge technologies. And it’s more than a mindset shift that may help banks more reliably and durably win the battle for primacy. It may offer a chance to reinvigorate the industry’s sense of mission, a way forward for banks and credit unions to reclaim their role as trusted partners in people’s lives.
Written By Nicole Volpe on September 9, 2025: Change How You Think About Primacy and Spark a Fresh Sense of Mission | The Financial Brand
