Embedded Finance and CX: How Non-Banks Are Raising the Bar for Financial Institutions
Summary: Embedded finance is the integration of financial services into non-bank customer experiences (Apple Pay, Shopify Capital, Uber driver payouts, BNPL in checkout), and it is reshaping what bank customers expect from their own institution. The customer-experience bar has shifted on four dimensions: time-to-value (now measured in seconds), customer effort (now near zero for routine […]
What Is a Customer Experience Audit? A Guide for Banks and Credit Unions
Summary: A customer experience audit is a structured, evidence-based diagnostic of how customers experience a bank or credit union across the touchpoints that matter. It is not an NPS program, a mystery shop, a journey-mapping workshop, or a technology assessment — it is the engagement that surfaces what is working, what is not, and what […]
The True Cost of Customer Churn at Banks and Credit Union
Summary: The average annual customer attrition rate at banks and credit unions is approximately 15 percent. The “five times more expensive to acquire than retain” framing understates the real cost. A complete cost stack has six components: wasted Customer Acquistion Cost (CAC), lost deposit lifetime value, forgone cross-sell, lost referral value, brand and trust degradation, […]
Agentic AI in Banking: What Financial Institutions Need to Know Before They Deploy
Summary: Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can plan and execute multi-step tasks toward a defined goal with minimal human direction, distinct from chatbots, traditional automation, and generative AI. The operational case is well-documented; the customer-experience case is largely missing. Banks deploying without a pre-deployment CX baseline, a defined human handoff, instrumented failure modes, […]
Before You Invest in AI, Ask These 5 Customer Experience Questions
Taking advantage of artificial intelligence has quickly become a strategic goal for financial institutions. Vendors are making aggressive promises, competitors are announcing initiatives, and leadership teams are feeling pressure to define their AI strategy. But adopting AI because the market expects it might not be the best investment of time and money. Like any major […]
A Q&A with Spero Financial: Building a More Data-Driven Decision-Making Culture
What happens when research becomes more than a one-time project? For Spero Financial, what began as a need to better understand a changing membership evolved into a multi-year strategic discipline that helped shape major business decisions. In this Q&A, Bethani Williams, Vice President of Marketing at Spero Financial, shares how member and market research informed […]