Three Things We’re Hearing
- You’re Almost Out of New Customers
- Gen Z Loves NeoBanks — and Banks Somewhere Else?!
- Education Loans are Heating Up!!!
A four-minute read
If you would like the Epic Report delivered right to your inbox, click here
You’re Almost Out of New Customers
- Banks love relationship banking! Marketing to existing customers is cheaper and easier to execute than prospecting — soliciting new product relationships outside of their deposit customer base
- However, prospecting presents the opportunity to supercharge growth when growth from within an existing customer base reaches its limits, and it can be done without adversely affecting risk
Existing Customer Growth Is Powerful … and Finite
- Most institutions rightly prioritize deepening relationships, deposit-led growth, share of wallet, and retention
- But every portfolio eventually hits the same wall: there are only so many customers already inside it
- So what: is your institution generating enough net-new inflow to fund long-term growth — or quietly leaning on a fixed pool?
Consumers Already Bank Beyond One Institution
- The demand is there — consumers increasingly spread their financial lives across multiple providers, treating relationships as additive, not exclusive
- In credit specifically, Americans actively use 3.7 credit cards on average — confirming multiple credit relationships are the norm, not the exception
- Consumers are willing to open new relationships — and your competitors aren’t waiting for them — existing-customer strategies alone won’t capture that growth
- Prospecting today offers sharper targeting, richer data, stronger testing frameworks, and better risk controls than in past years
- Capital One, American Express, Discover, Barclays, SoFi, and Best Egg are just a few of the top lenders that rely primarily, if not totally, on prospecting outside of their existing customer base
- Even commercial banks with large retail customer bases, such as Chase and Citi, drive the majority of their consumer credit growth through prospecting
- The top marketers of personal loans, home equity loans and credit cards are dominated by lenders who market to non-customers
- Many of these prospecting-built lenders have operated through recessions and other challenging credit environments while continuing to create billions in shareholder value
One Common Misconception: Prospecting = Unmanageable Risk
- For many institutions, the hesitation isn’t marketing capability — the question we hear most involves risk:
- Will fraud rates climb?
- Will credit quality deteriorate?
- Fair questions — but prospecting doesn’t require trading away controls or quality, it requires product-level expertise and disciplined testing
- Numerous institutions have expanded prospecting while maintaining portfolio performance; in fact, targeted pre-screen offers can result in better credit and fraud numbers than non-targeted accounts generated through other inbound channels
- This case study below outlines the challenge and the results for one bank:
- Challenge: card growth capped by reliance on the existing deposit base
- Goal: expand reach within and beyond the footprint without loosening fraud controls or eroding credit quality
- Approach: Epic sized the market opportunity, optimized targeting, and built a prospect-acquisition strategy to responsibly extend beyond traditional customer sources
- Results: substantial new card customer growth with no deterioration in risk
- If customer pools are finite, consumers carry multiple relationships, and profitable relationships don’t always start with entry products — at what point does relationship banking become relationship dependence?
- An effective prospecting strategy, combined with the right product-level risk and marketing expertise, provides a strategic growth advantage over the competition
Gen Z Loves NeoBanks — and Banks Somewhere Else
- Gen Z, the most-courted generation in banking, wants the slick app — but this generation born between 1997 and 2012 opens accounts at the names it already trusts
- Trust beats tech: fees, security, and reputation now outrank the mobile app when Gen Z chooses a bank
- Big banks still open the most Gen Z accounts: Bank of America, Capital One, and Chase lead consideration among employed Gen Z
- Neobanks own satisfaction (but not yet the account): Chime and Cash App punch above their weight, but trail branch banks that still capture most new relationships
What Gen Z Says It Wants
- Gen Z is becoming a real banking audience — and as more of them enter the workforce and start longer-term financial relationships, their priorities are shifting from convenience to credibility
- Asked what matters most in choosing a bank, employed Gen Z consumers ranked low or no maintenance fees (31%), security and reliability (29%), and brand reputation and trustworthiness (26%) at the top
- Table stakes digital features ranked below trust: customer service (22%), digital banking capabilities (21%), fee transparency (21%), and branch access (20%) followed
- The mobile experience is now a cost of entry, not a differentiator — Gen Z wants a modern app backed by a brand it believes is safe and stable
Branch vs. Fintech: A Split Decision
- Neobanks win on satisfaction — they take five of the seven highest net-satisfaction scores (although member-owned Navy Federal and USAA still top the list) in YouGov’s 2025 ranking on the strength of clean interfaces and low-friction onboarding
- But traditional banks win the account: 48% of new account openers prefer an established bank versus 27% who choose a digital-only provider
Who’s Winning the Segment
- Bank of America is the most favorably viewed bank among employed Gen Z, followed by Capital One and Chase — and BofA also leads consideration among likely new account openers (35%, vs. 21% for Chase and 20% for Capital One)
- Legacy players are rebuilding trust, not just defending it: Wells Fargo posted the largest year-over-year satisfaction gain, reaching its highest mark since the 2016 account scandal, while BofA rose four points
- Chime is the standout digital-native winner — it reached GAAP profitability in Q1 2026, grew active members ~19% to 10.2 million, and now claims the #1 brand-consideration spot among Americans earning up to $100,000, its core young-and-mainstream base (as an interesting side-note, Chime made the claim that they “led all banks and fintechs in share of new checking-account openings” in Q4 2025 based on a JD Power survey — a characterization JD Power is contesting)
- Cash App functions as a de facto bank for millions of younger, lower-income consumers and over-indexes with Gen Z relative to the broader employed population
- The fintech land-grab is now about becoming the primary account: Chime’s new Chime Prime membership — alongside deposit pushes from SoFi, Robinhood, and Block — is aimed squarely at converting a debit card into a main checking relationship
What It Means for Your Marketing
- Lead with trust, prove the tech: for Gen Z, security and reputation are the headline; the app is the demo
- Defend the primary relationship: Neobanks are converting satisfaction into deposits through membership and rewards hooks — incumbents that let a Gen Z customer treat them as a secondary account are one Chime Prime offer away from losing the relationship
- Meet them where the decision happens: Neobank-leaning consumers are heavy daily app users and notice financial advertising on social — a different media mix than the mailbox-first plan that still works for older segments
- Don’t write off the branch: Gen Z still values human help for big financial decisions; the winning model pairs a credible brand and a real-world presence with a competitive digital offering
Education Loans are Heating Up!!!
- As we near the halfway point of 2026, several product marketing trends are emerging, most notably in the Education Loans category where marketing spend is up 68% for direct mail and 32% for other channels compared to last year
- YTD Ed Refi mail volume is up 51% compared to the same period last year according to Epic’s analysis of Mintel Comperemedia data; while the increase is sizable, the market still has not adjusted back to pre-Covid / pre-federal student loan pause levels, as we’ve previously noted
- Private student loan competition appears to be heating up fast this year, with Mintel Comperemedia data suggesting that lenders mailed 7.8 million pieces through April, a roughly 1.6X increase over the same period last year
- The same data suggests Sallie Mae is driving the largest increase, dropping an impressive 5.7 million pieces across January through April this year, with 4.4 million of those pieces hitting homes in April alone. In 2025, Sallie had mailed just 323,000 total pieces in the first four months of the year
- The student lending market is expected to expand dramatically this year following the federal government’s trimming of several notable student borrowing programs, such as for graduate students. We can already see lenders like Sallie tapping into this market
- While we’re still trying to figure out what a stablecoin is, cumulative crypto card payment volumes have reached a record $7.8 billion with monthly volumes up 230% in the past year
- Fueling the growth is the growing access to stablecoins as a payment rail through crypto cards
- Visa is capturing 90% of onchain card transactions through partnerships with companies like Juniper Global
- Amid the wave of the rapid shift from traditional search to AI based inquiry, the AI Compass recently published an independent index that measures how readable consumer finance brands are to AI research and comparison agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini
- The index scores each brand factoring in “crawlability, structured data, content depth, and conversational clarity” (more on the methodology here)
- They rank numerous categories, but here is a sample ranking of “Top 10 Banks” and “Super Regionals”
Buy/Sell/Hold
Where we’d put our marketing dollars this month: the (trading) desk view of consumer credit
- BUY Home equity / HELOC acquisition: demand has finally caught up to the equity sitting in homes, and omni-channel spend hit record levels in 2025 — plenty of runway left before the channel is crowded.
- BUY Premium travel share-of-voice: lifestyle-led messaging keeps climbing and the affluent segment is still under-solicited relative to its value — pay up to own it.
- SELL Rate-led messaging: nobody brags about their credit card interest rate — with balances stubbornly rate-insensitive, low-APR hooks are buying attention you can't convert.
- SELL Standalone BNPL launches: one in four users say they regret a BNPL loan, and the 2026 story is consolidation and credit reporting, not another new logo in the checkout flow.
- HOLD Aggregators: strategy is in flux as AI chat eats top-of-funnel search — the model is repricing in real time; wait for the dust to settle before shifting budget.
Thank you for reading.
Jim Stewart and Ben Brake
www.epicresearch.net
The Epic Report is published monthly, with the next issue in July
Do you have a question about this issue or a suggestion about a future Epic Report topic? Please email me with your comments and suggestions on future topics or to have someone added to our distribution list
Epic Research is a marketing company that helps our financial services clients acquire new customers via organic growth. Reach out if we can help you achieve world class results!