Three Things We’re Hearing
- Deposits: Demand Up, Marketing Down
- Home Equity Social Creative Trends
- Digital Channels Dominate
A four-minute read
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Deposit Demand is Rising while Marketing is Retreating
- Consumer interest in high yield savings keeps climbing even as the Fed cuts rates — search demand hit its highest level of the cycle in early 2026 while fed funds fell from 5.33% to 3.63%
Savings Demand Hits a Record as Rates Fall
- Marketing has not followed the demand — savings spend tracks the rate, not the customer
Marketing Spend Follows the Fed, Not the Consumer
- Based on current trends, we estimate a 20%+ decline in savings marketing spend in 2026
- Direct mail still carries over 60% of savings spend with what looks like experimentation in display, paid social, and online video
Direct Mail Still Carries Savings Acquisition
- Rate competition has sharpened —the leading online savings rates have long sat above the fed funds rate with a currently observed high of 4.21% versus the 3.63% fed rate
Leading Online Rates Now Beat Fed Funds
- Mailers are selling the relationship, not the account — bundled checking and savings offers are approaching 70% of savings acquisition mail
Bundled Offers Take Over Savings Mail
- Sign-on incentives are the headline in nearly every package
- Chase pays up to $900 for opening checking and savings together
- BMO leads with up to $2,000 in cash bonuses
- TD offers up to $1,400, tiered to balance — the top $1,000 savings bonus requires $100,000
- We had hypothesized that marketing spend was being diverted out of media and into these incentives — the data says otherwise
- Bundled offers cluster at $500 or less (68% of offers), with roughly 26% in the $750–$1,500 range, down from 33% in 2025
- Top of the market incentives have decreased with nothing above $3,000 since 2023, and the $1,500–$3,000 tier has nearly disappeared
Bundled Incentives are Coming Down from the Top
- Savings-only offers are far smaller and trending lower — 88% are $250 or less, and nothing above $500 has been observed in 2026
Savings-Only Offers Stay Under $250
- Why this matters: demand is at a cycle high, but competitors are cutting savings spend more than 20%, and the incentive arms race is cooling at the top — that combination is an unusual window to buy deposits at a lower acquisition cost, and the bank that leans in with a bundled checking and savings offer will face less mailbox competition than at any point since 2022
Home Equity Marketing: What Social Creative Tells Us
- Direct mail dominates Home Equity acquisition marketing, accounting for 91% of category marketing spend
- Home Equity is a higher-consideration product, and mail gives lenders the room to explain rates, benefits and use cases — and gives consumers time to weigh them
- Digital is a small share of spend, but usage varies by lender — Rocket and Figure lean into it more than most competitors, though mail still carries the majority of their spend
- Social creative is still a valuable window into competitive strategy — it shows how lenders create relevance in a channel where consumers aren't already shopping
- Four strategies stand out across the current social creative we reviewed
- Connect Home Equity to a specific consumer need
- Make rates and borrowing costs tangible
- Emphasize speed and simplicity
- Establish a clear point of differentiation
Lead With a Specific Consumer Need
- Many advertisers tie Home Equity to a specific financial need, not generic access to equity
- Debt consolidation leads — Figure highlights paying off higher-cost debt to cut monthly payments, and LendingTree and NerdWallet take a similar angle
- Figure also positions its HELOC as a way to tap equity without refinancing — compelling for homeowners protecting a low first-mortgage rate
- Takeaway: lead with the problem the consumer is trying to solve, not the product you're selling
Make Rate More Tangible
- Rate is everywhere in Home Equity creative — the strongest executions put it in context
- LendingTree turns a 6.20% APR into real dollars: a $100,000 loan at an estimated $517 per month
- Trovy contrasts its 6.24% variable APR with a 23% credit card APR, giving consumers an instant reference point
- Both offer a low-commitment next step — “Calculate Payment” and “Check Your Rate”
- Takeaway: give consumers context for the rate, whether in monthly dollars or against the cost of other borrowing
Sell Speed and Simplicity
- Some lenders sell the experience itself, attacking the perception that Home Equity is slow and complicated
- Aven's “Old Way vs. The Aven Way” pits weeks of paperwork and a 30–45 day close against a 100% online application, approvals in 15 minutes and funding in as few as three days
- Rocket promotes an automated valuation system that speeds up the loan process — a back-office improvement turned into a consumer-facing benefit
- Takeaway: reduce perceived friction, either across the whole experience or at one specific step
Find One Clear Point of Differentiation
- Most lenders promote similar themes, so one distinctive feature can break through
- Citizens leads with a cost differentiator — “$0 to open a Citizens HELOC” and “Most HELOCs come with fees. This one doesn't.”
- Aven brings a credit card proposition to Home Equity, promoting 3% cash back on its Home Equity Card — a HELOC accessed through a credit card
- Takeaway: give one differentiator prominent treatment, even when the creative carries several benefits
What Home Equity Marketers Can Take Away
- Start with the consumer, not the product
- Make the economics easy to understand
- Reduce perceived friction
- Give consumers something distinctive to remember
- Make a considered product easy to grasp quickly
- Why this matters: these principles come from social, but they apply equally to direct mail — the channel that still commands 91% of Home Equity acquisition spend
Digital Channels Dominate
The Mix is Moving, Not the Money
- Total spend across the top 10 financial advertisers is dead flat at $2.41 billion through July — the channel mix is what moved
- Direct mail fell 14% and display fell 38%, while paid social nearly doubled at +89%
- Online video slipped 4%, so this is a paid social story, not a digital story
- Mail dependence varies more than any other channel — Citi runs 98% of its spend through the mailbox, Rocket Mortgage 23%
- The big shifts all run the same direction — Bank of America cut mail from 86% to 53% of spend, Amex from 67% to 47%, U.S. Bank from 77% to 62%
- Bank of America is the most aggressive — paid social went from $3.6mm to $39.7mm and total spend rose 66%
- Two went the other way — Wells Fargo added 44% more mail dollars and SoFi 16%, both while growing total spend
- Rocket Mortgage is the outlier — mail went from $6mm to $41mm
- Why this matters: with total spend flat, every incremental social dollar came out of another channel — mail budgets are being reallocated, not cut, and the issuers adding mail are doing it while their competitors look away
- J.D. Power's 20th annual card satisfaction study ranked American Express first among issuers for the seventh straight year, ahead of Chase and Bank of America
- Satisfaction tracks the reward, not the issuer — annual-fee rewards cards run away with the study (Amex Platinum 720, Venture X 705, Sapphire Reserve 703) while basic no-rewards cards sit at 573 (satisfaction measured on a 1,000-point scale)
- X switched on X Money in late July including a avings account and a Visa debit card
- The headline is the savings rate — up to 6.00% APY, roughly 180 basis points above the best national high-yield savings account and nearly 16 times the national average
- The rate isn't free — 6.00% is gated behind an X Premium+ account costing $40 a month, with Premium ($8) eligible for the boosted rate on a qualifying direct deposit
- The X Card pays 3% cash back on eligible purchases with bank sponsor Cross River earning unregulated interchange of roughly 1.4%, less than half the 3% payout making the card subsidized, not funded
- Citi joined other premium card issuers such as Amex and Chase lifting the AAdvantage Executive card annual fee to $695 from $595, rebranding it the World Legend Mastercard
- $2,300 in claimed annual value includes new and richer credits: $500 with AA Vacations, $180 Lyft, $120 Avis/Budget, and $100 in inflight and Admirals Club credits
- Citi’s playbook follows those of their competition — Amex Platinum went to $895 from $695 against $3,500 in claimed value and Chase Sapphire Reserve raised their annual fee to $795 from $550 against $2,700 in claimed value
- Premium has become a credit-stacking arms race, and higher fees only hold if cardholders actually redeem them
Thank you for reading.
Jim Stewart and Ben Brake
www.epicresearch.net
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