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The data comes by way of Cornerstone Advisors, a consultancy that works with banks and other financial services institutions. The firm surveyed 3,001 adult consumers in the US in 2020, 2022 and 2023, as well as 545 small American businesses in 2023.

Proposals to require financial service providers to exclude payment processing fees from the sales tax portion of a card payment would bring higher costs for everyone but the largest merchants, according to CUNA-commissioned research from Cornerstone Advisors.

A report from Cornerstone Advisors estimates that 500 community banks and credit unions in the US are making multi-million investments into fintech startups.

About 75% of SMBs want digital deposit account opening, as do nearly two-thirds of moderate-complexity SMBs, according to the consulting firm Cornerstone Advisors.

Last month, the Florida Credit Union Association and the Credit Union National Association highlighted a Cornerstone Advisors study outlining the drawbacks of implementing such legislation in Florida and nationwide.

“We’ll continue to see a rise in digital spend from high-performing financial institutions,” says Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors. “In particular, 2024 will see a significant increase on machine learning as FIs experiment with Generative AI use cases and conversational AI tools.”

In 2022, a Cornerstone Advisors survey found that fintech was for the first time the “primary driver of growth” for financial institutions. But more than half of all financial institutions have no personnel dedicated to financial partnerships, said Ron Shevlin, Cornerstone's chief research officer.

Two-thirds of millennials have at least one credit card, a Cornerstone Advisors report shows, and 40% have two or more. The average college student has more than $3,280 of credit card debt.

The 2023 Digital Banking Performance Metrics Report by Cornerstone Advisors states: “It’s no accident or coincidence that the highest performing financial institutions are the most aggressively investing in emerging technologies.”

Training is an area of CU operations that could be affected by technology, especially generative AI, says Sandeep Balan at Cornerstone Advisors. “In the meta world, there could be avatar trainers, integrating humans and ChatGPT, to provide flexible, individualized learning that’s available any time."