In the News

In Cornerstone Advisors' 2026 Digital Banking Performance Metrics study, institutions reported 3.36 abandoned applications for every account opened online, a completion rate of 22.9% that stayed flat even as digital volume climbed. At the average institution in that sample, the gap works out to roughly 9,000 accounts a year that never opened.

The step customers stall on most often is the direct deposit switch, which also decides primacy, and Cornerstone Advisors finds institutions lose 3.36 digital applications for every one they complete.

The CIO’s 2027 mandate won’t be to buy more tech. It will be to make the tech stack make sense.

Most smaller banks don't want to launch a card because about 90% of the card market is concentrated in the top issuers, said Tony DeSanctis, vice president at Cornerstone Advisors. Scale is also an issue. "The smaller you are, the harder it is to get up to speed."

Authors of new Cornerstone research contend the key to understanding SoFi is to stop viewing its original student-loan business as simply another lending product. Student lending gave SoFi an entrée to younger consumers and created opportunities to subsequently sell checking, savings, personal loans, investments and mortgages.

Tony DeSanctis of Cornerstone Advisors captured the competitive environment well: “Agentic commerce is such a new area; everyone is going to have an opportunity to carve out a piece of that market and possibly even dominate it. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Stripe are all moving aggressively in the space.”

AI has changed where customers bank and gives FIs an unrivaled opportunity to build deeper client relationships than digital banking ever allowed. Yet, only 7% of banks and 17% of credit unions have deployed AI in some form, according to Cornerstone Advisors.

Community banks with identical growth strategies in similar markets often yield drastically different results due to limitations in their core processing systems, according to a report by Cornerstone Advisors, commissioned by bank tech provider DCI.

“The best candidate for the 529 reward card is not someone who is only funding their 529 account with credit card rewards,” says Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors, a banking consultancy. “It’s someone who has already made significant contributions and has significant funds in a 529 account. It’s a way to top it off."

2026 research from Cornerstone Advisors found that for every new digital checking account opened online, another 3.36 account openings are abandoned due to “identity verification friction and mid-flow device switching, where applications must be restarted.”