In the News

Cornerstone Advisors covers banking strategy, technology adoption, and operational performance. It also publishes industry research that informs strategic planning across both banks and credit unions. For an institution planning a digital initiative or evaluating market opportunities, that peer context turns raw findings into a strategic narrative – useful when a board wants to know not just the score but the standing.

Tony DeSanctis, a senior advisor at Cornerstone Advisors, said that Chime's marketing prowess was one of its greatest strengths. "Chime should be taught in university marketing classes until the end of days," DeSanctis said. "Chime is not a technology company. Chime is a marketing company. There is not a single product that Chime offers today that a financial institution couldn't have been offering the whole time. Chime just said the words better."

Report highlights how modern core capabilities can streamline onboarding, unlock real-time data and scale fintech partnerships.

In a year when artificial intelligence accelerated to turbo levels, executives and board members need to acknowledge some of the staggering growth and ambitions that industry innovators are demonstrating.

"Stablecoins will become a product of scale and interoperability," Tony DeSanctis, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker. "It is much more likely that a consortium of banks or payment processors will be the end state solution for stablecoins." Similar to Zelle for P2P payments, the ultimate stablecoin solutions will have to be mass adopted by the entire industry, according to DeSanctis.

Chris Miller, a managing director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker: "As embedded banking continues to gain traction, providers need to make it easy for fintechs, software companies, and other third parties to integrate financial products into their platforms."

Marketing infrastructure—which includes CRM and campaign platforms, analytics and attribution tools, and the integrations connecting them—rose from 11% of total marketing budgets in 2025 to 12% in 2026 per a Cornerstone Advisors study commissioned by Fintel Connect.

Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors, agreed, writing on LinkedIn: “Musk has a history of jumping the gun with product announcements and timelines. That pattern matters when you’re asking people to deposit real money somewhere.”

Research by Cornerstone Advisors commissioned by InvestiFi found 75% of Gen Z and millennial consumers are interested in investing directly from their checking accounts.

John Meyer, a managing director at Cornerstone Advisors, said, "Even simple AI tools like meeting notetakers need to be vetted to ensure the data is not stored in Europe or is used to train other call data, since many of the topics for internal credit union meetings involve member services or ways that the credit union might consider differentiating,"