In the News

Catherine Wright, a consultant for Cornerstone Advisors, said recent research found internal productivity and knowledge-management tools are already helping employees work more efficiently.

Cornerstone Advisors research shows 45% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Z want investment tools built directly into the checking accounts they already use—and more than half say that experience beats a traditional account relationship on value alone.

Tony DeSanctis from Cornerstone Advisors lays it out plain: payments play a crucial role in the deposit game, and if banks don't step it up, fintechs who know the value of this niche are going to keep winning.

Cornerstone Advisors found that six in 10 Gen Z and millennial consumers say a checking account that reports rent and bill payments to the credit bureaus would provide better value than their current account.

Cornerstone Advisors’ 2026 Digital Banking Performance benchmark found that 3.36 digital checking applications were abandoned for every completed application. At the average institution, that represents nearly 9,000 potential accounts that never made it through the process.

To understand how financial institutions are responding, Casap partnered with Cornerstone Advisors to survey bank and credit union executives and found a system buckling under pressure in three key ways: institutions can't detect the fraud that's already happening, fraudsters face almost no consequences for trying and the tools being deployed weren't built for this sort of threat.​

"Expect the growth story to be driven by dollars, not borrowers," Joel Pruis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, said. "The real winner may not be the lender that books the most SBA loans, but the lender that leverages SBA guarantees to win larger, higher-value commercial relationships that previously fell outside the program's reach."

M&T Bank named a new head of AI engineering. This is a lot more important than you think—it’s a sign of a bank making a broad move from AI experimentation to AI transformation.

Cornerstone Advisors found that stablecoins are now a board-level or executive-level topic at 63% of US banks, up sharply since the GENIUS Act became law.

Tony DeSanctis from Cornerstone Advisors tracks the startling growth of active fintech debit cards, approximately with 66 million debit cards today active from six fintech companies, all of which have pay-over-time products. “There is a fundamental shift in how consumers bank,” he notes. “If you do not adapt, you die.”