In the News

Even with such a spotty track record, the pace at which new fintech relationships are forming is getting attention. According to Cornerstone Advisors, 57% of banks have already partnered with at least one fintech and 45% planned to move deeper into fintech relationships in 2026.

A Casap and Cornerstone Advisors survey found first-party fraud made up 36% of reported fraud in 2024. A year earlier, it was just 15%. Seed investor Primary puts the cost at over $100 billion a year. Cornerstone’s Ron Shevlin added a striking detail. More than a third of Americans say they’ve committed first-party fraud or know someone who has.

New research finds opportunities to improve members' finances while generating additional revenue.

Amazon's goals for Amazon Pay are partly why you won't likely see Apple Pay on Amazon anytime soon, said Tony DeSanctis, vice president at Cornerstone Advisors. "They're trying to generate revenue off of that by bringing smaller merchants into their ecosystem, and so they're actually doing exactly what Apple's doing. They're not going to embolden their own competitor, Apple Pay, by giving them all of that Amazon volume."

The report, “Monetizing the Mission: The Financial Lift Opportunity,” argues that institutions have focused too heavily on financial education and program participation without demonstrating improvements in consumers’ finances.

"The primary use case for stablecoins over the short and intermediate term will be for cross border and remittance payments," said Tony DeSanctis, vice president at Cornerstone Advisors. "Most other payment types have viable low-cost solutions that fill the need and address the use case, such as real-time payments, same day ACH and cards."

Cornerstone Advisors and Bloom Credit introduce 'financial lift,' a strategy to link consumer financial improvement to a $1.6 billion revenue opportunity for banks and credit unions.

The real contest isn’t just one agent against another over a single customer’s savings rate. It’s a battle for which side can scale to millions of negotiations the fastest.

Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors, pulled no punches in his Substack posting on what he believes Truist's board hopes to accomplish with the executive succession. "Lyons is coming into a $549 billion bank that has spent six years failing to deliver on the promises that justified the SunTrust/BB&T merger," Shevlin said.

Cornerstone Advisors found that credit union chatbot usage climbed from 3 percent in 2019 to 46 percent in 2026, and 59 percent of credit unions have now deployed generative AI in some capacity.