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Cornerstone Advisors study reveals compliance bottlenecks stall campaigns weeks after customer opportunities close.

"Amex is playing a bit of catch up here on small-business card features and functionality, certainly relative to these fintechs," according to Tony DeSanctis, vice president at Cornerstone Advisors. "Amex has the scale and resources to compete if it executes."

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.