In Customer Relationships, Personas are Just the Starting Point, Not the Solution
By Nicole Volpe, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Under pressure to grow accounts, deposits, and revenue, community banks and credit unions often reach for familiar levers. They may buy more advertising or create new incentives for sales teams; they may chase rates or lower fees. These tactics can deliver gains, but they rarely deepen relationships. And in an environment in which primacy is hard-fought and fragile, acquisition without engagement creates diminishing returns.
Recent switching data reinforces the challenge. A 2025 Baringa survey found that 35% of U.S. and U.K. customers had switched banks in the previous five years, most often for better digital experiences. A 2024 Mintel report found that checking accounts had the highest switching rate among financial products, at 23%.
One barrier to deeper engagement is disconnected systems and data. In the same Baringa survey, 68% of banking executives said their existing technology architecture hinders their ability to meet customer needs. AI has raised the stakes: Deloitte’s 2026 Banking & Capital Markets Outlook warned against migrating “bad” data to AI platforms, citing uneven data readiness both across and within U.S. institutions.
What this means in practice is that community banks and credit unions can’t easily personalize the customer or member experience, optimizing their progress from one lifecycle phase to the next or from one product to another. Products may run on separate platforms. Sales and marketing teams may use different CRMs. From the accountholder’s perspective, onboarding messages, compliance notices, and product offers can feel as if they’re coming from multiple entities rather than one institution because, in operational terms, that is often the case.
Closing that gap requires more than better data or better personas. It requires a connected engagement system—one that uses what an institution knows about its accountholders to drive the right action at every stage of the relationship, from first outreach through long-term retention. Persona development is a critical starting point. But it is only a starting point.
Getting Started
Most community financial institutions have not developed an actionable set of personas, said Andy Fogle of ADVANTAGE, who works with financial institutions to drive growth and optimize data. And those that have often rely on a small handful of customer profiles built largely around demographics.
Stronger personas draw from a broader set of signals: engagement history, product usage, conversion behavior, channel preference, and other data that show how customers actually behave. They also need to be specific enough to support meaningful testing and targeting, and drive ongoing engagement. In many cases, that means building dozens of personas rather than a few broad types.
“The key is to connect the customer view to the institution’s strategic objectives,” said Fogle. “Persona segmentation tells you where you’ve been successful, where you haven’t been successful, and how you can be more successful.”
That shared customer view matters because banks and credit unions already have more than enough data to inform more relevant engagement. The problem is that the data often isn’t accessible in ways that usefully generate insight and action.
Without a shared view, different parts of the institution may act on conflicting signals. Consider a consumer at a car dealership whose credit union has sent them an auto loan offer but moments later blocks them from wiring money to the dealership to complete a purchase. The marketing signal says we know you’re shopping for a car. The compliance signal says we don’t understand what you’re trying to do.
A persona-based strategy begins to solve that problem by creating a common reference point across product, marketing, compliance, and other functions. It helps the institution define the “who.” The next step is executing the “what, when, how, and how often.”
Turning Personas Into a Growth Plan
With an actionable family of personas in hand, the institution can identify the segments most relevant to its current growth priorities and build an engagement strategy for each that spans acquisition, onboarding, and post-onboarding—not as one-off campaigns, but as ongoing, responsive outreach.
That means defining not just who the institution is trying to reach, but the behavior it wants to change—whether opening and funding a new account, setting up direct deposit, building balances, adding a second product, increasing card usage, or re-engaging after inactivity.
Before acquisition, personas can make outreach more relevant by helping the institution identify which prospects resemble its strongest existing relationships, which products should lead the conversation, and which messages are likely to resonate. They can also sharpen language. An institution promoting “free checks” or using an outdated term like “share draft account” may be talking past younger consumers who think in terms of spending accounts, debit cards, and instant payments.
During onboarding, personas help move the relationship beyond the initial account opening. That matters because the first year is when many new relationships are still fragile: According to CUNA Strategic Services, community banks and credit unions lose roughly 20% to 25% of new members within their first year despite spending an average of $442 to acquire each one.
Retaining an existing member, by contrast, costs only one-fifth to one-quarter of what it takes to win a new one.
After onboarding, the risk of attrition can be high. Consumers may not close an account when they leave; they may move debit activity and new money elsewhere while leaving a small balance behind. Behavioral triggers can catch these signals early: a drop in transaction frequency, a missed payroll deposit, a sudden shift in channel usage. Personas give those signals context, so the institution’s response is relevant rather than generic. A member whose digital activity is declining needs a different intervention than one who just added a second product.
The goal is to continue deepening the relationship. “It’s easy for an institution to fixate on account growth, but what about relationship growth beyond that? What about revenue growth or ensuring the relationship is profitable and sticky?” Fogle said.
Measuring What Matters
Measurement should reflect the same progression. Conversion metrics like clicks, applications, and initial account funding matter, but post-acquisition metrics signal the potential for primacy and lifetime value. That means tracking whether the relationship is moving forward through balance growth, direct-deposit adoption, retention, and revenue per relationship.
Over time, those results sharpen the personas themselves, improving future targeting and giving the institution a clearer view of which segments merit more attention and which tactics change behavior.
Each persona, in effect, embodies its own execution plan. For each priority segment, the institution can define the offer, message, channel, timing and trigger. The purpose is to make each interaction reflect the accountholder’s needs and wants, not the institution’s quarterly goals.
Just as personas give structure to initial outreach, they can guide the follow-through, ensuring each next interaction is relevant to the consumer. Personas can help institutions identify which relationships to pursue, which messages to deliver, and which actions to take next. But personas are only the foundation. Their value comes from what an institution builds on them: more relevant outreach, stronger engagement, deeper relationships, and more sustainable growth.
