How Citizens Bank Beats the Giants with Style, Smarts and Soul
By Justin Estes, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Executive Summary
- On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast recorded live at The Financial Brand Forum 2025, host Jim Marous spoke with Lamont Young about how his nontraditional path from fashion to finance brings a fresh, people-first leadership perspective.
- Citizens Bank thrives against national banking giants by embracing hyperlocal strategies and personalizing customer relationships.
- Investments in data, community presence and Gen Z engagement fuel growth through trust and contextual service.
From Fashion to Financial Services
Q: Your background isn’t in banking — how did you transition from fashion to financial services?
Young: Funny enough, my background’s not in banking. My background’s actually in fashion. So, when I finished undergrad, I moved to New York and actually worked for fashion brands for my first couple of years out of school.
The whole banking thing, candidly, Jim, is just sort of sheer dumb luck. I had the opportunity to do a startup early on in my career. I actually serviced some of the banks in the southeast. And when business got a bit soft, I joined Bank of America, focusing on their small business segment. And that’s literally how I got into banking.
Funny enough, I thought that would be a bridge job for me for a year or two. And it has evolved into a 17-year career in banking.
Q: What perspective does your non-traditional background bring to banking?
Young: It all starts off with people, banking is, whether we like it or not, it’s a people-based business. Whether digital or not, you are ultimately serving humans. Our CEO, Bruce Van Saun always talks about banking being a noble profession.
The fact is, when you remove all the statistics and financial reporting, what we help customers achieve on a day-to-day basis is their lifelong dreams. That young couple is going to buy their first home. Banks enable that experience to actually happen.
Citizens Bank’s Hyperlocal Strategy
Q: Can you explain your hyperlocal approach and how you’ve applied it in challenging markets like New York City?
Young: If you look at what we’ve done in New York City over the last couple of years, New York City is a microcosm of that hyperlocal strategy. There are a number of people who, a couple of years ago, thought we were insane for trying to be a regional bank in the New York market.
However, to your point, we treat New York like we do all our markets. We wanted to ensure that we became part of the communities we actually serve. We hired folks who were from those communities. We treated Brooklyn differently as a borough than we treated the Bronx. We treated the Bronx differently as a borough than we treated Queens.
And that hyper-local strategy has enabled us to establish a strong foothold in New York and build a robust brand presence in the world’s toughest market.
Turning Data Into Customer Intelligence
Q: How does Citizens Bank build that deeper knowledge base about customers beyond surface-level information?
Young: So, we’ve invested heavily over the last couple of years in data and analytics. Being able to gather publicly available information on our clients without being intrusive is one way we’ve made experiences feel that much better for our users.
For instance, a couple of years back, we tried to revamp the entire home equity experience. So, any of you who have gone through a traditional home equity process know that it is one of the most cumbersome processes you would go through.
And so, if home values are available and we can estimate the equity in a home, why should we have an application process that takes customers through the entire process, including understanding the loan-to-debt ratio for a home?
And so, we developed a process for ourselves that would have taken, on average, between 30 and 45 days. And now, our home equity fast line product: candidly, we can close most of our loans in 48 hours or less.
Fighting Silent Attrition
Q: What is silent attrition and how does Citizens Bank identify customers at risk?
Young: So, passive churn is a real sort of thing across all financial institutions, large and small. The challenge for institutions is to recognize the triggers that initiate the process of passive churn.
Most institutions would have told you, “Hey, if we can get customers in this sort of sticky products, if I can get you into a checking account and I can get you a direct deposit, if I can get you into bill pay,” these are all sticky services. Candidly, they’re really too difficult for customers to switch.
Today, I can switch my direct deposit in seconds and pay my bills in minutes. Those things that you would consider traditional, sticky, just aren’t there. We use some internal, complex algorithms to examine the propensity models of people who are likely to attrit.
Dig Deeper:
- What Gen Z Really Wants from Their Bank
- How Three Banking Organizations are Leaning into Payments to Power Growth
- How Do We Put ‘Community’ Back Into Community Banking?
Q: How has the nature of “sticky” banking products changed in the digital age?
Young: We use that information to sort of engage with those customers to understand how do we correct those behaviors that actually lead to that sort of passive churn before that passive churn actually happens. And in some cases, it is as simple as providing the customer with a value-added insight.
Something as simple as, “Hey, we see that you’ve got multiple transactions for the same service on your account, here’s how we can actually save you a buck.” However, I still return to the point: you’ve to get really highly contextual. So, great, you can cancel that, and you can save me $150 a year, but what does that $150 actually do? Can I invest that money over time?
Understanding Gen Z and Millennial Banking
Q: What has surprised you most about how Gen Z approaches banking and financial services?
Young: So, it’s funny enough, you read a lot about the fact that they are so likely to look for sources of financial information outside of the traditional banking ecosystem. That said, Gen Z will seek human-based advice, but it must be earned over time.
So, what I think has been really, really surprising for us is that they’re so much more open to listing than I think we give this generation actual credit for. And this is why I go back to our conservative strategy of saying, hey, if we can just give them a couple of clear nuggets of information, something that can actually help to start that trust over the course of time when their needs become more complex, we can be one of those places where they turn to directly.
Q: How do you build long-term relationships with customers who are comfortable with fragmented banking experiences?
Young: The other thing that’s very, very surprising is that amongst Gen Zs, they are what I consider the sort of entrepreneurial generation. There are so many members of this generation who are graduating from school, whether it’s high school or college.
More importantly, I tell him that over time, your needs are going to change. So, your needs as a ninth grader in high school were going to be different than his needs now as a 19-year-old in college. Your needs as a 22-year-old when you actually graduate are going to be completely different.
And this is where the notion of earning trust and building relationships with clients, especially Gen Z and millennials, is important, because you don’t get the benefit of having that sort of trust inherent right away.
The Future of Relationship Banking
Q: What excites you most about the future of banking?
Young: Uncertainty, if that is a thing that I could talk through. The uncertainty of waking up every day and understanding that the marketplace could change, new opportunities could come up, is, I think, the thing that sort of drives me, and it’s probably a very, very weird answer to what I think is a very straightforward question from you.
However, I actually enjoy the uncertainty of knowing that our industry is in such a moment, in the midst of a history of real flux. That uncertainty provides banks with opportunities that I don’t think banks took advantage of 20 years ago, even before I started in the industry.
I’ve jokingly said to a number of people that if banks were on their game, firms like PayPal wouldn’t exist. Square would not exist.
