How the Race for Better Training Will Determine Your Bank’s Future
By John Findlay, CEO & Co-Founder of LemonadeLXP
Simple Subscribe
Subscribe Now!
Banking executives doubt their frontline and channel staff can recommend the right product to the right customer. Yet after spending hundreds of dollars to acquire each depositor, banks and credit unions depend on those same employees to deepen the relationship.
The average retail banking consumer holds deposit accounts at three institutions, making it easy to shift money without opening a new account.
Key insight: Annual workshops, static courses, and manager-led role-playing may produce passing quiz scores without the practice needed to personalize guidance at scale. Technology is making that practice easier to deliver — and turning training into a competitive lever for deposits.
Need to Know:
- Deposit growth is a top priority: 92% of banking executives are focused on growing their existing customer base, and 82% on increasing retail deposits.
- Customers hold accounts at three institutions on average, and 20% recently moved money away from their primary institution.
- Financial well-being affects retention: 37% of consumers cite a lack of help improving their financial well-being as a reason to switch providers.
- The frontline is not ready: 71% of banking executives doubt their staff can recommend the right product to the right customer.
- As institutions race to become depositors’ financial home, better training can turn employees into helpful advisors — and build more durable deposit relationships.
Growing Competition for Deposits
Deposit growth is near the top of banks’ agendas. According to CSI’s 2026 Banking Priorities report, 92% of banking executives say they are focused on growing their existing customer base, while 82% are focused on increasing retail deposits. Jack Henry’s Strategy Benchmark survey reached a similar conclusion early this year: 64% of banks identified deposit growth as their top objective.
According to CSI, the average cash incentive for a new checking account has reached $277, before media, advertising, interest expense, staff time, and onboarding costs.
Gallup found that fully engaged customers generate $402 more in annual revenue for their primary bank, hold 1.14 more product categories, and keep 10% more of their deposits there.
Key insight: Banks therefore pay $277 merely to enter a three-way race for balances; without deeper engagement, they absorb the incentive while risking forfeiture of those greater gains. Why? Because depositors are increasingly leaving their current bank behind.
New and Core Deposit Attrition
Some 20% of depositors had moved money away from their primary institution during the prior three months of 2026, according to bank customers surveyed by J.D. Power for its 2026 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study. (The same study reports customers hold accounts at three institutions on average.)
That was up from 17% in 2025. The customers most likely to have moved money were those under age 40 (23%), those in the affluent/mass affluent wealth bracket (25%), and those who were financially healthy (24%).
“The risk is not immediate attrition,” said Jennifer White, senior director of financial services intelligence at J.D. Power. “It’s gradual erosion of share of wallet.”
That raises two questions for banking executives: Can we make great service a reality across every channel? And do employees in each customer-facing role understand the institution’s products well enough to guide each customer to the right one?
In a recent webinar poll conducted by The Financial Brand, 71% of banking executives doubted that their frontline and channel staff could recommend the right product to the right customer. The remaining 29% were fairly sure; none said they would put money on it.
J.D. Power reported that banks treating routine experiences (alerts, funds transfers, fees, and face-to-face interactions) as opportunities to reinforce clarity and confidence “consistently drive the highest levels of overall satisfaction.” Yet the firm also found signs of “soft switching” as satisfaction with personal service interactions declined over the previous 12 months.
MX found that 78% of consumers wanted financial advice from their bank, yet only 28% received it. In digital channels, the gap was 58% versus 12%. Separately, 37% cited a “lack of help improving my financial well-being” as a reason to switch providers.
The challenge: Many institutions, however, feel they have tried everything. Annual workshops and static courses can deliver information but not necessarily the practice required to personalize guidance in the moment. Manager-led role-playing provides that practice but is difficult to scale.
What kind of training can do both?
Scale Is About More Than Size
The harder challenge is preparing employees to deliver guidance across every customer channel.
Curinos’ 2025 multi-channel study of 4,652 U.S. consumers found that only one in five affluent customers felt their in-person banker knew them. Just 25% of customers used their bank’s digital advice tools, and customers overall were 2.2 times more likely to seek financial advice elsewhere.
Most banking no longer happens in branches, so every team that interacts with depositors must be prepared to provide guidance.
Key insight: Contact center employees need to recognize opportunities to discuss savings goals, and support agents should know when a different account better fits a customer’s needs. Every employee who interacts with account holders needs working knowledge of the institution’s tools, products and services so they can connect customers with resources that support financial well-being.
That fluency can deepen relationships and increase share of wallet. What practical changes would allow this kind of training across the institution and its channels?
Facing the Turnover Challenge
The first and most challenging hurdle to staff fluency is annual turnover. Teller turnover, for example, now approaches 30%, according to American Bankers Association data. Each departure forces an institution to rebuild product knowledge.
Institutions’ offerings and processes are also often expansive. Even tenured employees need reinforcement or even first-time orientation.
To preserve product knowledge despite turnover and fading recall, financial institutions can:
- Tailor training to each employee’s role, line of business and customer channel.
- Cover the breadth of the institution’s tools, products and services without overwhelming employees with information.
- Reinforce knowledge through strategically timed digital training rather than additional workshops or recurring cram sessions.
- Use AI to personalize and schedule reinforcement, resurfacing product knowledge and conversational skills before employees forget them.
- Give employees realistic customer scenarios they can repeat until they can confidently apply what they have learned, varying the customer’s personality, objections, questions and level of difficulty.
- Deliver immediate, individualized feedback at scale, including scores, transcripts, missed opportunities, and examples of how the employee could have responded more effectively.
Institutions can see staff gain acumen quickly, especially with new hires, and those shorter timelines provide executives the training business case they have been looking for.
Training Results Observed in the Business
Similar to the marketing platforms that now make it much more efficient to engage banking segments of the account base, training delivered on a digital platform with banking-safe AI allows training teams to serve internal audiences with the right content at the right time.
Studies by LemonadeLXP of regional and large community institutions have found that frontline staff build the same conversational skills within two weeks of onboarding that might otherwise take them six to twelve months to acquire. Data on where staff struggle, how they improve, and which approaches work best also lets managers train where it is needed most to improve the quality of guidance account holders receive.
Where does the rubber hit the road on business metrics? They see more relationship growth per account-holder interaction. The organization also does not miss its one chance at the one in five affluent customers who feel their in-person representative does not care to know them; this magnitude of missed opportunity carries significant risk or reward.
Bottom line: Banks and credit unions have long wanted to compete on service in a commoditized industry. Traditional training held them back because training methods were limited, reinforcement was scarce, realistic practice was hard to scale, and managers had little visibility into what employees retained. No efficient way existed to develop staff into the truly helpful advisors who influence which bank gets more of a customer’s money.
Account holders want their institutions to advance their financial wellness. That desire may now reshape the race for deposits as technology turns training from an operational requirement into a central deposit strategy.
