Retail Banking’s Next Growth Opportunity Is Hiding in Plain Sight
By Chris Boland, co-founder and CFO of Boathouse
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For decades, retail banks have measured customer value by looking at some combination of deposits and assets under management. It made sense when affluent banking was built around serving established wealth. Today, it’s becoming a less reliable indicator of future growth.
Many institutions already know which customers are likely to become their most valuable relationships. They can see rising incomes, growing financial complexity, business ownership and major life events unfolding in real time. Yet too often, those customers receive the same experience as everyone else until they cross an arbitrary wealth threshold.
Key insight: The banks pulling ahead are changing the way they define value. They’re investing in relationships before wealth fully materializes, not after.
The next competitive advantage won’t come from finding different customers. It will come from recognizing the long-term value of the customers many banks already serve.
Need to Know:
• Current balances don’t always identify the strongest long-term relationships. Financial trajectory increasingly matters as much as current assets.
• Bank of America, PNC and Huntington have all shifted relationship strategies earlier in the customer journey, providing useful models for the broader industry.
• Regional banks already possess one of the industry’s greatest advantages: a deeper understanding of their customers and local markets.
• Growth comes from connecting banking, lending, wealth management and advice into one coordinated relationship, not managing each business independently.
• Banks that recognize future value earlier will be better positioned to deepen relationships before competitors do.
Banks Are Looking at the Wrong Scorecard
Ask most banking executives how they identify affluent customers and the answer usually starts with one metric: assets under management, inclusive of bank deposits.
It’s easy to understand why. Deposits and investments are measurable, objective and easy to segment. The problem is that they’re also backward-looking.
Consider two customers. One is recently retired with a substantial investment portfolio that’s unlikely to change significantly over the next decade. The other is a physician entering peak earning years, an executive whose compensation increasingly comes through equity, or a business owner preparing for an eventual sale. Today’s balances may favor the retiree. Tomorrow’s relationship value may look very different.
Many banks still treat those customers accordingly. That’s where the opportunity is quietly being missed.
Key insight: Banks have become exceptionally good at measuring what customers own today. They’re far less effective at recognizing what those customers are becoming. The data isn’t missing. Income trends, borrowing behavior, commercial relationships and life events already provide powerful indicators of future value.
Why it matters: Customers rarely move all of their financial relationships at once. Trust is built over time. Banks that engage customers while wealth is still being created have a far greater chance of becoming the primary relationship.
Actions for Banking Leaders
• Expand segmentation beyond deposits and investment assets to include income trajectory, profession and anticipated liquidity events.
• Identify customers with significant assets held away.
• Measure future household value alongside current balances.
• Introduce advisory relationships before traditional affluent banking thresholds.
Bottom line: The most valuable customer isn’t always the one with the largest portfolio today. It’s often the one whose financial future is changing the fastest.
Bank of America Proved That Customer Relationships Create More Value Than Product Relationships
It’s easy to look at Bank of America and conclude that its success comes down to scale. Bigger balance sheet. Bigger brand. More products. That misses the bigger story.
What Bank of America has built is an organization that treats banking, lending and wealth management as parts of a single customer relationship instead of separate businesses competing for the same client. Customers don’t experience their financial lives in silos, and increasingly they expect their bank not to either.
That philosophy has translated into measurable results. According to Bank of America’s 2024 Annual Report, Global Wealth & Investment Management ended the year with approximately $4.3 trillion in client balances, while more than 60% of wealth management clients also maintain banking relationships with the company. Those numbers reflect more than successful cross-selling. They suggest customers see value in consolidating more of their financial lives with one institution.
Another figure is equally telling. More than 72% of new Merrill wealth households added during 2024 entered with at least $500,000 in assets. The bank isn’t waiting until customers become ultra-high-net-worth before investing in the relationship. It’s engaging them while they’re still building wealth and creating opportunities to deepen that relationship over time.
Key insight: The real advantage isn’t offering more products. It’s making every part of the bank work together to strengthen a single customer relationship.
Actions for Banking Leaders
• Evaluate customer value across the entire household, not individual product lines.
• Align incentives across retail banking, commercial banking and wealth management.
• Identify customers whose financial lives are becoming more complex before they meet traditional affluent thresholds.
• Measure relationship growth alongside product performance.
Bottom line: Bank of America’s competitive advantage isn’t scale alone. It’s a business model designed around the customer instead of the organization.
Regional Banks Already Know More Than They Think. Will They Act on It?
Regional banks often frame the competitive challenge the wrong way. They compare themselves to national institutions with larger technology budgets, broader product portfolios and greater scale. Those differences are real, but they also distract from one of the advantages regional banks already possess.
In many communities, regional banks understand their customers at a level that’s difficult to replicate. They finance local businesses, know the employers shaping the regional economy and often recognize important financial milestones long before they show up in a portfolio statement. A commercial banker may know a business owner is preparing for a sale. A lender may see borrowing patterns changing. A wealth advisor may recognize assets beginning to move.
Viewed separately, those interactions seem routine. Together, they paint a remarkably accurate picture of future relationship value.
That’s where too many institutions fall short. The issue isn’t access to better customer intelligence. It’s that valuable information remains fragmented across different teams, making it difficult to identify high-potential relationships early enough to act.
For regional banks to really be competitive, their major advantage becomes connecting the knowledge they already have and using it to build relationships before competitors recognize the opportunity.
Key insight: The competitive advantage isn’t collecting more customer data. It’s turning existing customer knowledge into coordinated action across the bank.
Actions for Banking Leaders
• Create stronger collaboration between retail banking, commercial banking and wealth management.
• Reward household growth instead of individual product performance.
• Combine local market insight with customer analytics when identifying emerging affluent households.
• Remove organizational barriers that delay proactive outreach to high-potential clients.
Bottom line: The strongest competitive advantage many regional banks have isn’t scale. It’s a deeper understanding of their customers. The winners will be the institutions that organize around that advantage.
PNC and Huntington Are Investing Earlier in the Customer Relationship
One of the biggest shifts happening in retail banking has nothing to do with products or technology. It’s about timing.
For years, many institutions treated affluent banking as something customers earned after accumulating enough assets. PNC and Huntington have taken a different view. Both have recognized that the most valuable relationships are often established years before customers meet traditional private banking thresholds.
PNC’s Premier Banking strategy reflects that philosophy. By extending dedicated relationship support and broader financial guidance earlier in the customer journey, the bank is building loyalty while customers are still accumulating wealth instead of waiting until they’ve already done so.
Huntington has approached the challenge from a slightly different angle, bringing banking, lending, trust and investment capabilities together into a more coordinated experience. Customers aren’t looking for separate financial relationships. They want one institution that understands the full picture.
Neither strategy is really about expanding product offerings. It’s about recognizing that financial complexity often arrives long before traditional wealth milestones.
Key insight: The strongest affluent banking relationships begin years before customers qualify for private banking. The institutions that engage earlier are far more likely to become the primary financial relationship.
Actions for Banking Leaders
• Re-evaluate whether affluent banking programs begin too late in the customer lifecycle.
• Build service models around financial complexity instead of asset thresholds alone.
• Create a coordinated customer experience across banking, lending and wealth management.
• Measure relationship growth over time instead of focusing exclusively on assets gathered.
Bottom line: PNC and Huntington demonstrate that the race for affluent customers isn’t won after wealth is created. It’s won while wealth is still being built.
Banks Don’t Need Better Data. They Need a Better Definition of Customer Value
Retail banking has spent years searching for new sources of growth through products, technology and customer acquisition. Those investments remain important, but they overlook a much simpler opportunity.
Most banks already serve customers whose financial lives are changing in meaningful ways. Business owners preparing for liquidity events. Professionals entering their highest-earning years. Families with increasingly complex financial needs. The question isn’t whether those customers exist. It’s whether banks recognize their long-term value early enough to build deeper relationships.
Bank of America has demonstrated the value of organizing around the entire customer relationship. PNC and Huntington have shown that affluent banking begins well before traditional wealth thresholds. Regional banks have something many larger institutions don’t: a deep understanding of the communities and customers they serve.
Taken together, those examples point to a broader shift taking place across the industry.
Banks that continue defining customer value primarily through today’s balances will always be reacting to wealth after it’s been created. Banks that begin organizing around future relationship potential have an opportunity to build stronger, more profitable relationships long before competitors recognize what’s happening.
Next Steps
• Re-evaluate whether current segmentation models identify existing wealth or future growth potential.
• Connect customer intelligence across retail banking, commercial banking, lending and wealth management.
• Identify customers whose financial lives are becoming more complex before traditional affluent thresholds are reached.
• Measure success through long-term household growth, relationship depth and customer lifetime value.
Final bottom line: Retail banking’s next growth opportunity isn’t hiding in a new market or a new product. It’s hiding in the way banks define customer value. The institutions that recognize potential earlier, organize around the customer and act before competitors do will be the ones that build the strongest relationships over the next decade.
