How to Build Customer Relationships When Checking Accounts No Longer Confer Primacy

The checking account used to mean everything. Win the checking relationship, win the customer. That account represented “primacy”—the foundation for deposits, payments and eventually lending.

That rather quaint and arcane worldview no longer holds up.

Need to Know:

• Checking primacy is no longer a lock, as customers increasingly spread deposits and activity across multiple institutions. Loyalty is fragmented, not fixed.
• Payments are now the real battleground, because the bank that owns daily transactions earns the right to deeper relationships. Deposits follow convenience.
• “Soft churn” is accelerating, with customers opening new primary accounts without closing old ones, hiding primacy loss in plain sight. Traditional metrics miss the shift.
• AI is becoming the unlock for community institutions, enabling seamless experiences while freeing staff for higher-value relationship moments. Efficiency fuels connection.
• Primacy in 2026 belongs to institutions that win everyday financial behaviors and build trust for life’s biggest decisions. The goal is dominance in moments, not ownership forever.

According to JD Power’s annual retail banking satisfaction study, 69% of bank customers now have deposit accounts at multiple financial institutions — a proportion that has been steadily increasing since 2024. On average, customers maintain two to three deposit accounts and one in five recently shifted money from their primary bank to pursue higher interest rates, better savings programs, or cash-back offers.

The fragmentation runs deeper than account counts suggest: Customers direct deposit into one institution, spend on another’s debit card, park savings in a third’s high-yield account and handle payments through a fourth. Most aren’t moving large sums (typically less than 30% of total deposits), but they’re diversifying nonetheless, quietly spreading relationships without closing accounts.

“Primacy is dead,” says Jim Perry, senior strategist at Market Insights, Inc. “Too many bankers continue to think about this through the old model — where we can gain a relationship and own it forever. The question shouldn’t be ‘are we the primary bank?’ but rather ‘for which moments, for which needs, for which behaviors are we going to be primary and for how long?'”

Where Primacy Actually Lives

The new battleground for primacy is the payment experience.

Bhavna Kaushal, a banking and payments consultant with Payments+Partnerships, argues that there’s a clear hierarchy in today’s banking relationships. “Their daily financial hub, for the most part, is through payments,” Kaushal says. “Whether it’s day-to-day payments that you’re making at merchants, whether it’s bill pay, whether it’s person-to-person, or card on file. Once you do that right and you do it seamlessly, you earn the right to the deposits, and then increasingly, the borrowing needs.”

This payments-first approach explains why direct deposit remains such a critical metric — but not for the reasons institutions traditionally assumed. JD Power data show that 83% of customers still have direct deposit set up on their primary checking account, but that share has been slowly declining since 2024. More revealing: among new checking accounts opened in recent months, half of customers committed to the new relationship by setting up direct deposit, even while keeping their old account open, according to Jennifer White, senior director at JD Power.

This is “soft churn”: customers opening new primary accounts while leaving old relationships dormant. JD Power found that 50% of new checking accounts are opened as soft churn, double the rate of hard churn where customers close their previous account. For many banks, this means they’re losing primacy without seeing defection in traditional metrics.

Christian Widhalm, chief executive officer at Bloom, a credit data infrastructure platform, has seen this dynamic play out in real time. Bloom offers a service that allows checking account holders to build credit history from their regular bill payments — rent, utilities, cell phone bills—without changing their behavior. Bloom discovered that customers weren’t just enrolling for the credit-building benefit; they were actively shifting their financial activity to maximize it.

“We were getting all these people reaching out saying, ‘I love this product, I’m trying to get my credit back up so I can go get a mortgage. But hey, I couldn’t find my electric bill,'” Widhalm says. “We end up going back to them and telling them, the reason you can’t find it is that you’re not paying it out of this account. They will then go and change their payment, transfer the money over and then start making those payments out of their Bloom connected account.”

The results were telling: Bloom saw an 11% increase in deposits within three months of enrollment and an 18% increase in recurring monthly payments, with customers consolidating their financial activity around the institution that provided the most value in their daily financial lives.

The Efficiency-to-Relationship Conversion

Winning payments-based primacy requires two things community institutions have traditionally struggled with: seamless digital experiences and sufficient staff capacity to deepen relationships when it matters. Increasingly, AI is solving both problems at once.

When Busey Bank acquired a $7 billion institution in 2024, adding 30,000 new customers, it deployed Glia’s voice AI platform to handle routine inquiries while preserving human advisors for complex interactions. Glia’s virtual assistants handled 61.5% of calls and automated post-call work reduced wrap-up time by 50%. Busey absorbed the entire customer base without adding headcount.

The bank used those efficiency gains to shift frontline staff into relationship-building roles, promoting two customer care advisors to strategic support roles and plans to upskill more team members for treasury and commercial positions.

“The more interactions we can handle without human support, the more we can repurpose employees for higher impact,” says Caitlin Drake, senior vice president and director of customer experience and support at Busey.

Dan Michaeli, chief executive officer at Glia, sees this pattern across community institutions deploying AI. “The differentiation that community and regional banks have to achieve primacy is currently hampered by their cost structure,” Michaeli says. “AI is a complete unlock. If you have an AI workforce that’s built for banking, you have the opportunity to completely transform how the institution can deepen that advantage of relationship, deepen that connection to the member or customer.”

Product Architecture for Primacy

The checking account alone won’t create primacy, but a multi-product strategy anchored in daily financial behaviors can.

Citadel Credit Union launched Ultimate Growth Checking (UGC) in March 2025, a relationship-based account that automatically adjusts rewards based on member behavior. Rather than requiring members to manually qualify for different tiers, the account uses AI to monitor engagement and adjust benefits accordingly. Members who add products—credit cards, loans, higher deposit balances—receive boosted rewards across their entire relationship.

Citadel opened more than 22,000 UGC accounts in the first year after launch, representing approximately 20% of the credit union’s total deposits. Further, the product achieved a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 91.

This approach recognizes a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. JD Power data show that when customers open new accounts, they most often seek better budgeting and organization tools, followed by promotional offers and life-event support. Younger customers, particularly Gen Z, are especially driven by life events and circumstances that require new financial infrastructure.

“Gen Z wants advice-based relationships and digital convenience,” says Courtney Rowan, senior vice president and chief digital and transformation officer at Citadel Credit Union. “They’re not going to wait for annual rewards. They need that engagement more frequently.”

The Community Advantage

Despite the challenges community banks and credit unions face in competing with fintechs and large banks on technology and scale, they maintain one structural advantage that’s becoming increasingly valuable as digital experiences commoditize: local trust.

Kaushal argues that community institutions serve customers who place higher emphasis on community and local relevance. “There is going to be a dominant relationship,” she says. “What you want to do is build to be that dominant relationship and build the moat around it.”

That moat isn’t product features alone — it’s the combination of digital convenience and human connection that fintechs can’t replicate. The rise of AI-generated content, deepfakes and digital fraud has created an environment in which authentic human relationships command premium value. Community institutions that can match fintech convenience while maintaining local presence are positioned to win the moments that matter most: complex lending decisions, life event planning, financial stress and trust-dependent transactions.

Today’s primacy playbook is about being the dominant relationship for the financial moments that shape people’s lives — and using payments, product design and operational efficiency to earn that position every day.

The genie isn’t going back in the bottle. But community institutions that understand where primacy lives in 2026 don’t necessarily need it to.