Banking Consumers Don’t Want Rewards, They Want Recognition
By Corey Wrinn, Managing Director at Rivel Banking Research
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“I’ve been with my bank for almost 15 years. They’re offering cash bonuses to anyone who opens a new account online right now. Why does a stranger matter more than someone who’s been here for years, with multiple accounts like I have?”
A participant said this in a Rivel Banking Research focus group not long ago, and it’s stuck with me since. It’s the kind of comment that sounds like a complaint about pricing. It isn’t. It’s a complaint about being unseen.
Key insight: Consumers have gotten used to being rewarded for sticking around. Airline status, hotel upgrades, retail perks—the longer you stay, the more a company signals that it notices. These same consumers then log into their bank app, where they’ve been for 15 years, only to be treated the same way as the ones who signed up last week. Promotional offers chase the new account, and cash bonuses chase the switcher. The person who’s kept their paycheck, mortgage and credit card at the same institution for a decade only gets a statement.
That is the recognition gap. Long-term customers create real value, but most banks give them very few signs that the relationship means anything more than it did on day one.
A few institutions are starting to notice this trend and testing what that recognition could look like. Chime rolled out “Chime Prime” this year, built around customers who make Chime their primary bank. PNC launched “TotalRewards,” a tiered structure tied to how deep a customer’s relationship runs across banking and investing. They are different products, but they point to the same shift: Relationship depth is starting to become visible to customers, not just measured behind the scenes
People Don’t Only Want Prizes
Airline and hotel programs work for a simple reason: Customers can track their own progress. They know their status, what they’ve earned and what’s next. Banking has never really offered that. Someone can deposit, add products, refer family and stay loyal for 20 years without ever seeing a signal that their business is appreciated.
What’s striking in our focus groups is how modest people’s expectations are. Nobody’s asking for a rewards catalog. The requests that come up repeatedly are basic:
- Recognition of how long they’ve been a customer — a simple note when someone reaches 5, 10 or 15 years
- Frontline familiarity — giving staff prompts to acknowledge longtime customers by name and relationship
- Personalized outreach — messages that reflect what product the customer already has, not just the next to sell
- Loyalty fee waivers — removing nuisance fees for customers who have stayed and grown with the institution
None of this is about rewards in the airline miles sense. It’s about being recognized as someone the institution actually knows.
Community Banks and Credit Unions Already Have a Recognition Advantage
They just haven’t packaged it. America First Credit Union is a useful example. Beyond the standard product line, it’s built a membership experience around local discounts and experiences that get more valuable as engagement grows. The underlying message—membership itself is worth something, separate from any single account. While this is not a cost-free endeavor, it’s something that ensures greater visibility into offering members a benefit they can’t get somewhere else, and rewards those who have been with the credit union over time.
This is what we hear directly from consumers too. After repeated focus groups, people describe loyalty in strikingly unglamorous terms. Nobody’s talking about airport lounges and exclusive perks. They want a few signs that they’re cared for and would lose something by jumping to another FI.
“It is wonderful to be recognized as a person rather than a number, and to be able to speak to a real person who is local, rather than a computer,” one California credit union member told us.
Another Florida bank customer put it more simply—her local branch’s tellers are “always friendly and welcoming and make a real effort to remember who we are.”
Key insight: That’s the pattern we keep running into. In a recent Rivel study among banking consumers who were content with their institution but not fully happy, 60% said they wanted a loyalty program that earned them perks. 90% said they wanted more acknowledgment that their institution appreciated them. That 30-point gap is the whole story. Consumers aren’t primarily asking for a rewards catalog—they’re asking to be seen. Tenure has built familiarity but not recognition on a regular basis.
That gap is the opportunity. Community institutions already have what people say they want, like a local face, a name the teller remembers, advice from someone who isn’t reading a script, a role in the community that’s visible outside the branch. The advantage isn’t missing—it just hasn’t been developed in a way that institutions can rely on it.
Consider a few other expanded options:
- Visible relationship status — showing customers where they stand, such as a preferred or primary banking relationship
- Relationship reviews — a simple annual check-in on what they have, what they pay and where the bank can help
- First-look access — giving existing customers early access to new products, rates, events or planning resources
- Referral recognition — thanking customers who bring family or friends to the institution, even in small ways
- Service continuity — helping longtime customers reach someone familiar instead of restarting the relationship every time
- Household recognition — acknowledging the broader family relationship, not just one account or one product
From a practical standpoint, institutions are spending more on trying to find new business instead of cultivating their current customer base. According to Ally Akins, Principal at Capital Performance Group, it should be a no-brainer:
“It’s far faster, cheaper and easier to grow deposits and loans with the customers a bank already has than to acquire new ones. But too many institutions treat that opportunity as simply a sales or cross-sell exercise, rather than what it actually requires—an ongoing communications and content strategy that shows existing customers the bank sees them and understands what they need next. That means moving beyond exclusively product-push messaging to content that reflects a customer’s actual financial life, needs and behaviors—not just what a bank is trying to sell them this quarter.”
Friction Is Not a Loyalty Strategy
For most of banking history, customers stayed put because switching was a hassle. Moving direct deposits, closing old accounts and updating autopay was difficult. That friction did the loyalty program’s job for free. It’s gone now. Someone can open a new account on their phone during a commercial break and have direct deposit rerouted by the weekend (sometimes automatically).
The question for banks is no longer, “How hard is it for someone to leave?” It now is, “Have we given them enough reasons to want to stay?”
Recognition is one of those reasons. It does not have to be elaborate. It just has to be visible enough that a longtime customer feels the relationship has actually meant something.
Bottom line: That is the real risk we’ve heard in the focus group comments we’ve collected in the past year. These customers are not always angry nor halfway out the door. But they are paying attention to how they’re treated relative to their other experiences. And what they want to know is simple—after all this time, has anyone noticed me?
