Why Your Omnichannel Strategy Fails Before the First Campaign Runs
By Nicole Volpe
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Banks and credit unions have long pursued omnichannel banking as a way to bring continuity to an increasingly complex customer journey. The core idea is to enable accountholders to move frictionlessly among channels and touchpoints. But the larger promise is greater personalization, such that each accountholder experiences the institution as knowing and responding to them as an individual.
For many institutions, however, even the fundamentals of that vision have proven difficult to achieve.
Reality check: Recent evidence offers a sense of the work that’s still to be done. A 2025 retail banking survey by Baringa found that 68% of U.S. and U.K. banking executives said their technology architecture actively hindered their ability to serve customers effectively. Meanwhile, a 2026 Capgemini study found that just 41% of financial institution executives said they had a unified customer journey strategy, while 40% cited cross-channel fragmentation as the biggest barrier to providing an effective customer experience.
To be sure, many financial institutions continue to invest in more seamless customer journeys and more coordinated marketing execution across channels. But in doing so they may start in the wrong place — focusing on the tactics and technologies without first building institutional alignment. The Financial Brand unpacked this topic in a conversation with Ivan Peña, vice president of checking acquisition at ADVANTAGE. He discussed some of the blind spots and misconceptions that may cause well-intentioned omnichannel banking initiatives to underperform.
Blind Spot 1: Management Is Aligned
Alignment can be deceptive. What appears to be consensus on the goals of an omnichannel banking initiative may not stand up to the pressure of execution. A CEO might emphasize growth and win agreement across the leadership team, but the CFO may still execute with a bias toward profitability and the marketing lead may double down on their practice of acquiring the most accounts at the lowest unit cost. A financial institution might identify high-LTV relationships as its top priority, yet its budgets, incentives, and dashboards may all reward basic acquisition.
Key insight: In rooting out misalignment, the marketing budget is a good place to start, according to Peña. “Your budget is the single most important expression of commitment to any strategy,” he said. The resources allocated to acquire 1,000 accounts should reflect not just the cost of acquisition but also the larger outcomes the institution expects those accounts to produce.
Candid assessment of past initiatives can provide another diagnostic. Before launching a new growth effort, Peña advises examining why previous ones stalled: Were expectations unrealistic or ownership unclear? Did leadership lose confidence? Did the team lose confidence? If such issues are left unresolved, new initiatives are likely to crack along the same fault lines.
Blind Spot 2: Defining Success Too Narrowly
Managing an omnichannel strategy requires a willingness to evaluate performance holistically. Different channels lend themselves to different measures of activity and response, and the accountholders they reach may start from very different stages of relationship and engagement. As a result, once the institution has aligned around its larger objectives, it must translate them into a set of performance measures that capture the omnichannel strategy’s overall efficacy.
To measure an omnichannel strategy, financial institutions must shift from channel-specific metrics to a multilevel performance model, implemented before a campaign launches and aligned around shared goals. At the highest level, strategic indicators like net portfolio growth, LTV, primacy, and share of relationship can show whether acquisition is deepening relationships, not just adding accounts. At the next level, behavioral metrics can track actions and events such as cross-channel conversions, funding speed, debit activation, direct deposit setup, and bill pay adoption — which measure movement through and across funnel stages and track engagement. At the operational level, assessing individual channel health — measured, for example, by first-contact resolution, cost-per-interaction, or touchpoint satisfaction — should be considered across departments rather than in isolation. A channel can perform well against its own metrics while still creating friction elsewhere in the customer journey.
Key insight: “Just tracking new accounts, clicks, and impressions is not going to do it,” Peña said. “How long do they stick around? What are we doing with that acquisition once it comes in the door?” If the desired outcome is primacy, the first 90 days become a critical proving period, where the institution learns whether it is becoming embedded in the accountholder’s financial life, and those behaviors become a far more meaningful measure of whether an acquisition effort “worked.”
Blind Spot 3: More Channels = Better Experience
Too often, omnichannel becomes shorthand for broader distribution. Recognizing the member or customer at each touchpoint is a minimum requirement, but each successive interaction should also add value, both for the consumer and for the institution. A product campaign that delivers the same message across direct mail, paid search, and outdoor advertising adds reach, but without a coordinated role for each channel, it does little to move the customer forward in the journey.
Key insight: Peña calls this the “omnichannel shotgun,” aka “We’re going to put your ads everywhere.” Instead, he said, an institution should start by asking what role each channel should play in moving a particular journey forward. “Do you know how to use the right channels at the right time?” Different channels may be suited to discovery, consideration, onboarding, or service. Some market segments may favor one over another. The ideal mix may change as the relationship progresses.
Organizational silos also play a role. Many financial institutions retain legacy accountability and ownership models: marketing runs direct mail / paid search, the retail bank owns the branch, and the digital team owns the app. Each team has separate vendor contracts and budget goals, which can make coordinated orchestration harder.
Blind Spot 4: Personalization Isn’t Out of Reach
Large financial institutions increasingly derive competitive advantage from their ability to personalize at scale. They have invested heavily in the data infrastructure and tools needed to serve increasingly narrow audiences, recognizing behavioral signals and tailoring communications accordingly. “They are talking to everybody differently and uniquely,” Peña said. “And that’s what it takes to be successful in marketing.”
Smaller financial institutions are well aware they cannot match those investments; building the clean rooms and data-management platforms that reconcile information across silos can be resource-intensive. But they also tend to overlook the power of their in-house information stores, from core transaction data all the way up to local-market knowledge.
Such information can help make target personas more actionable, enabling an institution to move beyond simple demographics by adding in attributes such as product history, conversion behavior, and channel preference, Peña said. The personas can then function as execution plans, helping to identify viable segments, understand how to influence them, and design offers and messaging.
Key insight: When deployed as part of an omnichannel strategy, personalization must be seen as a continuous process. Every interaction generates new information about what triggers next-best actions for each individual and helps refine the original persona. The information used to acquire an accountholder can also shape how the institution onboards them. “If you’re sending vanilla emails after acquisition, then you’re breaking that personalization flow,” he said. The institution should preserve what it learns about why an individual responded and use that information to inform what comes next.
Bottom line: For many smaller institutions, undertaking a comprehensive data rationalization initiative is likely to feel like an expensive leap to take. Peña says these institutions can get a leg up by finding partners that have already invested in the data capabilities and expertise needed to put that information to work. Critically, he advises, bank and credit union strategy-makers must first get clear on their business goals: Know what “good” looks like before choosing infrastructure or partners.
Ultimately, omnichannel success is not about adding more channels or more technology. It starts with alignment around what the institution is trying to accomplish, how success will be measured and what should happen after an accountholder says yes. Get those pieces right, and technology can help connect and scale the experience. Without them, it may only amplify the disconnects already there.
