Banks and credit unions have spent years pouring money into digital banking, online advertising and customer acquisition. The numbers suggest they have gotten very good at getting people to the front door. Getting them through it is another matter.
For every digital checking account successfully opened, financial institutions are losing an average of 3.36 applications to abandonment, according to the 2026 Digital Banking Performance Metrics report from Cornerstone Advisors and Alkami. Digital account opening now represents 27% of all checking account openings, but the abandonment problem remains stubbornly high. For the average institution in the study, the gap represents close to 9,000 potential accounts a year that never make it through the process.
That should concern bank marketers just as much as click-through rates, lead costs and campaign attribution, because these are not people who ignored an ad. They showed enough interest to begin opening an account, and somewhere between that first click and a funded relationship, the institution lost them.
The financial impact becomes harder to ignore when acquisition costs are added to the equation. Curinos estimates the average cost to acquire a checking customer reached $559 in 2025, roughly double the level seen in 2018. In many cases, the marginal cost of acquiring the next customer can be much higher.
That means banks are paying more to generate interest at the same time a large share of those prospects are disappearing during onboarding. A campaign can look strong on a marketing dashboard, produce thousands of application starts and still deliver poor economics if too few of those applications turn into funded accounts.
Some of the friction happens before the application is submitted. Long forms, poor mobile design, broken prefill, repeated requests for information and identity verification problems all create opportunities for applicants to quit. But another major problem begins after the customer hits submit, when an application gets pushed into manual review and sits there waiting for a decision.
That delay matters more than it used to. Consumers can move quickly between competing banks, fintechs and credit unions, and someone who waits hours or days for an answer may simply open an account somewhere else. By that point, the marketing dollars have already been spent and the institution has already done the hard part of creating demand.
Digital Demand Is Growing Faster Than the Process Behind It
The industry does not appear to have a digital adoption problem. Cornerstone’s latest research shows mobile banking activation at 82%, while digital consumer loan applications have moved past 50% of total applications for the first time. Digital checking account opening has also continued to grow.
The problem is that many institutions have modernized the front end faster than the systems behind it. Websites look better, digital campaigns are more sophisticated and account-opening tools are easier to access, but many of the underlying approval, fraud and verification processes still depend heavily on manual review.
That disconnect is becoming more important as banks and credit unions increase their use of artificial intelligence. Much of the current conversation has centered on chatbots, virtual assistants, marketing content and customer service, but the larger financial opportunity may sit deeper inside the account-opening process.
AI and automated decisioning tools can be used to help verify identities, analyze documents, identify fraud, route applications and reduce the number of legitimate customers unnecessarily pushed into manual review. That does not mean removing people from the process entirely. It means using automation where it can reduce delays while maintaining the controls banks and regulators expect.
Fraud makes that balance increasingly difficult. Javelin Strategy & Research estimated U.S. new-account fraud losses reached $6.2 billion in 2024, while financial institutions are also dealing with synthetic identities, mule accounts and increasingly sophisticated attempts to bypass identity checks.
The challenge is stopping more fraud without creating so much friction that legitimate applicants abandon the process. Every false positive that sends a real customer into a lengthy review queue creates another opportunity for that customer to go somewhere else.
Existing Customers May Be Getting the Same Bad Experience
The issue becomes even harder to justify when the person applying is already a customer or credit union member.
Accenture has found that North American consumers hold roughly seven financial products, while fewer than half of those products are typically held with their primary institution. That leaves a significant cross-sell opportunity for banks and credit unions, but many still make existing customers go through nearly the same process as a first-time applicant.
A customer who has banked with an institution for years may still be asked to re-enter information already sitting in the core system, verify an identity that has previously been verified and move through the same fraud and onboarding workflow as a complete stranger.
From a marketing standpoint, that is a major disconnect. Banks have spent heavily on personalization, CRM systems and targeted offers, yet the account-opening process itself can remain surprisingly generic.
One useful measurement would be to compare completion rates for existing customers against those for new prospects applying for the same product. Existing customers should normally have an easier path. If they do not, that is a strong indication that unnecessary friction remains in the process.
Bank Marketers Need to Follow the Conversion All the Way Through
This is also a measurement problem.
Many marketing reports stop too early. They track impressions, clicks, landing-page conversions and application starts, but the real question is what happened after the application entered the institution’s system.
Marketers should know how many applications were completed, how many received an instant decision, how many went to manual review, how long those reviews took and how many ultimately became funded accounts.
Without that information, an acquisition campaign can appear successful even while a large percentage of the prospects it generated are being lost later in the funnel.
That distinction will become more important as financial institutions plan their 2027 marketing budgets. Spending more to generate applications makes little sense if the systems behind those campaigns cannot efficiently turn those applications into customers.
Cornerstone’s data shows that digital demand is already there. Consumers are willing to open accounts online and use digital banking products. The bigger opportunity may be improving what happens after they decide to apply.
For many banks and credit unions, the cheapest new customer may not come from another ad campaign. It may already be sitting inside the application queue.
