The Measurement Gap: Bank Marketing Heading Into 2027
Banks and credit unions are spending more on marketing than they have in years, but most still can’t prove what that spending produces.
More investment, less evidence
The gap between marketing investment and marketing evidence is the defining problem for financial marketers heading into 2027. Independent research published in 2026 tells a consistent story.
Marketing spend rebounded at community and midsize banks in 2025, reversing several years of slow growth (Capital Performance Group / The Financial Brand). Proof hasn’t kept pace. Beyond the 31% who say they misattribute results, another 26% don’t know whether they do. AI raises the stakes further, because AI personalization depends on exactly the unified data most institutions lack.
Institutions don’t need more software in 2027. They need a measurement system that connects the tools they already own to the outcomes leadership cares about: funded accounts, loans, retention and relationship value.
This is a point-of-view paper, not a primary survey. It combines published 2025–2026 industry research from Cornerstone Advisors, Capital Performance Group, Gartner, Salesforce, ProSight Financial Association and Conductor with patterns Richardson Marketing sees in its work with banks and credit unions. Every figure is linked to its source. Field observations are marked as such and reflect client experience, not statistics. Scope: U.S. community banks, regional banks and credit unions, roughly $250M to $50B in assets.
More money, more scrutiny
Marketing budgets at financial institutions grew in 2025, and leadership now expects that money to show a return. Fintech bank holding companies spent more than three times the share of budget on marketing that traditional banks did (CPG / The Financial Brand). Credit unions between $500M and $4.9B in assets raised marketing spend 9.1% in 2025 (The Financial Brand).
Brand awareness share of bank marketing budgets
Brand awareness is the first line under review, and money moves during the year when an executive asks for it. When a new checking account costs $200 or more before a $277 bonus, every channel is expected to justify its share.
Marketers who can’t tie spend to funded accounts will lose budget arguments to those who can, regardless of which team is actually producing growth.
Most institutions are guessing
In a Cornerstone Advisors survey of 126 senior executives fielded in January and February 2026, not one institution said it could reliably trace results back to marketing for every outcome tested (The Financial Brand).
Source: Cornerstone Advisors, The Marketing ROI Gap in Banking, commissioned by Fintel Connect.
The same study found a mismatch between where money goes and what performs: paid search receives the most budget, while email delivers the strongest ROI. Most institutions still build next year’s budget from last year’s numbers.
This pressure isn’t unique to banking. Across industries, 63% of marketing leaders reported more pressure from CFOs in 2025, up from 52% the year before (2025 CMO Survey via MarTech). Bank marketers face that pressure with weaker measurement than most.
In Richardson Marketing’s engagements, the most common setup we find is last-click reporting in GA4, a separate report from the digital banking platform, and a monthly spreadsheet that reconciles neither. Paid search looks like the hero because it captures intent that email, direct mail and branch conversations created.
The CRM is where measurement breaks
Attribution fails mostly because customer data is scattered across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Nearly 60% of financial institutions say their CRM or core system limits their ability to track marketing ROI (Cornerstone Advisors).
In the institutions we work with, customer data typically sits in several separate systems:
Banks weren’t built to combine an email touch and an online ad into a single view of one customer, as one industry executive told The Financial Brand. It’s not a banking-only problem: only 26% of marketers across industries are completely satisfied with their data unification, and siloed data, poor data quality and privacy rules are the top three obstacles to personalization (Salesforce).
The GA4 migrations we audit usually track pageviews and button clicks, not application starts, submissions and funded accounts. When the website, the application vendor and the core each count a “conversion” differently, leadership sees three numbers and trusts none of them.
New tools on an old foundation
AI adoption in banking moved from experiment to deployment in 2025, but results depend on the data underneath. Generative AI is now live at 49% of banks and 59% of credit unions, up from 36% of credit unions a year earlier (Cornerstone Advisors; Finopotamus). Cornerstone frames 2026 as the year to operationalize it, not just try it.
Credit unions with generative AI deployed
The martech numbers show the same pattern of buying ahead of using:
| Martech indicator | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share of martech capability actually used | 49% | Gartner |
| Martech share of marketing budget, 2021 → 2026 | 26.6% → 19.4% | Gartner via Chief Marketer |
| CMOs planning to invest more in martech anyway | 62% | Gartner via Chief Marketer |
Fewer dollars are going to new tools, and teams are being asked to get more from the ones they have. Salesforce’s 2026 research names the root cause: AI can’t personalize for a customer it doesn’t actually know (Salesforce).
Automation programs we review are most often a welcome series and a monthly newsletter. Onboarding, cross-sell and win-back journeys stall because the triggers depend on product and lifecycle fields the CRM doesn’t reliably hold. The fix is rarely a new platform; it’s clean, current data flowing into the one already licensed.
The next measurement gap
AI assistants are becoming a new front door to banking, and almost no institution is measuring it yet. Conductor’s 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 13,770 domains, found a wide gap between how often AI answers appear and how often people click through (The Financial Brand).
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is likely the next budget line marketers will be asked to defend. Institutions that start tracking AI Overview presence and citation share now will have a baseline when that question comes.
Six fixes for 2027
These recommendations come from Richardson Marketing’s work with financial institutions, shaped by the research above. They are ordered deliberately: each one makes the next possible.
Write a measurement plan before buying anything
- Primary KPIs: funded accounts, funded loans, deposit dollars, households added
- Leading indicators: application starts, calculator use, rate-page visits, appointment requests
- Second-order outcomes: what else a new customer opened within 90 days
- One naming convention for campaigns, UTMs and events across GA4, CRM and automation
Rebuild GA4 around business outcomes
- Key events for application start, submission and (via offline import) funding
- Cross-domain tracking to online banking and loan application vendors
- Duplicate and legacy tags removed
- Web and app data streams in one property
- Reports that match finance, or a documented reason why they don’t
Unify customer data into one usable view
The CRM doesn’t need to be perfect; it needs to be trusted.
- De-duplicate contacts and resolve identities across core, digital banking and CRM
- Load current product holdings on a scheduled feed
- Add lifecycle stage and last-engagement fields automation can trigger on
- Assign an owner for data quality with a monthly review
Rebuild automation around the customer lifecycle
- Prospect nurture
- New account onboarding (first 90 days)
- Primary-relationship building
- Cross-sell triggered by holdings and behavior
- Retention and early-warning signals
- Win-back
Email already delivers the strongest ROI for most institutions, so better lifecycle email is usually the fastest return available.
Move attribution forward in phases
A · Channel cost & conversion
What does each channel cost per funded account?
Needs: Fix 1 KPIs, clean UTMs, monthly spend by channelB · Multi-touch & test/control
How do channels work together? What would have happened without the campaign?
Needs: Fixes 2–3, holdout groups on key campaignsC · Relationship-level value
Which customers and journeys produce lifetime value?
Needs: unified customer data, product profitabilityProtect the brand budget first, then run attribution on everything else. Measure brand on a fixed schedule with recall research and retention trends.
Give marketing operations an owner
Someone must own analytics configuration, tag governance, CRM data quality, automation logic and reporting. At smaller institutions that may be one person or a fractional partner. Without an owner, every tool drifts back into its own silo.
A 90-day plan for Q1 2027
Most institutions can make measurable progress in one quarter without new software.
Measurement plan
Agreed KPI list, conversion definitions and naming conventions, signed off by marketing and finance.
GA4 and tagging audit
Key events for application start, submit and funding; duplicate tags removed; cross-domain tracking fixed.
CRM data cleanup
De-duplicated contacts, product-holdings feed, lifecycle stage field.
Onboarding journey
One lifecycle journey rebuilt for new checking customers, with a holdout group.
Channel scorecard
Cost per funded account by channel, reported monthly to leadership.
AEO baseline
Top 20 acquisition queries run through AI assistants and AI Overviews, results logged.
By the end of the quarter, leadership should be able to see what a funded account costs by channel — the one number most institutions can’t produce today.
Build the system, not the stack
The research from 2026 points in one direction. Budgets are growing, scrutiny is rising, and AI is raising the bar for data quality. Yet most banks and credit unions still can’t reliably say which marketing works.
The institutions that win in 2027 won’t be the ones with the newest platforms. They’ll be the ones that define success clearly, connect the systems they already own and give someone responsibility for making it all work together.
With that foundation, campaigns become predictable, budgets become defensible and leadership sees marketing in the terms that matter: funded accounts, retention and growth.
Find your measurement gap
Richardson Marketing helps banks and credit unions build measurement, CRM and automation programs that connect marketing to results.
Talk to Richardson MarketingSources
- The Marketing ROI Gap in Banking — Cornerstone Advisors, commissioned by Fintel Connect, 2026
- Why ‘Brand Awareness’ Budgets Are Losing Ground to Provable Return — The Financial Brand, Aug. 10, 2026 (cites Cornerstone, ProSight, CPG, Conductor)
- Marketing Spend Benchmarks 2026 — Capital Performance Group / The Financial Brand, May 2026
- What’s Going On in Banking 2026 — Cornerstone Advisors, Jan. 29, 2026
- Cornerstone’s Annual ‘What’s Going On’ Report — Finopotamus, Feb. 2026
- Marketing Technology — Gartner (2025 Marketing Technology Survey)
- Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026 — Chief Marketer, June 2026
- State of Marketing 2026 — Salesforce, Feb. 2026
- 5 Hard Truths From the Tenth State of Marketing Report — Salesforce, Mar. 2026
- What Is Marketing Attribution? — MarTech, Sept. 2025 (cites the 2025 CMO Survey)
