At this year's CRIC Conference, senior insights leaders from four of Canada's biggest banks sat down together to talk about the future of CX research in the banking sector during “How Banks are Advancing Insights to Drive Better Decisions and Client Outcomes.” The panel featured Julia Cipollone from Scotiabank, Andrew Hui from TD Bank, Erin Cohen from CIBC, and Tamsin Jackson from RBC.
These organizations compete for the same customers and the same talent every day. That's what made the session worth paying attention to. For an hour, four competitors set that aside to compare notes on what's actually working in their organizations customer insights functions, what isn't, and where the work is headed next.
We've sat across the table from individual banking clients on a lot of these same questions, so several of the panel's points landed close to home. Here's what stood out to me during the discussion, and where it lines up with what we've seen in our own financial services market research.
The Takeaway in Short:
At the CRIC Conference, four competing Canadian banks described their goals as broadening what their insights teams are responsible for and pulling together customer research, behavioral data, and market trends into recommendations business teams can act on rather than just reporting findings back. Another point they shared was that understanding why customers join and then stay or leave matters more than tracking whether they do.Banking isn’t a casual category, and neither is customer experience trivial in banking in general. People often start with a financial institution because of family, school, a first job, or a first credit card, and the relationship deepens over time through important moments like buying a home or starting a business. That history creates loyalty, but loyalty in banking is complicated. Some customers stay because they trust their bank, some because switching feels like a hassle, and some simply because no one's given them a reason to leave.
The panel's point was that banks can't stop at knowing whether customers are staying. They need to know why, and what would strengthen or weaken that relationship going forward.
That distinction showed up clearly in our own research. In a 2023 study of Gen Z banking customers, we found that nearly half chose their financial institution because of a parent's affiliation, and another 41 percent leaned on a recommendation from family or friends. At that age, loyalty isn't earned through a marketing campaign. It's inherited, and then it's either reinforced or lost based on what the bank does next.
This is where the digital-versus-human question gets real. The same study found that half of Gen Z customers still want to sit down with an actual person for financial advice, even though they're happy to handle transfers and bill payments on an app.
But it isn't a blanket preference for people over technology either. In the follow-up study, we found that more than a third would reconsider their bank over bad customer service, and roughly 1 in 6 were already turning to banking apps for financial guidance they weren't getting elsewhere.
That's the same tension the panel described: knowing when technology serves the relationship and when it's a person that actually builds it. There's no single right answer across every product or moment, and getting it wrong in either direction costs the bank something, whether that's efficiency or trust.
Across the panel, one theme was clear. Customer insights teams are being asked to do more than run studies or report on findings. They’re being asked to help business teams make decisions in a more complex environment, pulling together customer experience research, behavioral data, market trends, brand tracking, and journey mapping work into something a stakeholder can actually act on.
Large banks aren't usually short on research. What's harder is knowing what the organization already knows, what still holds true, and what needs a second look. A strong insights team earns its keep by answering three practical questions:
We've seen what happens when that discipline is missing, from the other direction. In our 2023 small business banking study, we found that banks had quietly become a less central source of information for their own customers, simply because business owners had more places to turn for help than they used to. As our CMO Stephan Sigaud put it when The Financial Brand featured the study, banks that wait for the customer to come to them are already behind.
That lesson isn't specific to small business. An insights function that only answers questions when asked isn't doing the job. It has to get ahead of what the business needs to know before anyone thinks to ask.
Strong customer experience research is only part of the job. In a large organization, insights need to be understood, trusted, and used by people who didn't run the study, which takes more than a solid methodology. It takes communication, relationship-building, and enough business judgment to know which finding matters to which stakeholder, and when.
That's the same argument Sigaud made alongside CX consultant Sean Albertson in a recent CMSWire piece on customer experience in banking. Their view was that banks succeed by balancing continued digital investment with genuinely personalized service delivery, not by picking one over the other.
That's an insights problem as much as a CX one. Someone has to know, with evidence, exactly where personalization needs to happen and where it doesn't matter as much. And someone has to make sure that finding reaches the people building the product and the staff talking to customers, not just a slide in an executive deck.
What stood out most about the session wasn't any single insight. It was that four competitors were willing to compare notes at all, and that in doing so, they landed on the same underlying point: understanding customers well enough to explain why they stay, not just confirming that they do, and making sure that understanding actually reaches the people building products and talking to customers.
We've watched that same pattern show up across our own banking and financial services work, closely enough that it keeps showing up in the data. Banks generally aren't short on information. They're short on insight leaders who can connect what they already know to the decision sitting in front of them right now, while keeping the customer at the center of it. That's where the real value gets created, in banking and everywhere else.
If your bank is trying to understand not just whether customers are staying, but why, and what would deepen that relationship, that's the kind of research we do every day. Contact us to talk about what a study like this could look like for your organization.
Recommended Resources: