How Digital Leaders Grow Revenues 5X Faster

13%.

That's how many banks and credit unions in this country are operating at the highest level of digital maturity, according to Alkami's latest retail banking digital maturity research. Of every 100 institutions, only 13 operate at that highest level — and those 13 grew average annual revenues at five times the rate of their less mature peers. Not 5% more. Five times more.

Here's what most banking executives misunderstand about those 13. They're not the largest institutions on the map. One third of them actually have less than $500 million in assets. Meanwhile, over 10% of the least digitally mature institutions have more than $5 billion in assets. In other words, digital maturity isn't correlated to size. It tracks with how an institution thinks. If your approach still treats digital maturity as a matter of how much you can spend, you're asking the wrong question.

The research breaks the industry into four segments. At the least mature end is Patiently Exploring. Then comes Innovation-Ready, then Digital-Forward, and at the most mature end, Data-First — the 13% I mentioned at the start.

Most executives watching this already know which bucket they're in. What matters more is that these segments are not static. In one year, Patiently Exploring decreased from 14% of the industry to only 7%, and half of that group advanced. Digital-Forward increased from 38% to 44%, while Data-First increased from 9% to 13%. Some of those institutions did not move only one level. They jumped two segments, sometimes three, in a single year. And some fell.

The segments describe where an institution sits now — not where it has to stay.

The definition of digital maturity has evolved, and most financial institutions have not kept pace. If you still think this is about your mobile app and your account opening flow, you're only measuring a fraction of what matters.

Three factors distinguish the most mature institutions from everyone else today, and only one of them directly involves consumers.

The first is fraud and cybersecurity posture. The most mature organizations build fraud prevention into every digital interaction from the very start. Almost all now offer real-time fraud alerts and active card controls, and most are educating their customers on fraud prevention during the onboarding process. Mature organizations address fraud at the very beginning of developing new capabilities — not after they're already in place. That timing is the whole difference.

The second factor is employee experience. The most digitally advanced institutions stopped treating user experience as a consumer-only issue. More than half of top-tier institutions say their employees have an above-average digital experience within the bank. Among the least mature, that number is only 2%. When your own staff can't operate systems efficiently, there's a limit to how good that customer experience can ever become.

The third factor is data activation, which is where the gap is widening the fastest due to generative AI. The most mature organizations use data to automatically deliver targeted offers in real time during a customer's digital experience. The least mature are still trying to break down data silos.

I can hear your pushback already. We lack the budget. We don't have the talent or the bandwidth. I've been in this industry for almost half a century, and I've heard every version of that since the beginning of my time in the industry. The institutions at the top of the maturity curve faced the same constraints as everyone else. They simply made different choices with what they had.

They set different priorities. They hired for different skill sets, and they chose different partners. They shifted their focus to the things that compound, and they stopped funding the things that didn't.

The real question is what it costs to stay where you are while your peers are moving forward. And as that gap widens, it stops being a growth question and starts becoming a survival question. This is what I covered in my recent Insight Video on Acquire or Be Acquired.

Before I continue, I want to make sure you have the actual research in front of you. Alkami and Emerald Research Group surveyed over 400 digital banking decision makers over two waves of this study. The full report breaks down what the leaders are doing differently. The download link is in the episode notes below.

So what does it really look like at an institution that's doing it right?

Quontic Bank was founded as a small community bank in New York in 2009. By 2019, the leadership team made a decision that most institutions are still hesitating to make. They fully committed to becoming a digital-first bank without sacrificing the customer-centered values they had as a community bank.

I had a chance to speak with Grace Pace, the Senior Vice President of Digital Banking. What stood out most to me was how clearly she could explain the reasons behind everything they had built. The technology was real, but the commitment came first.

Quontic is a modest-sized organization. They do not have a thousand engineers. What they have is focus, leadership, and a culture that puts the customer experience above everything else.

Look at what that focus produced. Account opening in roughly 3.5 minutes, with near-total automation of their entire Know Your Customer process running in the background. Over $150 million in net new deposits in 2024 alone through their digital account opening platform. Pre-filled cross-sell journeys for existing customers, allowing them to open a second account in seconds. And a back office where Grace's team works from a single dashboard instead of switching between five different systems.

Here's the part that matters for everyone watching. The tools Quontic used are available to every single bank and credit union in the country. They are partner tools, not proprietary builds. What Quontic has is a leadership team committed to using them well and getting out of the way.

They got out ahead while a lot of the industry is still debating whether digital is a real strategy. That commitment is available to every institution, regardless of asset size.

If you lead a financial institution, here's what you have to do Monday morning.

First, identify which of the four segments you're actually in. Not the segment your marketing materials claim you're in, or the one your last vendor demo suggested. What's the honest answer, and where does that put you? You can't improve what you haven't truly measured.

Second, use the assessment in the link below to identify the component you need to fix now. Then decide on the specific part of that component you're committed to changing — whether that's fraud posture, employee experience, or data activation. Most leaders already know the answer to that question. The hardest part is admitting it and doing something about it.

Third, decide what you're going to move on in the next 90 days. Not the next year or five years. The next 90 days. The institutions already ahead are not waiting for you, and they are widening the gap with every quarter that passes.

Alkami commissioned the Digital Maturity Model and Assessment Tool to do the first part of that work for you. It's a short assessment that any bank or credit union can take, and it does two things. It tells you which of the four segments your institution is actually in, based on the same model used in the research. And it gives you a roadmap forward, with the specific dimensions you need to move on to advance to the next level.

The assessment link is in the episode notes, right next to the report link. Have several people in your organization take it — diversity of opinion is good, and the discussion that follows is helpful. It only takes a few minutes.

The assessment will tell you more about your competitive position over the next five years than most strategic planning exercises ever will. The next winners in banking will not be determined by asset size. They'll be determined by how quickly an institution becomes digitally mature. That's what this research is really measuring — not technology maturity. Organizational maturity.

So what's the first thing you're going to change? Let me know in the comments below.