How to Earn Attention in an Age of Distraction

Your bank or credit union is holding your customer's money. But right now, the World Cup is holding their attention.

This year, nearly 6 billion people will follow the tournament, and many of them are your customers or members. And yet most of those customers or members have not opened their app in weeks or even visited a branch.

For years, your institution has competed for deposits, for products, and for rate. But before anyone opens the account, before they apply for a loan, and before they even trust your advice, something else has to happen first. You have to earn their attention. It's the one part of the contest that financial institutions keep leaving to chance.

Watch what the World Cup does this month. The news will lead with it. Advertisements will be all around it, and conversations at work, online, and at the dinner table will all focus on it. Spending is going to shift. Travel has shifted, and for four weeks, the rhythm of ordinary life rearranges itself around a tournament. That didn't happen because the World Cup bought a few advertisements. It happened because people cared enough to make the tournament a part of their lives.

That is the share of mind that every financial institution says it wants. And yet most of us don't do anything to build for it.

Most banks and credit unions answer the attention question with visibility. You may count branches, impressions, sponsorships, and maybe just the sheer number of times your name appears. But visibility only measures who saw you. It says nothing about who actually cared. You can actually be everywhere a customer or member looks, and still be the thing that they look beyond.

The World Cup makes that trap obvious. Bank of America just became the first bank ever to sponsor it, in a deal reported to be at least $100 million. That puts their logo in front of billions, but it does not buy their attention. It rents the proximity to attention that the tournament already created.

The pushback to this narrative is obvious. You already spent on brand, you sponsor the local team, and people know your name. All of that can be true while the real problem deepens underneath it. The real threat is quieter than dislike. A customer who simply stops noticing you and starts giving their attention to whoever earned it.

Attrition rarely begins with a closed account. It begins months earlier — the day a customer's attention moves on without telling you.

Attention is more than the number you report after the fact. It's actually the leading indicator of the whole relationship. By the time the deposits move and the balances thin out, the contest is already settled. You're probably reading the final score of a game you maybe never knew you were in.

If you want the framework behind this, be sure to catch my recent Insight Video on silent attrition, which raises the question every bank and credit union should sit with.

You're not the World Cup. You cannot summon the planet's attention for a month, and you cannot buy your way to the front of someone's mind. So how does an ordinary institution with an ordinary budget earn the attention that was never handed to you?

Interestingly, the answer has almost nothing to do with advertising budgets. In fact, some of the most effective moves may cost nothing at all.

Go back to the tournament for a moment. The World Cup did not earn its hold on us by outspending everything else in our lives. It earned it by being worth our time again and again, until showing up for it became almost automatic. Attention given consistently is attention that compounds. This is the part that most financial institutions miss. The same mechanism is open to all of us at any size.

When you show up usefully and consistently in places where attention actually lives — maybe that's in feeds, in conversations, in communities, and in the moments when money matters — that presence accumulates.

And there's a new front most financial institutions are missing. Attention is no longer only in a branch, or on Google, or even on social media. It's in the answers that AI gives when someone asks a financial question. If you're not part of that answer, you're invisible at the exact moment that attention is being decided.

So you have to show up across all of it consistently and slowly. And then suddenly you become the name that shows up first. And the name that comes to mind first is just another way to describe the primary financial relationship that everyone is fighting for.

So what does earning attention look like in your institution next week and beyond? It starts by changing what your messages say. Most financial institution communications are an alarm — a fraud alert, an overdraft warning, a payment due notice. Every message is your financial institution protecting itself.

As I shared in my Insight Video on wearable technology, Oura talks to people who wear it. It doesn't wait to be asked. It tells you how you slept, what changed, and most importantly, what to do about it. A bank or credit union can do exactly the same. Imagine your app telling a customer, "Hey, your dining is 28% above your normal." Or: "Hey, your bonus just landed. Moving $1,200 today will keep your savings on track." These aren't alerts. They're intentional insights with empathy. And that difference is the whole game, because people pay attention to whoever helps them make a better decision.

So change when you show up. Nobody wakes up wanting a home equity loan. They wake up thinking, "Geez, my daughter's starting college in the fall," or, "Oh my gosh, it's time for a second car." Banks organize around products. People organize around key moments in their lives. Show up inside those moments. That's what matters. And you can be relevant before a product is even mentioned.

Then give them a reason to come back. Pick one moment a week and own it. Let's say every Friday you give your customers or members a short financial week in review — not a statement and not a list of transactions. Instead: What moved? What improved? What should you do next? Stop sending only negative notices. Start building a positive habit.

There's room to surprise people here too. They track their steps, their sleep, and their heart rate. And they love watching their numbers get better. Almost no one has built the same thing for financial momentum — for savings, or stability. The institution that does that will own the attention no one else is competing for.

Underneath it all, your customer or member is asking four simple things: How can you help me? How can you surprise me? How can you teach me? How can you celebrate me? Do these consistently and attention stops being something you chase. It becomes something you've actually earned.

And if attention is the leading indicator, measure like one. Stop grading yourself on impressions and followers, and start watching consideration, engagement, referrals, and primary account growth. The order is the whole point. Consideration comes first. The deposits will follow on a lag.

A practical place to start is shared in a Retail Banking Trends report shown below.

Let's go back to the customer we started with — giving 90 minutes to a World Cup game, and yet not a thought to the financial institution that holds their money. That gap is not destiny. It's a choice about what you decide to be worth.

Bank of America put its name on the tournament for a reported $100 million. You do not need anything close to that to earn attention and build trust. You need to be useful consistently in the moments that actually matter. Maybe that means being the community lender known for backing the first homes and the first businesses in town. That earns attention the national brand cannot buy.

Think about those customers or members always distracted by the noise around them. Tell them one or two ways that you should be able to earn their attention — maybe with a simple surprise and delight moment. Put your ideas in the comments below and commit to trying at least one this week.