Originally published on LinkedIn, John’s Corner is where Fortimize CEO John Hamon shares the perspectives, challenges, and hard truths he sees from the front lines. View original publication.
Nobody on her phone knows her name.
Over dinner in August, Rob Keatts, chief growth officer at Chartway Credit Union, said something that has stayed with me. For most of our careers, we’ve talked about being the customer’s PFI, her preferred financial institution: the place that held her checking account and her mortgage and the relationship behind both. Rob said her PFI is now her phone.
The corner branch doesn't fit on a screen
He’s right, and it changes what the contest is about. On that screen a $4 billion bank and a $4 trillion bank sit side by side at the same size, and she can’t tell which is which. When ABA and Morning Consult surveyed bank customers last November, 54% named a mobile app as their top way to manage their accounts. The branch got 9%.
A community bank used to earn the PFI title with things she could see, like the corner you were on and the name her parents already knew. None of that shows up on the phone.
A money-center bank no longer needs a branch on her street to be in her pocket. Chase lands there with a technology budget reported at close to $20 billion this year and the app J.D. Power ranked first among national banks in 2026. Then it builds the branch anyway, with more than 160 openings this year on a path to putting 75% of Americans within a reasonable drive of one. Branches still matter, but the one that follows the app is where a relationship the phone already started gets confirmed.
A title won every quarter
She does not pick a preferred institution once. J.D. Power’s 2026 retail banking study found that 20% of customers had moved money out of their primary bank in the previous three months. The PFI gets decided again every quarter, on a screen, by someone who never has to walk past your building to change her mind.
Two kinds of knowing
A community bank will not outspend the largest banks on its app. It can still give her a better experience, because the best experience on a phone is the one that already knows you. The contest turns on the difference between two kinds of knowing. The largest bank holds generic data about millions of people like her, and it has built the machinery to act on that data every time she opens its app. A good community bank holds particular knowledge about her, gathered over years, and has almost no way to act on it while she is looking at her screen.
Her phone has no teller
The trouble is where that knowledge lives. It sits in the branch manager’s head and a loan officer’s notes, and it’s scattered across a core, a loan system, a card processor, and whatever spreadsheet somebody built to connect them. For decades that worked, because the branch was where the knowledge got used. She walked in, and someone who knew her was standing there. Her phone has no teller. On that screen, anything the bank knows but can’t reach may as well not exist.
The referrals nobody wrote down
One bank we work with, a regional community bank in Texas, used to pass referrals between teams on sticky notes and forwarded email. A banker who spotted what a customer needed could write it down, but she had no way of knowing whether anyone on the other team would ever act on it. In the first week on a new system, referrals went up 200%, and the lift has held in the months since. Some of that lift is likely referrals that always happened and were never written down. Those were the ones the bank was losing, because a referral nobody recorded was one nobody could be sure anyone handled.
Knowledge that travels
What moves that knowledge, in the work we do, is a customer 360 in Salesforce, or a member 360 at a credit union. My firm, Fortimize, implements Salesforce for banks and credit unions, and every example here comes from our own work, so weigh them with that in mind. Once the referral travels, everything else the bank knows about her can travel too: to the contact center, to the app, and to any agent the bank puts in front of her. At the Banking Innovation Day we hosted at Dreamforce, a credit union showed a snapshot that lets its frontline staff read a member’s whole relationship in five seconds. Every agent on display at Dreamforce this year is only as useful as what it knows about the person on the other end.
A $4 billion bank can do this without a megabank’s calendar or headcount. The same Texas bank went live in 16 weeks, with its people using the system in production. A credit union we work with got back the equivalent of 15 full-time employees and used the time to grow without hiring.
An expensive database
The same tool can widen the gap it was meant to close. A 360 that is bought and left unused is an expensive database. One that is used badly puts the failure on her screen, where she sees it before your board does. Bring it in and execute it poorly, and the disadvantage shows up in a quarter or two. So we agree with each client on the economic number before we start and report where it stands every quarter.
Saturday morning at the kitchen table
Here is the test I would put to any community bank or credit union leadership team. Picture one of your customers at her kitchen table on a Saturday morning, pricing a car loan for her daughter on her phone. What does your institution know about her at that moment that the biggest bank in the country doesn’t? And can anything on her screen, or anyone who calls her back on Monday, act on it?
Sources
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ABA: Bank apps continue to be most popular option among customers (Nov 2025)
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J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study
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J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Digital Banking and Credit Card Mobile App Satisfaction Studies
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Chase to open more than 160 branches in over 30 states in 2026
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JPMorgan expands AI investment as tech spending nears $20B
