Banking · Credentials 2026
THE NEWOLD BANKING
From products to behaviors

Rebuilding competitive advantage through behavioral insight, experience design, and open talent models.

BMC · Business Meets CultureApril 2026
Weathered bank façade with the word BANK
Scroll
The shift

The old banking fortress
is weakening

Banking used to enjoy structural protection from:

  • Distribution control through branches
  • Regulation and barriers of entry
  • Product opacity and trust asymmetry

These defenses are weakening fast — bank branches are declining across the UK, US and LATAM, and open banking lets third parties access banking data to offer their own services. The error is to assume old rules still guarantee customer stickiness.

Banking's historical defenses are eroding faster than institutions are adapting.

Source: McKinsey global banking review, BCG retail banking, FCA, Federal Reserve branch studies · World Bank · BMC Research

Branch decline and open-banking adoption
Bank branches per 100K adults (LATAM −6%, EU −3%, US −4%) · Countries with open-banking regulation approved
Four symptoms of a contestable market

Why the advantage is eroding

Click each symptom to see the full picture.

Changing banks is easier than ever.

Banks reduced perceived risk and effort, so loyalty becomes fragile — loyalty programs require a full re-thinking.

What lowered the friction

  • Digital onboarding
  • Account portability mechanisms
  • Comparison sites
  • Switching incentives
1M
UK accounts used the free switching service in 2025
43%
"I was able to open the account remotely"
32%
"It was easy to get one, unlike a traditional bank"

Fintechs make opening and onboarding very easy, capturing new clients — although their average deposit remains lower than incumbents.

Source: wearepay.uk · FCA Retail Banking Survey 2024.

Banking products are increasingly sourced, replicated, or embedded — rather than uniquely manufactured.

  • Anyone can offer current accounts, cards, payments, credit or FX without being a bank.The line is blurringOld / new banking is blurring — new banks want to institutionalize, while incumbents try to go digital.Everyone wants into transactionality — telcos, oil & gas, mobility, delivery.
  • Banking-as-a-Service and white-label models let clients consume banking products where they transact.
  • Product parity raises the importance of proposition design, user experience, brand trust and ecosystem integration.
35%
of responding banks used white-labelling — the EBA calls it widespread (2025 Spring RAQ)

Embedded finance — who really holds the value

Customer need
Customer wants to buy shoes
Platform
Nike store integrated with Apple Pay
Financial product
Apple Card — preferred method of payment
Regulated entity
Goldman holds the balance and facilitates payments

Source: Fintech Futures, Statista, MarketsandMarkets, BMC analysis.

Income-based segmentation is a poor proxy for customer behavior — and banks own some of the richest behavioral datasets.

  • Income-based segmentation is too blunt for modern banking.
  • Two customers with the same income can have radically different financial behaviors, emotional drivers, channel preferences and risk profiles.
  • Transaction data, channel data and real-time context should power behavioral segmentation and next-best-action systems.
  • Segmentation should shift from generic variables to behavior-linked information.

Behavioral / lifestyle segmentation vs income-based

ConcernIncome segmentationBehavioral / lifestyle
Churn predictionReactiveProactive
PersonalisationOne-size-fits-allContextual and dynamic
Customer returnDifficult to isolate impactAction-tied and measurable
Customer engagementGeneral campaignsTailored, signal-triggered

Source: FCI banking behaviour segmentation · BMC analysis · relationship-based pricing in banking.

Closed talent ecosystems limit innovation in a rapidly changing market.

  • Banks over-recruit from familiar profiles and under-recruit from adjacent sectors — retail, technology, telecom, travel, gaming and consumer platforms.
  • This narrows the inflow of new commercial, design, product and behavioral-science thinking.
  • A sector trying to reinvent journeys with largely homogeneous mental models will struggle.

To succeed, studies recommend banks understand

  • Talent is the new bottleneck in banking transformation
  • From job-based organizations to talent-to-value models
  • The shift in skills: from cognitive to socio-technical capabilities
  • Elevating HR to a strategic role

The proof

Banks have lost their competitive-advantage protection

The 5-year "shuffle rate" — the share of an industry's market value that shifts across valuation tiers — shows how unstable banking positions have become.

48% of Diversified Banks change valuation quartiles — competitive advantages show no protection for incumbents.

Source: McKinsey — Strategy's biggest blind spot, the erosion of competitive advantage (2019–2024).

5-year shuffle rate of change by industry
5-year shuffle rate of change, 2019–2024
The real battle

It's now experience,
not access

When products are similar, the experience of discovery, onboarding, servicing, rewards, advice and issue resolution becomes the product.

  • Trust still matters — but now coexists with app quality, journey simplicity and relevance.
  • Banks underinvest in the micro-moments that shape customer memory.

In a commoditized market, customer experience becomes THE differentiator — loyalty shifts from passive retention to active value exchange.

BCG 2025 retail banking survey · McKinsey experience-led growth · Accenture 2025 global banking consumer study.

Cross-industry lesson: owning the customer relationship
Cross-industry lesson — Mercadona, Tesco & Sephora own the customer relationship, not the manufacturing.
BMC Credentials

Frameworks &
Examples

These are the project types BMC can deploy. Each methodology below opens its framework — and, when you want, the real cases where we have applied it.

Select a methodology to explore its framework and examples

©BMC Strategic Innovation · Proprietary & Confidential 2026. All methodologies, models and tools are intellectual property of BMC Strategic Innovation.

From products to behaviors — branding rooted in business & brought to life in culture.

BMC partners with banks to rebuild competitive advantage through behavioral insight, experience design and open talent models.

Business Meets Culture · Proprietary & Confidential 2026
Methodology
—