As the new year kicks into high gear, I find myself reflecting on the year gone by. For me, 2025 was big, both personally (I got married) and professionally (I changed roles). After 19 years in relationship management – where the focus was developing trusted relationships and matching solutions to client needs – I moved into a strategic advisor role. I now lean on my prior experience while partnering with clients from a distinct perspective: analyzing data to explain market trends, diving into client-specific data to show where they are today and providing recommendations to help them reach their strategic goals.

At Raddon, we slice, dice and analyze vast amounts of national and client data. This allows us to develop metrics to help financial institutions understand how they stack up against peers. In the Raddon-sphere, the top financial institutions are known as high performers – those that have metrics in the 90th percentile or higher.

What makes a high performer a high performer? There are three primary drivers behind a high-performing financial institution:

1) Balances

2) Payments

3) Member/customer experience

Balances

Larger balances per household fuel growth and revenue, give institutions flexibility to offer competitive rates and consumer benefits, and support broader strategic options. The following chart shows that when accountholders are less engaged with us, the balances they maintain are lower and we see less product depth. In our research, we see this trend flip with high performers, which typically show larger balances and more products per household than their peers – both signs of deeper accountholder relationships. Larger balances and deeper member/customer relationships are what we want to strive for.

Figure 1: Total balances

Consumer engagement is a hallmark of high performance

Source: Performance Analytics, 2025

Payments

Payments sit at the heart of member/customer engagement. Winning payments – becoming “the” place consumers use regularly for transactions – builds loyalty and retention and signals primary-financial-institution status. Transaction data helps us identify high-activity accountholders and behavioral trends. Looking at the following chart, you can see that top performers in both checking and credit card penetration show increased performance in loan and deposit balances along with increased household and profit growth. When you “win the wallet,” deposits, loans, household growth and profitability tend to reflect that success.

Figure 2: Top performers and growth

Winning payments is the foundationfor broader success

Source: Performance Analytics, 2025

Member/Customer Experience

When the member/customer is truly at the center of an institution’s culture, the experience improves across every touchpoint. Consumers reward institutions that make things easy, offer tailored service, improve financial well-being, and respect consumers’ time and effort. The following chart from our research shows accountholders bring more of their business when it is simple and convenient to do so; higher member/customer satisfaction correlates with larger share of wallet. Raddon accountholder surveys are a terrific way to get feedback from your accountholders and provide you with actionable information on what you are doing well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Figure 3: How ease of doing business coorelates to share of wallet

When it's easier, accountholders bring more 

Source: Performance Analytics, 2025

Consumers today can get financial services from places beyond traditional community institutions. Large national banks (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo), online banks (Ally, SoFi) and fintech (Chime, Venmo, PayPal) all compete for primary-financial-institution status. This makes it more important than ever to be intentional about the three high-performance drivers. Being a high performer does not make you immune to attrition, but it does give you an edge and fewer reasons for members/customers to look elsewhere.

If you want to move toward high performance, focus your strategy on those three drivers – balances, payments and member/customer experience – and be deliberate about the actions that support them.

This article is the first in a series. Watch for upcoming posts, where we will take deeper dives into why and how:

• Balances drive growth and stability.
• Payments drive engagement and loyalty.
• Member and customer experience drives member and customer retention and share.