A good branch manager used to know which customers were saving for a house, who had just started a business and who might need a different account soon. Nobody wrote that down as a strategy. It was simply how banking relationships worked. Most of those conversations no longer happen in a branch. They happen, or fail to happen, in the app.

And customers are there constantly. According to Accenture's Banking Consumer Study 2025, which surveyed 49,300 banking customers across 39 countries, mobile apps are the go-to banking channel for most people, with users averaging around 150 interactions a year. No branch ever saw a customer that often.

The question is what those 150 visits are building.

Frequent, but shallow

The same study shows how narrow most of those visits are. The two most common activities done at least weekly in banking apps are checking balances (45%) and transferring money (31%). Customers come in, do one thing and leave.

The apps themselves are good at that job. Accenture looked at the app store ratings of 30 top banks across eight countries and found they sit consistently above 4.5 out of 5, with very little variation between markets. That's an achievement. It's also a warning. When everyone's app works well, a well-working app stops being a reason to choose one bank over another. Accenture's phrase for the result is that banks have become "functionally correct, but emotionally devoid."

Meanwhile, relationships are spreading out. Nearly three-quarters of customers in the 2025 study have a relationship with at least one competing bank. On average they hold accounts with two banks and two digital wallets. Digital challengers are already the primary or secondary bank for one-third of consumers.

Tenure can hide this. The study found that 61% of customers with lower advocacy scores had still stayed with their primary bank for more than seven years. Accenture calls them "lazy loyalists," and warns that they can lull a bank into a false sense of safety. A customer who stays isn't necessarily a customer who's growing with you.

Why the relationship shows up in revenue

Accenture matched advocacy scores with revenue growth at more than 200 banks. Banks in the top 20% for advocacy grew revenue 1.7 times faster than those with the lowest scores. Advocates, customers who would recommend their bank, hold on average 17% more products with their primary bank.

The depth of the relationship and the depth of the product holding move together. The app is where most banks now have to build both.

The personalization paradox

Personalization is the obvious answer, and the data shows why it's harder than it sounds. In the 2025 study, 72% of customers said personalization influences their choice of bank, yet only 3% use the personalized tools their main bank offers. More than half (51%) said they feel bombarded by advertising. And while banks are the most trusted entities to protect customer data, 84% of customers worry about how their data is used.

So customers want to feel known, but they don't respond to generic "tailored offers," and they're wary of anything that feels like surveillance. The banks that get this right tend to treat personalization less as targeting and more as service, relevant, explained, and on the customer's terms.

Four ways the app builds the relationship

1. Put the portfolio where attention already is

Most banks have built a deep portfolio, cards, loans, savings, insurance, investments. Much of it sits two or three taps beyond the screen where sessions end. The customer who checks a balance every morning may never see the product that would suit them.

Akbank, one of Turkey's leading banks, used Storyly and moved its offers into a Stories format inside the app, at the moment customers are already paying attention. And 56% of purchases across all of the app's offer spaces came directly from Stories, and purchases of financial services within those offer spaces rose 126%. Akbank also used Smart Sorting to prioritize the best-performing Story groups automatically, which on its own lifted engagement 30%, and added personalized birthday Stories, opened from a banner, for customers on their birthday.

2. Explain before you sell

Complex products carry the most hesitation, and a menu entry does nothing to resolve it. The 2025 study found 88% of Gen Z and Millennial customers are eager to expand their financial knowledge. It also found 46% of customers feel pressured at least some of the time to accept products that serve the bank more than themselves. Both numbers point the same way. Guidance earns trust, and pressure loses it.

Explaining things proactively also cuts cost. Sadapay, a digital payments app in Pakistan, was fielding many customer service questions about physical debit card wait times. It started explaining the process upfront in in-app Stories, and promoted its digital debit card in the same place. Customer service saw fewer questions about wait times, and marketing saw higher adoption of the digital card feature.

3. Give customers a reason to open the app that isn't a transaction

If every session starts with a task, the bank only appears when it's summoned. Content that's worth opening for its own sake changes that.

tbi bank in Bulgaria runs a different gamified scenario every month. In its "Treasure Hunt," each daily Story hides a letter, and customers collect them to uncover a hidden phrase. It became the campaign type with the highest response rate. The first Treasure Hunt lifted monthly active users 8.85%, and a consistent monthly gamification strategy took that to 17.7%. Interactive content drew a 53% response rate, with more than 65,000 responses, and overall engagement reached 77%.

Recognition works the same way. Dreams, a finance management app, used Wrapped-style Stories to summarize each user's activity and celebrate their milestones. Results? A 34% engagement rate, 65,000 clicks on CTAs and 17,000 responses to interactive stickers.

4. Move at the speed of the campaign

Banking campaigns are time-bound. A cashback window, a card launch, tax season, payday. If every new piece of in-app content needs an engineering ticket and an app release, the window often closes first. The alternative, pushing everything through notifications, is fast but shallow.

Kapital Bank in Azerbaijan, whose Birbank app serves more than 3 million users, saw this clearly. Its push channel ran at a 57% opt-in rate and a 4% open rate. Using Stories inside the app, a cashback program reached 50% of customers in its first week at around 40% click-through, and a credit card campaign saw a 64% increase in participation. The bank also turned creative made for social channels into in-app Stories, so it could publish inside the app at the pace of its social calendar.

What to measure instead of logins

If the app is where the relationship grows, logins and session counts aren't enough to tell you whether it's growing. More useful signals:

• Products per customer, and how many second products started in the app.
• Feature adoption after each release, not just release dates.
• Non-transactional sessions: visits that included content, education or interaction, not only a balance check.
• Zero-party responses: what customers tell you directly through polls and questions, with consent.
• Support contacts on topics the app could have explained first.

A first 30 days

Banks don't need a transformation program to start. A focused first month can look like this:

• Week 1: pick one screen. Choose the screen where most sessions start or end, usually home or the account overview. Map what customers see there today and how often it changes.
• Week 2: pick one job. Choose one of the four above. Surfacing one under-discovered product, or explaining one feature that drives support contacts, are both good first jobs because they're easy to measure.
• Week 3: build two or three pieces of content. Repurpose existing campaign creative where you can. Add one interactive element, such as a poll, so you learn something even if conversion is modest.
• Week 4: measure against the old placement. Compare engagement and the downstream action with whatever occupied that space before, over the same period.

The first month should prove that the app can say something new to customers without a release, and give you a baseline for what that's worth. A headline result can come later.

Start with the visits you already have

Most relationship strategies assume you need more of the customer's attention. In banking, attention isn't the scarce part. Customers already open the app around 150 times a year. The opportunity is to make a few of those visits about something more than a number.

If you'd like to see how that works in a banking app, take a look at Storyly for Finance or talk to our team.