The majority of financial institutions (82%) expect 2026 to bring positive deposit growth, according to ProSight Banking Outlook: 2026 Trends. However, consumer sentiment remains tentative amid persistent economic and geopolitical uncertainty. These dynamics create a challenging landscape for financial institutions as their deposit growth projections clash head-on with fragile consumer confidence.
Incentives are a core strategy to attract new customers, especially in challenging operating environments like the one presently defining the industry. According to recent ProSight data, younger generations are increasingly more likely to switch financial institutions. From 2024 to 2025, 75% more Generation Z customers and 52% more Millennials expressed intent to switch their primary financial institution within six months. While these trends signal opportunities to capture new customers, they also speak to the significant retention challenges financial institutions currently face.
Incentives drive growth, but at a rising cost
Incentive offers resonated with banking customers in 2025, with consumers across all demographic groups citing cash incentives and rewards among the top four drivers of their decision to seek a new financial services organization. The ProSight Banking Outlook: 2026 Trends study also found that an incentive or reward offer directly motivated up to 27% of consumers to switch financial institutions in 2025.
However, incentive programs demand considerable investment. Acquiring a single new checking account is estimated to cost well over $200, and incentive offers can push that figure much higher. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, financial institutions have also seen their deposit costs increase sharply since the first quarter of 2022, when the Fed responded to soaring rates of consumer price inflation by implementing hawkish monetary policies.
Given the realities of rising acquisition costs and rate-driven margin pressure, the competitive dynamics of the incentives landscape demands careful analysis. As a starting point, financial institutions can place their internal strategies in their proper market context by examining overall offer prevalence, average incentive values, and the offer types most commonly associated with successful customer acquisitions.
The current landscape of deposit incentives
A growing number of financial institutions are using incentives as a customer acquisition tool. According to a ProSight report, there was an 18% increase in the number of institutions using cash incentives to attract new checking customers from 2023 to 2024. According to the same report, 43% of financial institutions offered cash incentives on new checking accounts in 2025, with an average cash incentive value of $277.
In early 2026, surveys of the market landscape sourced from data aggregators including Bankrate, Forbes, and NerdWallet indicate that offers generally continue to cluster in the $100–$500 range, though some carefully targeted high-value offers range into the thousands of dollars.
Which incentives have the strongest impact?
Direct cash bonuses and sign-on offers, which are paid to customers who meet qualifying conditions when funding and using new accounts, represent one of the most widely used incentive strategies. However, ProSight survey data also indicates an increasing move toward promotional interest rates — especially for savings accounts, money-market deposit accounts, and CD products.
Tiered-rate accounts, which typically offer higher interest rates to customers who maintain balances above an elevated threshold, have also become prominent in the market. As competitive features in interest-bearing accounts, they are common enough to warrant FDIC regulation.
Financial institutions can augment the impact of their cash- and rate-based incentives by developing reward-based offers and loyalty programs. Robust academic research shows that perceived value — which banks can elevate through additional rewards and loyalty programs — is one of the most impactful core factors influencing customer loyalty in the financial services industry.
Where are new accounts originating from?
ProSight research points to the importance of online promotions in attracting new incentive-laden account openings. More than half of Generation X (59%) and Millennial (51%) consumers first learned about promotional offers through online channels. These high rates persisted among the Boomer+ (43%) and Generation Z (38%) demographic groups. Branches also continue to play a major role in account originations, ranking second among all channels in generating new accounts from promotional offers among all four generational groups.
Financial institutions should also note that members of younger generations are far more likely to switch their primary financial services provider than their older counterparts. ProSight’s Banking Outlook: 2026 Trends survey found that 35% of Gen Zers and 32% of Millennials planned to change their primary financial service organization in the next six months, compared to just 5% of Gen Xers and 2% of consumers in the Boomer+ group.
Maximizing incentive ROI requires market insight and strategic program design
Given both the competitive importance of incentive programs and the costs they involve, financial institutions must design offers with strategic certainty and carefully track their market performance. In both respects, financial institutions are forced to operate with imprecision when they lack the right market insights. This can lead to:
Limited ROI visibility. Incentive costs are easy to track, but the value they generate is difficult to understand without clear visibility into incremental performance and long-term customer behavior. All too often, this leads to inefficient or wasted marketing spend.
Short-term rate-chasing behavior. Impressive account incentives may attract checking deposits, but these new customers are often fickle and disappear as soon as they find a slightly better offer. As a result, financial institutions pay a high acquisition cost for a low lifetime value as they struggle to convert new customers into long-term banking relationships.
Delayed performance insights. Financial institutions that operate their incentive programs without market-wide comparative data can only assess program performance retrospectively. This lack of agility makes it difficult to adjust underperforming offers in a timely manner.
Strategies for building smarter customer acquisition campaigns
Targeted analytics can help financial institutions quickly and efficiently assess whether their incentive offers are delivering positive returns. Two such strategies include:
“Early value” scoring. Financial institutions can quickly gauge an offer’s impact using a 90-day early value score. The metric can measure the continuity of payroll deposits, how often customers use mobile deposit and peer-to-peer payment features, and relative levels of new customer engagement as determined by net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) tracking.
Industry-wide benchmarking. By benchmarking their incentive programs against broader market trends, financial institutions can quickly compare the performance of various offer tiers, acquisition channels, and customer segmentation to that of their peers. By tracking competitor cash incentives, fulfillment, and origination patterns, institutions can validate strategies, optimize offers, identify market opportunities, and align campaigns with industry norms to maximize ROI.
Implementing these analytical tools can help financial institutions more effectively turn marketing spend into sustainable deposit growth while building stronger long-term relationships with high-value customers.
Base marketing decisions on statistically validated comparative data
“Higher-dollar offers and higher-than-typical market rates may succeed in generating initial attention,” says Tom Hoscheidt, ProSight’s managing director of research, “but implementing the program requires careful targeting to attract the right kind of new customer.” Benchmarking data can inform this precision thinking by generating actionable insights across four key performance metrics: acquisition and origination impact, customer engagement and lifetime value, offer effectiveness and ROI, and channel and segment analysis.
ProSight has developed a Marketing Incentive Offers Analysis benchmarking program to help financial institutions gain strategic, data-backed insight into their incentive programs and how those programs perform against peers and broader industry trends. Delivered semiannually, the new ProSight benchmarking analysis draws on deep and robust proprietary datasets to help financial institutions:
- Compare campaign performance against peers
- See how incentive values, fulfillment rates, and origination mixes align with nationwide norms and percentiles
- Pinpoint strategies that can increase originations, elevate new account balances, and strengthen primary customer relationships
Explore the program overview to learn more about this powerful new ProSight product, or connect with the ProSight team to discuss strategies for applying incentive-based insights to generate profitable outcomes.
