The materials available in this article are for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your own advisors with questions regarding the trends in banking content herein. The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the individual authors and may not reflect the opinions of MeridianLink, Inc.
It’s no secret that 2025 has been a somewhat bumpy ride for the average consumer. Tighter personal budgets, a challenging housing market, and rising credit card balances are forcing consumers to be more cautious, selective, and value-driven in their financial decisions. Yet even in periods of economic uncertainty, meaningful opportunities exist for financial institutions that know how to adapt—supporting consumers in practical ways while still protecting and growing revenue and market share.
Digital experiences sit at the center of this opportunity. When thoughtfully designed, your lending and deposit account opening interactions can build trust, inspire financial confidence, and deepen engagement. Personalization is necessary to see serious results, both in terms of revenue and relationships. And when paired with automation and AI-enabled data centric processes, personalization can be delivered at scale—creating fast, frictionless journeys that keep both new and existing consumers engaged, loyal, and ready to do more business.
In this blog, we’ll explore a few of the most impactful trends in banking and lending, along with solutions to help you move into 2026 with confidence.
1. Smooth Digital Acquisition & Onboarding That Converts
Digital banking is now the standard, being the preferred banking method across all generations. In fact, a report reveals that 61% of consumers believe that digital apps and tools are actually supporting them through tougher economic times. When you combine that with the fact that 75% rate their relationship to money positively and 69% attribute that positive relationship to technology, you see just how vital digital experiences are to consumer engagement and retention.
But those consumer relationships and business growth opportunities don’t just present themselves. You have to be prepared to reach this new business. That’s why online visibility and searchability are so important. Consumers surfing the web and social media need to know your banking and lending services exist. Having that presence is step one in competing with the digital-only banking competitors excelling in this space. With discoverability handled, next comes the follow-through, which is critical to turning passive interest into concrete business.
A clear website and application layout is the first step in guiding visitors, ensuring they know exactly where to go based on their needs. Once consumers begin their journey, it’s essential to keep the process simple, seamless, and secure. Key elements that make this possible include:
- Device-agnostic applications that can be started on one channel and completed on another, helping prevent application abandonment.
- Fast, secure identity verification that works seamlessly in the background, protecting your institution from risk while letting consumers move forward quickly and effortlessly.
- Instant account funding, enabling new users to access and use their accounts immediately, reducing the likelihood of unfunded or inactive accounts.
- Simplified, intelligent application forms with auto-fill for existing consumers and removable fields for specific product types, making the process faster, easier, and more user-friendly.
The Solutions To Make It Happen
MeridianLink® Access offers a highly configurable, automated workflow that makes consumer-facing digital applications easy, efficient, and engaging:
- Surface relevant product cross-sell opportunities directly within the application
- Recover abandoned applications before they turn into lost business
- Let consumers complete applications quickly and on their own time with autofill, document upload, eSignature, and save-and-resume options.
- Quickly fund accounts with seamless, fully automated processes.
- Easily configure and brand applications to match your institution’s strategy, style, and audience.
- Guide consumers through personalized application flows that feel intuitive and effortless
- Deliver consistent, frictionless experiences across every channel and device
For mortgage lending, MeridianLink® Mortgage Access builds on these same capabilities with tools designed to help lenders reduce origination costs, improve pull-through rates, and speed up closings:
- Fast, accurate financial data verification through VOE, VOI, and VOA sourcing
- A Quick Pricer powered by PriceMyLoan® PPE to control which loan types, terms, and programs are presented
- Flexible configurations that adapt to your unique mortgage strategy—not the other way around
2. Data-Powered Personalization Strengthens Relationships
Among the most notable trends in banking today is consumers’ growing comfort with data sharing. In fact, 66% of consumers are willing to provide their financial institutions with data, and three quarters of those using data-backed fintech apps report feeling more confident in their financial lives.
Despite this readiness, many institutions struggle to fully capitalize on data-driven opportunities. On average, financial institutions score just 50 out of 100 when evaluated on their ability to acquire, manage, and effectively use data.
When real-time data can easily, and securely, be accessed across departments, operations can function smoothly, and consumers can remain well-served based on current, relevant insights. However, when that data is cut off from a certain department or stuck in one area, operations can suffer, sometimes in more covert ways that drive away business over time.
For example, if an account shows dwindling activity and that trend is never flagged, you may not know the relationship is in jeopardy until it’s already moved to a new primary institution. In other cases, a consumer may be well-suited for additional products but never informed of its availability because incomplete, siloed data failed to identify this critical engagement opportunity.
Analytics and reporting help financial institutions close these gaps by enabling them to:
- Create holistic individual profiles that inform campaign segmentation for relevant outreach opportunities
- Personalize deposit and lending experiences based on needs and circumstances
- Flag inactivity and abandonment to apply re-engagement strategies
- Tap into smarter scoring methods that go beyond traditional credit scores to more accurately assess creditworthiness.
This is vital to expanding credit access to younger demographics, gig economy workers, and other underserved groups who are qualified borrowers. With a comprehensive approach that considers a wider pool of financial health and stability indicators, you can safely increase approvals and revenue while reducing losses.
The Solutions To Make It Happen
To turn insights into action and deliver consistent, personalized experiences at scale, your institution needs a connected banking and lending ecosystem. Our MeridianLink One platform provides access to real-time data across your operations, enabling teams to engage consumers more effectively, strengthen relationships, and drive sustainable growth.
- MeridianLink® Insight, including our latest Insight for Mortgage and Insight for Collect solutions, transforms raw data into actionable intelligence. With intuitive dashboards and real-time reporting, you can uncover trends, identify opportunities, prioritize accounts, and make smarter, faster decisions—ensuring every interaction is relevant and impactful.
- MeridianLink® Engage puts those insights into motion. Our personalization and campaign management solution integrates with your core system and other MeridianLink tools to deliver targeted, multi-channel campaigns with advanced segmentation. Real-time dashboards let you monitor performance, refine strategies, and continuously optimize ROI—all while creating more relevant, engaging experiences that deepen consumer relationships.
3. Automation & AI Boosts Efficiency & Competitive Edge
When we look at the evolution of trends in banking, it’s hard to ignore the impact of digital-only challengers. In Q3 2025 alone, Chime captured 13% of all new checking accounts, and over the past few years, more than $3 trillion in deposits have moved into fintech-led investing platforms.
For your financial institution, these numbers highlight more than lost market share—they reveal growing complexity. As competition rises and consumer expectations evolve, decision-making now involves more data, more variables, and more personalized insights than ever before.
A decade ago, a handful of metrics—credit score, DTI, LTV, and a few compensating factors—were enough to guide most lending and account decisions. Today, staying competitive means analyzing deeper insights, including:
- Deposit-level behavioral data
- Relationship depth
- Deposit migration patterns
- Non-traditional payment performance data
- Fraud triggers
This is where automation and AI-enabled technology become essential.
By tapping into a broader set of data and automating key processes—identity verification, underwriting, processing, and post-closing— financial institutions can reduce manual steps, improve accuracy, and scale operations efficiently. It’s not about replacing people. It’s about removing friction, accelerating decisions, and freeing your team to focus on higher-value work. Not to mention the time and cost savings that can be passed on to your consumers in the form of reduced costs, better rates, and a more satisfying experience.
The Solutions To Make It Happen
From initial engagement to account opening, lending, and ongoing relationship management, MeridianLink One brings this experience to life across your operation and at every stage of the consumer financial journey.
- Our highly configurable workflow automations for loan origination, account opening, and collections make it easy to define the operational flow that works best for your institution. Auto-approve more qualified borrowers, quickly set up and fund new deposit accounts, build data-driven queues that match the right collectors to the right cases, and streamline other routine processes.
- For mortgages, our built-in PriceMyLoan® product and pricing engine automates underwriting, pricing, fees, and margin management. This helps you make faster, more confident decisions while creating a smoother, more efficient mortgage lending experience for consumers.
- Through MeridianLink® Marketplace, your institution gains access to hundreds of trusted integration partners, including leading providers of AI-enabled identity verification, fraud protection, and loan underwriting—allowing you to expand capabilities without disrupting existing workflows.
- And to take these capabilities even further, MeridianLink offers expert consulting services. Our Custom Scorecard uses AI and machine learning to create scoring models tailored to your consumer base, helping you determine qualifications, loan structures, and risk-based pricing more accurately. Decisioning Optimization pinpoints critical risk drivers and thresholds to develop tailored lending strategies, credit policies, and automated underwriting frameworks. Advanced Analytics continuously monitors automated decisioning rates and portfolio performance to keep your operations on track and adapt guidelines as needed.
Make 2026 Your Year of Revenue and Relationship Growth
This year don’t sit on the sidelines while your competitors pull ahead. MeridianLink gives your institution the tools to turn today’s trends in banking and lending into decisive action. Whether your focus is expanding deposits, growing consumer loans or mortgages, managing delinquencies, maturing your data strategy, or automating decisioning, we have the solutions to help.
Take the first step toward a more productive, efficient, and consumer-focused 2026.
