Closing Banking’s Experience Gap

Banking Experience at a Glance:

• A modern digital experience has become table stakes and is no longer a meaningful differentiator
• When financial institutions evolve faster than their brands, a perception gap emerges between what customers expect and what they experience
• The brands best positioned for growth understand the importance of aligning brand, digital, and branch experiences to one clear, compelling promise

Over the past decade, banks and credit unions have made significant improvements to the way people bank. From better mobile and online experiences to greater automation and self-service, everyday banking has become less complicated and more convenient. But while many institutions have invested heavily in digital transformation, their brands often lag behind. A customer may discover a modern digital platform only to encounter an outdated visual identity, generic messaging, or a branch environment that feels disconnected from the digital experience.

This growing gap between what a banking brand delivers and how it is perceived presents a real risk for banks and credit unions. Customers don’t experience brands and marketing separately from branches and mobile apps – they experience one institution. As digital capabilities become table stakes, a brand’s competitive advantage increasingly comes from its ability to connect brand, digital, and physical experiences into a single, cohesive expression of who the institution is and what value it provides.

Making the challenge even more complex, banks and credit unions today operate in a vastly different competitive landscape. The rise of fintechs and neobanks has reshaped expectations across the industry with things like frictionless onboarding and seamlessly connected digital journeys. These innovative brands are also challenging conventional norms of what a financial institution should look and feel like, driving relevance through customer-centric experiences and bold brand identities.

Consumers don’t just compare their banking experience to other financial institutions. Every interaction with brands like Amazon, Apple, and Uber shapes expectations for speed, simplicity, and seamlessness. Those expectations carry over to banking, regardless of where they originated. As the bar continues to rise, delivering a modern digital banking experience is no longer a meaningful differentiator. Those capabilities are the baseline customers expect before they ever consider what makes one brand different from another. These two banking brands are powerful examples of financial institutions that are working to close the experience gap.

PNC Bank: Aligning a Standout Brand with a Growing Experience

Successful organizations understand that growth demands a clear, cohesive brand story across every touchpoint. PNC is a masterclass in this type of focused brand alignment. Over the past several years, the bank has pursued an ambitious growth strategy through investments in their branch network, service capabilities, and product offerings. In parallel with this growth, the bank recently underwent a subtle identity evolution, reinforcing its core brand promise by communicating what it means to be “Brilliantly Boring.”

This identity shift also brought greater consistency to the bank’s marketing messaging and brand expression across channels, ensuring customers experience the same PNC brand regardless of where or how they interact with the bank. This example illustrates how a cohesive brand helps growth investments work harder by making the institution’s strengths more visible to customers. The result is a more unified customer experience that reflects the bank’s broader strategic vision.

Openland Credit Union: Closing the Gap Between Reality and Perception

Perhaps the most important lesson for banks and credit unions is that the challenge isn’t always what they deliver – it’s whether their brand communicates that value. Before their recent rebrand, Openland Credit Union had sophisticated digital capabilities and ambitious growth goals but struggled to build awareness in a crowded market. The credit union’s brand no longer reflected who it had become or where it was headed.

By creating a scalable brand identity and clearer strategic narrative, Openland connected their brand experience with the strengths of their service delivery. The consistency across channels means that digital, physical, and marketing efforts all work together to reinforce a unified brand promise. Rather than reinventing an already exceptional credit union, the rebrand ensured that members and the market saw the same clear, confident story.

Closing the Experience Gap

Many financial institutions focus their modernization efforts on what people can see, such as an updated website or a new marketing campaign. But the experience gap runs deeper than a brand’s visual expression. To close the experience gap, banks must connect the dots between business strategy, brand positioning, digital experience, branch environment, internal culture, and every touchpoint in between. A new logo can change how an institution looks, but true brand alignment builds recognition, increases trust, and drives choice.

For banking leaders evaluating whether their organization communicates the strength of everything they do best, ask these questions:

• Does our brand reflect the reality of the experience we deliver today?
• Do our branches feel like a modern expression of our role in people’s financial lives?
• Are people receiving the same consistent story across marketing, digital, and physical channels?
• Can our target audiences connect with our brand and see themselves reflected in it?

The answers to these questions uncover the largest gaps, but they may also illuminate where the greatest opportunities lie. The financial institutions best positioned for growth will be those that deliver a clear, compelling experience across every interaction. At a time when customers have more choices than ever – with expectations set by outstanding experiences with every other brand – relevance is determined not only by what a brand says but how consistently it delivers on brand promise. When brand, digital, and physical experiences work together to create a consistent experience, financial institutions become easier to understand, easier to trust, and ultimately easier to choose.

Adrenaline’s brand experience experts can help your financial institution identify and close experience gaps. Get in touch to start the conversation.

Adrenaline is an end-to-end brand experience company serving the financial industry. We move brands and businesses ahead by delivering on every aspect of their experience across digital and physical channels, from strategy through implementation. Our multi-disciplinary team works with leadership to advise on purpose, position, culture, and retail growth strategies. We create brands people love and engage audiences from employees to customers with story-led design and insights-driven marketing; and we design and build transformative brand experiences across branch networks, leading the construction and implementation of physical spaces that drive business advantage and make the brand experience real.