Silent Attrition: 5 Ways Primary Banks Can Combat the Threat

UPDATED APRIL 2026

Silent attrition happens when bank customers fragment their financial activity across multiple institutions without ever formally leaving their primary bank. It’s hard to detect because the account stays open, but the revenue quietly drains away. With neobanks growing rapidly and the average retail bank customer now holding three deposit accounts at different institutions, this is a problem that affects every customer segment regardless of age or income. Banks that invest in advisory relationships, strong digital experiences, personalized engagement, loyalty programs, and consistent new-account marketing can slow the bleed and deepen the relationships they still have.

Your customer didn’t leave. They didn’t close their account or file a complaint. But at some point, they started depositing their paycheck with a neobank, opened a high-yield savings account with another provider, and now only use your institution for the checking account they’ve had since college. Sound familiar? This is silent attrition, and it’s one of the biggest threats facing primary banks today. The JD Power 2026 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study found that the average retail bank customer now maintains three deposit accounts at different institutions, a trend JD Power calls “soft switching.” The account stays open, but the relationship is hollowing out.

What Is Silent Attrition?

Silent attrition, also referred to as silent switching or silent churn, is when customers of a bank fragment their banking activities by using secondary institutions for financial services offered by their primary institution. This growing phenomenon is tough to detect because the customer doesn’t close their account at their main institution, so unlike when a customer moves their account from one primary bank to another, the losses incurred from silent switching are more gradual and frequently fly under the radar.

Why are More Bank Customers Fragmenting Their Financial Relationships Than Before?

There are multiple reasons for this, but the single largest factor is how our financial system has evolved with the rise of neobanks. A neobank is a fintech firm that offers the ability to make various financial activities highly convenient through online apps, software, and other technologies. Neobanks don’t have physical locations but instead compete based on better rates, lower fees, and online convenience.

According to The Business Research Company’s 2026 Neobanking Global Market Report, the global neobank market grew from approximately $383 billion in 2025 to $552 billion in 2026. In the U.S., Chime has become the dominant player with over 22 million customers and more than $1.25 billion in revenue in 2025. Globally, neobank users are expected to reach 350 million by 2026, with millennials and Gen Z making up 78% of the user base. Many of the largest neobanks have become well-known names in the industry. Nubank, based in Brazil, remains the largest in the world with over 110 million users, while Chime leads the North American market.

The rise of neobanks has dovetailed with growing pressure on traditional banks to keep customers engaged. While the JD Power 2025 study showed an 11-point jump in overall satisfaction and a 3-point increase in Net Promoter Scores, the 2026 study revealed cracks forming at key touchpoints, with satisfaction declining across phone, branch, online, and automated channels in the second half of the year. The pandemic accelerated digital expectations, and while in-person branch visits have rebounded, customers’ standards for digital experience were permanently raised.

What Customer Segments Are Affected by Silent Attrition?

It would be easy to assume that this trend is more prominent with younger generations since they don’t have as long-standing of relationships with their main financial institution and are likely to value digital experience more than their older counterparts. However, the data paints a very different picture. Based on a study from Bain Retail Banking, the age bracket that’s by far the most likely to have exactly one financial services provider is 18-24. That may not be surprising given where they are in their financial journey, but what is surprising is that there’s very little difference in terms of the percentage of respondents with one financial institution across all other age brackets in the study.

This trend has only accelerated since Bain’s 2023 findings. JD Power’s 2026 data reinforces what Bain found in 2023: this behavior is widespread and accelerating. Satisfaction scores declined across multiple service channels in the second half of the 2026 study period, suggesting that even banks making progress on the basics are losing ground during the interactions that matter most. The fragmentation is a systemic shift in how people relate to their financial institutions, and it cuts across every demographic.

5 Ways Primary Banks Can Combat Silent Attrition

1. Good advice and guidance

There’s no replacement for being a trusted advisor to your clients. Consistently offering knowledgeable guidance at touchpoints that are in the client’s best interest builds trust and loyalty. While this begins at the one-to-one personal level, reaping the full benefit of your expertise in doing this extends beyond these direct communications. Savvy financial institutions do a great job of displaying their capabilities in this arena by taking it online in the form of digital self-help resources they make available to customers as well as prospective ones.

Another great tactic is to compile customer testimonials of clients who have benefitted from your guidance. These can be written or in video form. Smart use of such digital assets helps curate more new account relationships that start with the expectation of an advisory relationship versus viewing your service as a commodity. This is how you make new accounts see you as more than an interest rate.

2. Strong digital experience

No, digital experience isn’t the only reason people use a neobank. But trying to beat them purely on rates and fees isn’t a winning strategy. The next best line of defense is to offer a comparable digital experience. This means intuitive, convenient, consistent, and secure.

Intuitive

Users shouldn’t need to review documentation, spend time clicking around aimlessly, or converse with a chatbot to carry out basic digital banking activities. When evaluating the intuitiveness of your digital experience, it’s important to extend your analysis to any off-domain experiences you offer through 3rd-party partnerships.

Convenient

Convenience is the very reason customers demand digital banking tools in the first place. They need to be able to access their funds whether they’re at home, in the office, or traveling. Ensuring that most users can carry out the activity they set out to accomplish in the channel they started in is critical. The second they must jump from their computer to their phone and back again can be all it takes for them to lose their patience.

Consistent

This one is severalfold. First off, whether a user is on a desktop computer or mobile device, they should be able to enjoy a good experience that’s not drastically different based on their advice. Secondly, regardless of whether they’re on your website, in your mobile app, or receiving an email from you, it should all look and feel similar. They shouldn’t be asking themselves, “Is this really my bank, or is this a scam?”

Secure

The importance of preventing cybersecurity breaches as a financial institution goes without saying. But this is about more than just addressing your vulnerabilities. It also gives people peace of mind all the time. Communications that display the lengths you go to in order to keep customers’ finances safe can go a long way. The other side of the fence is arming your customers with the knowledge needed to make sure they’re doing their part as well.

Blog posts and other resources you make available that provide tips on identifying scams and phishing attempts help display how seriously your institution takes risk management against fraud.The rise in fraud we’ve witnessed in recent years has made many consumers more conscientious than ever about the security of their financial assets. According to 2025 industry data, security breaches at legacy banks caused 19% of Gen Z to explore switching to a digital bank, and 57% of Gen Z ranked identity and credit protection as their top concern when choosing where to bank.

3. Personalize the experience

For most users of financial services, we’ve moved past a time when they worried about how much of their data their bank has and into a place where it’s expected. But with that expectation comes the expectation that it will be used in a way that benefits the customer as well. At a minimum, this means tailoring your cross-selling activities to the customer’s financial behaviors. Ideally, it also means tailoring their self-serve digital experience as well. Smarter use of customer data is a mutually beneficial activity for the institution and the customer. From your perspective, it helps improve customer loyalty and the hit rate of cross-selling tactics and can help you head off silent switching based on your customers’ financial behavior indicators. For your customers, you’re making their experience more efficient, not inundating them with off-target promotional messages, and providing more tailored advice.

4. Loyalty reward programs

Loyalty reward programs can offer a lot of creative ways to prevent silent switching while also building customer loyalty. It’s important to think beyond deposit balance for reward programs. Consider rewarding customers with incentives for interactions rather than making your reward methodology only about dollars. Criteria such as the number of times a customer uses their debit card or the number of times they log in to their online banking account during the month, regardless of transaction totals, can be an effective way to keep them engaged from a usage perspective and displays that you value them for more than just their account balance.

5. Keep filling the bucket from the top with effective marketing

While the above-mentioned tactics can help primary banks decrease the impact of silent switching, it’s completely unrealistic to expect to stop it entirely. This is an area where effective marketing can make a big difference by helping to add new accounts to offset losses. Having a strong promotion plan, a targeted paid media spend, and an impactful organic search strategy can make all the difference. It’s imperative that these elements work in combination with one another as well as with your other channels within your communications ecosystem, such as social media.

From early-stage consideration to an online presence during the phase when a potential customer is doing their research on rates and making sure the right person sees your promotional rate at the right time, it frequently takes several key touch points before acquiring a new depositor account. Having the right plan in place, tracking key metrics, and optimizing as you go are critical to driving new bank accounts.

Is Silent Attrition Costing You More Than You Realize?

Combating silent attrition requires coordination across a lot of marketing disciplines: CRM, paid media, public relations, social media, SEO, and more. That’s a lot to manage internally, especially if you’re trying to move quickly. A marketing partner with financial services experience can help you connect those pieces and build a retention strategy that keeps customers engaged before they quietly walk away.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Silent attrition occurs when customers shift banking activity to secondary institutions without closing their primary account, making losses gradual and hard to detect.
• The average retail bank customer now maintains three deposit accounts at different institutions, according to JD Power’s 2026 study.
• Neobank growth is a major driver, with the global market reaching $552 billion in 2026 and platforms like Chime surpassing 22 million U.S. customers.
• Silent attrition affects all demographics; Bain research shows that income level has little bearing on neobank adoption, and fragmentation is consistent across age brackets beyond the 18–24 group.
• Being a trusted advisor through one-on-one guidance and digital self-help resources builds the kind of loyalty that rate competition alone can’t match.
• Loyalty programs that reward engagement (logins, debit card usage) rather than account balances keep customers actively using your platform and reduce the likelihood of quiet defection.