New findings reveal significant differences between the most advanced cohorts
Alkami Technology, Inc., a leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions in the U.S., announced the release of the 2025 Update to the Retail Digital Sales & Service Maturity Model in collaboration with financial services influencer Jim Marous and Emerald Research Group. The report – based on proprietary research surveying over 200 U.S. financial institutions with a minimum asset size of $200M – offers a fresh benchmark for digital maturity in banking, with emerging performance distinctions in security and fraud, the employee experience, and data and artificial intelligence (AI).
“Digital maturity is quickly becoming the single most important driver of growth and efficiency in banking,” said Jim Marous, owner and chief executive officer of the Digital Banking Report. “The widening gap between the leaders and their less mature peers is foundational to how these institutions are strategically aligning culture, strategy, and technology to meet rising expectations across every channel.”
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The research segments financial institutions into four maturity stages, measuring comprehensive benchmarks across readiness and implementation of digital strategies. These cohorts remain the same as originally released in 2024, as do key findings showing the most digitally mature institutions reporting significantly higher revenue growth and institutional size alone not determining an institution’s maturity.
Findings include:
- One-third of the most mature institutions have less than $500M in assets, while 13% of the least mature have more than $5B in assets.
- Digital maturity continues to be highly correlated to growth, with the most advanced institutions reporting up to 5x higher annual average revenue growth than their less mature peers.
- AI is creating a widening performance gap with 42% of the most digitally mature institutions actively using generative AI at some level across their organization, compared to 26% of the least mature.
- The most mature institutions have advanced data architectures that support effective AI implementation, where 67% can automatically push targeted marketing to their account holders.
- Fraud mitigation practices and cybersecurity defense measures vary widely between the two most digitally mature segments, Digital-Forward and Data-First, with the former emerging as leaders in fraud prevention and the latter distinctly offering consumer incentives to improve cybersecurity posture.
- Digital-Forward and Data-First institutions have significantly more intuitive administrative interfaces for their employees, with 38% and 53% respectively reporting their digital banking admin consoles are more intuitive than other technologies in their stack.
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“Today’s most digitally mature institutions are accelerating their AI adoption by leveraging advanced data capabilities, while also redefining ‘user experience’ to include employees within the workflow,” said Allison Cerra, chief marketing officer at Alkami. “These advancements—paired with a more progressive risk posture—are helping them widen their lead. Yet, the data shows this remains a fluid market. Any institution, regardless of size, can turn digital maturity into a competitive edge, and we hope this update offers valuable insights to do just that.”