As we come to the end of the year, it is an excellent time to review annual key performance metrics. An important one that I am not sure most banks track is customer attrition rate. I’m not talking just about total customers who closed accounts (although that is a good stat to know …). The stat to pay attention to is how well your institution is doing in attracting and keeping younger customers. To make this metric effective, you have to have one thing: a customer’s birth date, which I am confident you have for all customers. Take that birth date and do two tasks. Create a report of all customers whose accounts closed in or went dormant in 2025 with birthdates of 1964 or earlier. Then create a report of all customers who opened an account in 2025 with birthdates of 2002 or later. Compare those two reports and figure out the net gain or loss by the extremes of the generations. In addition, create a third report that tracks every new account opened in the past five years (regardless of birthdate) that closed their account within one year of its opening. This report represents likely dissatisfaction with some element of the customer experience. The issue of attrition is one that should be strategic for your institution. Knowing that customers are closing accounts soon after they are opened could show a problem exists, but how would you know the cause? It could have been a rude experience with an employee, a dispute over a transaction or dissatisfaction about the online / mobile feature set. Only by doing follow up with each closed account and digging deeper into why accounts are closed will you be able to ascertain whether there is a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. There will always be closed accounts. Life changes like moving, marriage, divorce and the like all can be reasons for closing accounts. But suppose your analysis of closed accounts showed a significant number attributed to a single issue, like a bad customer experience. Would you put into place some remediation to correct that systemic issue? Of course! Similarly, if you saw new signups from younger customers who subsequently closed accounts and the reason was they did not like the mobile experience, you would need to remediate that also. It might take a longer process than employee re-training but be none the less important. Concerning the ration of younger new accounts to lost accounts from the older generations, you need to think of this in two ways. First, if you don’t add at least as many accounts as you lose, your number of accounts will steadily dwindle. This would exacerbate the second issue: the account balances of the new, younger accounts are significantly less on average than what baby boomers and super seniors keep on balance. Meaning you need more than just a one-to-one exchange of young to old account holders. It may be that you need five to eight younger accounts to offset the deposits of just one lost older customer. Once this metric becomes a strategic marker for you, you would enact specific tactical actions that beef up the marketing to younger prospective customers, which interestingly dovetails back to how robust your virtual branch solution is. The online and mobile banking features that you offer is a mission critical element for younger customers. Remember, they are tech critics not tech adopters. If they check out your digital branch and find it wanting, they may not engage at all. Or they will open an account but very quickly abandon it if the online experience does not meet or exceed their expectations. You may never know who chose not to open an account because of an inadequate virtual branch solution, but you can — and should — know if that is why someone closes an account. A recent article in The Financial Brand touched on this subject. It referenced the need to perform a graph analysis that would evaluate the underlying data on customer activity to identify attrition elements traditional analytics can miss. These elements include: Silent Attrition: Identifying disengaged customers before accounts are closed. Bank-driven Attrition: Pinpointing where service failures, high fees, or poor product design create dissatisfaction. Network Contagion: Understanding how exits spread across households and peer groups. Event-driven Attrition: Anticipating life changes such as relocation, retirement, or a new job before they trigger churn. Journey Gaps: Detecting broken onboarding or digital experiences hidden in silos. The author of the article goes on to identify specific actions the institution could take based on the results of the graph analysis. I encourage you to inspect the actions documented, you can find the article here. Whether you take any of these specific steps will depend on what your graph analysis results are and how specific actions align with your strategic plan. No matter the specific of your strategy, acquiring and keeping younger customers has to be a focus or there is not a long-term future for the institution. The FB article ends with this: “Customer attrition is not random; it is predictable, preventable, and relational.” Start the new year with steps that will reveal attrition’s predictability for your institution. Once you have identified areas causing attrition, create actions that address and remediate the issue to make future attrition preventable. Finally, create a bank-wide notification system that enables anyone at any level to make note of and report a relationship (or behavioral) event. This last step could be someone announcing they are engaged, a business that is planning to expand out of your service area or a grandparent talking about a grandchild planning a fundraising event. There are many, many more examples of where an offhand comment could be the insight to a relational issue that if collated and analyzed, might enable your institution to be proactive in providing the appropriate banking services at the optimal time to best serve an existing or new customer. Digging deeper and getting very smart about how you gather and analyze data will be the secret behind your future success!