Originally published in The Financial Brand, May 2026
The competitive frame for retail banking has shifted, and for most institutions it has shifted faster than their loyalty and relationship programs have been able to keep up.
The most-watched consumer financial relationships of the last five years are not anchored on fee schedules. They are anchored on visible, dynamic value: what the customer has, what it earns them, and what the next step unlocks.
Retail banks are responding in three directions:
- paid subscription tiers
- earned rewards programs, and
- reimagined membership models.
The problem: Most are under delivering, not because the commercial model is wrong, but because the infrastructure underneath it cannot give customers dynamic visibility into how the bank recognizes and rewards the depth of their relationship.
What this means: The same gap shows up across all three. Customers deepen their relationship with a bank, adding products, consolidating balances, making the bank their primary — and get little or no recognition for it.
That is the problem worth solving.
Need to Know:
- Paid subscription, earned tiers, and membership programs are packaging choices for the same underlying product: dynamic visibility into how the bank values, recognizes and rewards your loyalty and depth of the relationship. The model matters less than the institution’s ability to make that value visible.
- The most consequential distinction in earned-tier design is one most banks have not consciously made: balance-based programs reward relationship size, while behavior-based programs reward relationship depth. Treating them as interchangeable means underserving both objectives at once.
- The institutions getting this right can show the whole customer relationship back to the customer in plain language: what they have, what it earns them, and what one more product or behavior changes. Customers who clearly understand the value of the relationship they have built rarely move it somewhere else.
Three Core Models, One Underlying Challenge
Paid subscription is the most legible model. Revolut pioneered it in its UK home market, building five tiers that let customers self-select into the perks and benefits they valued most, regardless of total balance. That approach did two things at once: it created a meaningful recurring revenue stream and generated a self-selected set of cohorts that told Revolut exactly what their customers value. A Revolut customer can name the tier they are on and explain what it earns them. That clarity is the product, as much as any feature behind it. With global success now driving US expansion, the model has become the clearest playbook in market.
Wealthsimple is instructive precisely because it changed course. After scaling a paid subscription model with a digitally native Canadian audience, it pivoted toward rapid AUM growth, rebuilding the program as earned relationship tiers tied to total deposits and assets. Customers were willing to deepen the whole customer relationship, but not necessarily to subscribe to it directly. Wealthsimple’s assets under administration reached $124.8B in Q1 2026, up 71% year over year, a trajectory that validated the pivot decisively.
Earned tiers are the dominant US approach. They are designed for institutions that need to serve the broadest possible customer base, with low enrollment friction, rewards from day one, and a visible path to more benefits as the relationship grows.
What makes the model especially powerful at large banks is the breadth of products behind it. Every new product a customer adds deepens the relationship, and a deeper relationship unlocks more, creating a complementary cycle across deposits, lending, and everyday banking that fintechs with narrower product ecosystems struggle to match at scale. Bank of America Preferred Rewards, now BofA Rewards, is one of the largest loyalty programs in U.S. banking. PNC’s newly-launched TotalRewards and U.S. Bank’s Smartly operate on the same logic.
Chime takes the earned-tier model in a different direction. Set up direct deposit and a single qualifying deposit of $200, or $400 total per month, unlocks Chime Plus. $3,000 per month unlocks Chime Prime, with exclusive rewards and perks. These tiers are gated on behavior, not total balance. Chime markets them as membership tiers; functionally, they are earned tiers that reward the act of making Chime your primary bank.
Credit union membership is foundational at signup and largely invisible after. Credit unions hold the strongest legal claim to a relationship-based model in financial services. Most don’t communicate value they provide to members clearly, e.g., via digital channel widgets and dashboard.
Navy Federal members collectively saved nearly $21 million on Home Equity Loan closing costs in 2025 alone, and the average credit union paid $264 per member in dividends in 2024. These are meaningful numbers. Most members will never know them, because no one told them. That is the missed opportunity: not the benefit itself, but the failure to make its value visible.
A paid subscription, an earned tier, and a membership program are different packaging choices for the same underlying product: making relationship value visible in ways customers can understand and act on.
The Shared Challenge
Across all three models, the challenge shows up the same way. The program exists, but the customer does not clearly see its value.
A high-tier earned-tier customer who does not know their tier carries the same retention risk as a customer who has never qualified, because neither has been given a reason to consolidate further. A subscriber who cannot name what their fee delivers will cancel at the next renewal. A credit union member who has never been shown how much they have saved in fees, earned in cash back, or benefited from a rate discount has no experiential reason to deepen the relationship.
The bank sees the customer. The customer does not see the relationship. That is where programs quietly underperform, regardless of how sound the underlying commercial logic is.
The Distinction Worth Getting Right
Inside the earned-tier category sits what may be the single most important design choice a bank can make, and most institutions are making it by default rather than by design.
Balance-based programs reward how wealthy a customer already is. The model works through clear milestones: reach $25,000 in total relationship balances and unlock Gold, reach $100,000 and unlock the next tier. That structure creates a virtuous cycle. Customers have a concrete goal to work toward, and each milestone unlocks a set of new, visible benefits that make the next step feel worth taking. The best implementations add personalized choices at each tier, so what unlocks feels relevant, not generic.
Behavior-based programs reward relationship depth being actively built. The key difference is accessibility. A customer can reach primary status within a single pay cycle the moment their direct deposit switches, rather than waiting to accumulate a balance that may feel years away. Balance-based tiers are retention tools for customers who have already consolidated. Behavior-based tiers are the faster path to primacy for customers who have not.
For credit unions, this choice is especially consequential. The member-owner model was designed around relationship depth, not asset thresholds. A credit union that rewards behaviors such as direct deposit, bill pay, and cross-product adoption over balance alone is closer to the original logic of what membership is supposed to mean. Few are operationalizing it yet.
The institutions getting this right have built three things working together:
- A unified data layer across balances, behavior, products held, and lifecycle stage, so the bank can see the whole customer in real time rather than product by product.
- Decisioning logic that translates that view into a live tier position and benefit set, updated as the relationship changes rather than reviewed quarterly.
- A customer-facing experience that surfaces the value clearly and consistently, without the member having to go looking for it.
That last point is where most programs fall short, and where the opportunity is largest. In the past, fee rebates, cash back earned, and mortgage discounts quietly accumulated in the background. Customers never knew how much value they were receiving because no one showed them. Banks that have changed this, putting relationship value front and center through digital dashboards, monthly benefit summaries, or a running cash-back ticker that pays out visibly each month, consistently see higher satisfaction and stronger retention. Watching that daily ticker go up and then seeing that cash deposit hit the account is tangible. Customers who experience that rarely move their accounts somewhere else.
Banks that have not solved this tend to frame it as a technology gap. In practice it is a data and decisioning problem, and it sits at the heart of whether whole customer loyalty is a real operating model or a line in a strategy presentation.
The Real Holy Grail
The starting point is clearer than most banks make it: choose a model, operate it effectively, and make relationship value visible in ways customers immediately understand.
For banks with both retail and business customers, the journey does not stop at the personal relationship. A business owner who banks personally and runs their company through the same institution is giving the bank both wallets. If those two relationships live in separate programs with no visible connection, neither is being fully recognized. Connecting retail and business relationship programs remains one of the most underdeveloped opportunities in banking today.
Bottom line: Subscription banking is ultimately a relationship strategy first, and a pricing strategy second. Customers rarely deepen relationships because a fee structure changed. They deepen them when they can clearly see the value of the relationship and what the next step unlocks. The institutions that operationalize that visibility well will not only retain customers more effectively but redefine what loyalty looks like in modern banking.
