Inertia Ain't It

For decades, the winning strategy for retaining checking account customers has been something rather embarrassing: Inertia. Customers stayed put because the alternative was too tedious. But that hassle isn’t too big of a deal anymore. Moving money around is much quicker. Never mind closing accounts, though. Consumers tend to hold onto their original checking account and divvy up money to other accounts they determine are worth their time.

Of consumers who were actively switching institutions, Curinos, a data and technology provider, found that those with four checking relationships rose to 50% in 2024, up from 7% in 2019.

The bank account trend has been likened to paycheck motels and referred to as soft switching and silent attrition and it reveals a big shift in what is meant by earning primacy. It used to mean whoever had the checking account and direct deposit. Now, the coveted spot is becoming where a person goes to see and act on most of their financial life. “It's changing from a primary banking relationship to a primary banking interface,” wrote Jordan Wright, Atomic’s co-founder and CEO in a LinkedIn post.

In recent weeks, it’s become one of the liveliest areas of banking, as new competitors reshape what consumers expect from the experience. Consumers are turning to LLMs to answer their personal financial questions and newer account options are popping up like dandelions this year. One of the latest contenders is extra splashy. Elon Musk’s X Money launched in late July with its partner, Cross River Bank. It lets X Premium and Premium+ members access banking services, providing yet another place to plop their direct deposit to do things like send money to anyone on X or pay their bills, and earn up to 6% APY on their parked cash.

It speaks to something that’s been happening for some time. In the What’s Going On in Banking midyear report, Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors, argued that the idea of a core deposit is more of an illusion at a time when money becomes even more dramatically mobile. As Shevlin argues, “Stop managing deposits as if inertia is a strategy. For decades, friction was one of banking's most profitable products. Deposits stayed because moving them wasn't worth the effort. Programmable money eliminates the friction.”

It’s among the reasons why the next few years stand to be juicy. Already, consumers can use AI agents to purchase stuff. Consider how Robinhood started in May letting customers bring their AI agents from another platform into Robinhood to trade stocks and make credit card purchases, for example. It’s easy to imagine another scenario: an AI agent moving money to earn a higher yield or secure the best bank bonus. In J.P. Morgan Chase’s Q1 2026 earnings transcript, the bank discussed an early-stage AI tool it’s testing to allocate money from checking accounts into products that pay a higher yield. It’s not live. The bank frames it as a tool targeted at a small subset of its clients with investments. In August, an early-stage startup Rivo announced it raised $3.1 million in funding and is already letting checking account customers use the app to automatically move money into Treasury bills and back when bills are due. It even pitches itself as the solution for “the inertia tax.”

It’s early days. And that’s not to say everyone will want to outsource their money decisions. Some consumers still use cash over a bank app, let alone an agent. According to MX’s latest survey of more than 1,000 consumers, only 32% said they were likely to use an AI agent to switch accounts into a better option, ranking at the lowest of the nine options listed.

The idea of bank hopping could easily prove fanciful because it can’t solve for indifference. As Greg Palmer, vice president of strategy and host at Finovate, said in his Yours in Finance questionnaire: “They kind of default into a primary banking relationship... next thing you know, it's 20 years later, and I'm still banking with them because of a decision that I made in 30 seconds, two decades ago."

Palmer speaks from experience. Earlier in his career, he worked in marketing at a bank and saw firsthand that people opened checking accounts at a place where you’d think other things would occupy their mind: booths at community fairs.

When I worked at Bankrate, I observed something similar in a different direction: Teammates expressed surprise at how many consumers didn’t chase higher savings rates when they could. There, they were forgetting how messy life is and that most of us aren’t looking to do anything that sounds like sorting a junk drawer. And value, well, it’s subjective to a person. Who cares about chasing rates when there is only a few hundred, if that, socked away.

And yet, any experience that quickens a task when time is elusive? That’s enticing.

Consider Chime Invest, for example. Instead of asking members to spend time deciding what to invest in, they can outsource that decision to an expert-managed portfolio. If they wish to take on the work, they can buy stock and ETFs themselves. For Chime Prime members, it’s free and it gives one more reason to stick with an app that already has their direct deposit.

Chime also happens to already excel at wooing all kinds of new customers, and in a recent release, said the average number of engagements is an eye-popping five times a day.

According to Shevlin’s research, fintech companies – including Chime as well as PayPal, Venmo, SoFi and Cash App – opened 56 percent of new checking and payment accounts in 2025, up from 36 percent in 2020. Never mind all the new kinds of companies getting or vying for charters in 2026.

To remain primary nowadays requires enhancing consumers’ financial lives in new ways that save them time and money, often. That means retention is about giving them more reasons to stay, not making it harder to leave.