By Sammy Fiorino
In November of 2025, the American Bankers Association surveyed 130 bank marketers to understand how banks are currently using data analytics, specifically for marketing purposes.
The findings indicate that bank marketers continue to expand their use of data as expectations around measurement, personalization and performance accountability grow. While ownership structures, confidence levels and integration complexity continue to evolve, organizations are steadily building the infrastructure and experience needed to support more advanced applications such as personalization and marketing attribution. As capabilities mature, data offers marketers a meaningful opportunity to further strengthen credibility and clearly demonstrate marketing’s impact within their institutions.
Current state of data analytics oversight and use
As banks expand their use of data-driven strategies, ownership of data and analytics responsibilities has evolved. In 2025, 28% of bank marketers reported overseeing the data and analytics function, down from 36% in 2024. This continues a multi-year decline from pre-2024 levels, when nearly 50% of marketers reported direct ownership of data analytics. This trend indicates that data and analytics responsibilities are increasingly shifting outside of marketing, though the specific ownership structure varies by institution.
Beyond ownership structure, the frequency of data use offers additional insight into how analytics supports day-to-day marketing decisions. Overall, marketers appear to be using data more frequently, as the share reporting yearly data use declined from 15.19% to 7.45%. The most common frequency was 32.98% of respondents, indicating that they rely on data to inform marketing decisions monthly.
Full-time employees in the data function
Most banks operate with very small data teams. Nearly half of respondents (48%) report having two or fewer dedicated data employees, while the most common team size is three to five employees (29.3%). Only 23% of banks report having data teams of more than 5 people.
This distribution suggests that, for most institutions, data capabilities remain lean and centralized, with responsibilities likely distributed across broader roles rather than supported by large, specialized teams. Additionally, 5% of banks report having no dedicated data personnel, indicating that data analytics may be outsourced, embedded within other departments or managed across departments rather than supported by a dedicated, standalone team.
Data accuracy, confidence and usage readiness
Confidence in data accuracy remains a key factor in how data is applied to day-to-day initiatives. In 2025, the majority of marketers rate their confidence as either neutral or confident, accounting for just under 70% of responses. Overall confidence levels were relatively stable year over year. However, the percentage of respondents reporting uncertainty rose from 10% in 2024 to 18% in 2025, while the share who were very uncertain decreased from 5.1% to 3.0%.
As marketers seek to increase the frequency and sophistication of data use, the lack of growth in the confident and very confident categories helps explain why usage patterns remain largely unchanged. Confidence in sourcing, governance and accuracy remains closely tied to how comfortably teams can rely on data for more frequent or more advanced applications.
Strategic growth use cases
In 2025, 28.5% of respondents report being in the data strategy formulation phase, down from more than 41% in 2024, indicating continued movement beyond early-stage planning. Despite this progress, only 9.7% of respondents report using data to customize interactions at the individual customer level, highlighting limited adoption of more advanced data-driven applications.
This gap aligns with execution challenges reported by marketers. Difficulty integrating data across systems is cited as the most significant barrier to implementing data initiatives, suggesting that infrastructure complexity continues to shape customer-level activation. Data is most commonly housed in CRM systems (52.6%) and data warehouses (38.9%), reflecting a mix of operational and centralized environments that require cross-platform coordination. As a result, progress toward advanced-use cases such as personalization remains uneven despite broader strategic maturity.
Satisfaction with using data to link marketing and sales
Marketers report relatively low satisfaction with their organization’s ability to use data to connect marketing activities to sales outcomes. Just over 26% of respondents report being satisfied or somewhat satisfied, while the majority report neutral or lower satisfaction.
The limited ability to link marketing activities to sales outcomes represents one of the most significant constraints on marketing credibility and investment justification.
Customer-centric applications of data
Bank marketers are applying data analytics across a wide range of strategic and operational use cases, with a clear emphasis on customer-facing initiatives. The top three reported use cases for data and analytics are customer relationship deepening, customer communication, and customer experience. This concentration indicates that banks are prioritizing customer engagement and relationship growth over efforts focused solely on improving internal workflows, such as cleaning customer data or automating reporting.
The emphasis on customer-facing applications suggests that data is being leveraged as a strategic tool to improve personalization, relevance and service delivery. In practical terms, this implies that banks view analytics as a driver of customer value creation and competitive differentiation, reinforcing the role of data-driven marketing in supporting growth and relationship expansion.
Overall, the findings highlight steady progress in banks’ data strategy development, alongside opportunities to further strengthen infrastructure, integration and measurement capabilities. More than half of respondents (55.6%) plan to expand their data and analytics functions over the next three years, signaling continued organizational commitment to growth in this area.
As organizations continue to formalize data governance models and clarify cross-functional responsibilities, marketing teams will be better positioned to access trusted data, align with sales and demonstrate measurable business impact.
Sammy Fiorino is a marketing consultant and project manager at Capital Performance Group, a strategic consulting firm that helps financial institutions maximize the ROI of their marketing efforts. She can be reached on LinkedIn or at [email protected].
