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What’s in Your Customers’ Mailboxes? | Epic Research

Written by Jim Stewart Ben Brake | Dec 13, 2025, 5:00:00 AM

Three Things We’re Hearing

  • What’s in Your Customers' Mailboxes???
  • Chasing High-Net-Worth Elephants!
  • Home Equity and Education Lending Lead 2025 Growth

A four-minute read

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What’s in Your Customers' Mailboxes???

  • Despite years of “mail is dead” predictions, the channel remains the workhorse for financial services account acquisition with 8.5 billion combined banking, credit card, and mortgage & loan offers stuffing consumer mailboxes in 2023 and 2024 — and 8.1 billion pieces through October this year
  • 2025 direct mail spending for lending products has generally grown faster than other channels — including paid social, national TV, display, and online video (paid search and payments to aggregators and partners is excluded due to lack of tracking data)
  • With so much investment in direct mail across the industry, competitors are reaching for your customers, so visibility into what’s in their mailboxes provides critical context for how your offers stand up
  • Comparing what’s in your customers’ mailboxes to an industry benchmark allows you to see how much competitive pressure your customers are facing relative to the market overall
  • Competitive intensity isn’t uniform — how it shows up for your audience can provide meaningful insights to drive your unique targeting, offer, and creative strategies
  • Mailbox analysis can also highlight key market dynamics, such as the ways your customers can (or cannot) engage with competitors’ products
  • By combining mailbox analysis with deeper dives on product, offer, and creative trends, clients gain a clearer picture of the choices available to their customers, allowing them to better position their products in a crowded market

Chasing the High-Net-Worth Elephants

  • In recent years, mega-banks Chase, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells — along with super-regional banks Citizens, PNC, and Truist — have increasingly pushed their private banking and wealth management offerings
  • Private Banking was generally banking-product centric while Wealth Management was traditionally geared towards investments and financial planning, however the current market cycle has seen the convergence of the two offerings with banks increasingly embedding wealth management services into their private banking offerings to capture fee-based revenue
  • Wealth management advertising is predominantly done on television and digital channels, with direct mail accounting for less than 15% of total advertising spending
  • And while banks have become more aggressive in the market, investment and insurance firms remain the dominant advertisers
  • A review of banks in particular reveals underlying marketing themes
  • Product bundling — a client with a checking account, a mortgage, and a managed investment portfolio is far less likely to leave the bank than a client with a single deposit account
  • Heavy promotion through branch and digital channels
  • $2,000 – $5,000 cash incentives for new customers
  • Following the collapse of First Republic Bank (FRB), JPMorgan Chase acquired FRB's assets
  • Investment bank JPMorgan Private Bank generally targets clients with greater than $10 million in assets, while Chase Private Client targets the mass affluent (individuals with assets ranging from $150,000 to roughly $10 million)
  • Chase Private Client is heavily marketed through the massive retail branch network and the Chase mobile app
  • Chase is a leader in cash incentives offering up to $3,000 for new clients who upgrade to Private Client Checking and transfer $500,000 or more in qualifying new money
  • Citi's marketing strategy in 2025 involves the complete integration of its retail bank into its wealth business
  • The bank consolidated its "Citigold" and "Citigold Private Client" tiers under a single leadership structure to create a seamless continuum of service
  • This allows Citi to market a "lifelong" relationship that evolves with the client's wealth
  • Bank of America’s marketing strategy leverages the Merrill Lynch brand for investing and the Bank of America brand for banking
  • The cornerstone of BoA's marketing is the Preferred Rewards program and clients are tiered (Gold, Platinum, Platinum Honors, Diamond) based on their combined balances across banking and Merrill investing accounts
  • This system markets wealth management products to banking clients organically — a client with a large checking account is incentivized to open a Merrill Edge account to reach the next tier for credit card bonuses or mortgage discounts
  • Wells Fargo continues to rebuild its brand, using its massive branch network to market "Wells Fargo Premier," a direct competitor to Chase Private Client
  • Wells is currently marketing a $2,500 bonus for opening a Premier Checking account, contingent on bringing $250,000 in qualifying linked balances
  • Wells Fargo Advisors has been aggressive in 2025, recruiting billion-dollar teams from Merrill Lynch and other firms
  • While JPMorgan Chase acquired First Republic’s assets, Citizens Bank aggressively targeted its human capital, hiring approximately 50 senior private bankers and related support staff formerly associated with First Republic
  • Earlier steps to augment the wealth franchise include the 2019 purchase of Clarfeld Financial Advisors, a $6.6 billion registered investment advisor, with Clarfeld serving customers with at least $10 million
  • In June of this year, Citizens announced a new hire of a New York–based advisor team managing nearly $1.5 billion in client assets
  • In its 2025 earnings commentary, Citizens said the private bank is among “the best organic growth prospects of anybody in the super-regional space”, estimating the private bank would contribute roughly 7% of earnings in the current year, and noted the potential to double that contribution within three years
  • The era of the "siloed" bank customer — who has a checking account at one bank and an investment account at another — is changing
  • Bank marketing strategies of 2025 are focused on the "Converged Client," whose liquidity, credit, and investments are managed as a singular, optimized portfolio by a single institution
  • Through aggressive hiring, ecosystem integration, and record-breaking cash incentives, banks are reshaping the geography of American wealth management

Home Equity and Education Lending Lead 2025 Growth

  • Home Equity and Education Lending continue to be the leading gainers in 2025
  • Home Equity lenders seem to have finally realized that historically low levels of marketing don’t really sync with record housing wealth
  • Marketing for In-school Education Lending is rebounding after Discover’s market exit led lower-than-average advertising spending 2024
  • Despite Discover’s June exit from the Home Equity market, they remain the third largest home equity mailer for 2025; however, Aven — a relatively new player in the sector — has recently grabbed the “number one mailer” position for the past 12 months
  • Continuing the post-pandemic recovery, credit card mail volume has steadily averaged 300-350 million pieces mailed each month this year
  • FICO and Plaid have partnered to launch the “Next-Generation Cash Flow UltraFICO Score”
  • The new score combines FICOs traditional credit-data-based score with real-time cash flow data provided by Plaid
  • Credit data has long been the most powerful — by far — predictor of consumer credit-worthiness; however, adding cash-flow information should make the new score even more robust
  • JD Power reports that about half of new checking accounts are opened via “soft switching” — when a consumer opens a new account and keeps their old one
  • Chime was the largest benefactor of the trend, opening 13% of all new checking accounts
  • The BNPL sector is having a record-breaking holiday season, solidifying its place as a mainstream budgeting tool rather than just a niche payment option
  • BNPL providers drove $1.03 billion in online spend on Cyber Monday alone, a 4.2% increase year-over-year, according to data released December 2, 2025
  • Data from Afterpay, reported on December 2, 2025, showed a 10% increase in average basket size for BNPL transactions this holiday season

Thank you for reading.

Jim Stewart and Ben Brake
www.epicresearch.net

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