Money 20/20 built its 2026 agenda around four pillars: Borderless Financial Architecture, Technology as the Great Equalizer, Partnerships as the Engine to Scale, and Brave New World. Put those together and the industry is telling you where it expects growth to come from now: data, technology, and who you’re connected to.
The third pillar is likely the one banks underestimate walking in. It’s also the one that matters the most.
Banks Have Data. The Real Opportunity Starts Beyond Their Four Walls
Bank transaction data is full of untapped value. Banks use it constantly, for fraud, for compliance, for understanding their own customers. But what most banks don’t do is use it beyond their own walls to unlock additional value.
Most banks still treat transaction data as an operational asset, not a growth one. Traditional card-linked offers don’t move the needle. They’re generic, low-value, and rarely reach the customers who actually need a reason to stay, inactive cardholders, infrequent spenders, likely attritors.
The fix isn’t more data. It’s bank-optimized commerce: insights-driven incentives funded by merchants, built around the initiatives that actually matter to banks, cardholder activation, retention, deposit growth, loan expansion. In this model, transaction data stops sitting in a warehouse and becomes a measurable growth lever.
The Missing Link: A Partner That Connects Data, Demand, and Dollars
A strategic partner brings together strong brand and agency relationships with sophisticated technology, data management, and analytics to extend the value of bank data beyond the bank’s four walls. By turning aggregated transaction data into insights that marketers pay for, the partner generates revenue to fund personalized cardholder incentives.
Using advanced technology and analytics, the partner then segments cardholders and delivers relevant incentives at scale—think bank products and services tailored to each customer’s lifestyle or life stage.
The result is a sustainable model that creates value for marketers and cardholders while delivering outsized returns for banks.
This isn’t theoretical. With a leading card issuer, this model moved from framework to results at scale. One example program:
- 9.9 million customers targeted.
- 755,000 exposed to personalized incentives.
- 187,000 responded to the incentive.
- The result: $266 million in incremental spend, $352 in incremental spend per exposed card over twelve months against a matched control group.
- All incentives behind that lift were funded by Affinity Solutions, not the issuer.
That’s the mechanism this argument rests on, made concrete. The lift held across every segment tested: new spenders, attritors, inactive cardholders, and consecutive spenders at three, six, and twelve months, is the difference between a program that works for one audience on paper and one that functions as real infrastructure.
What This Means Heading Into Vegas
Banks walking the show floor this October will hear plenty of pitches about proprietary platforms and closed-loop ecosystems. Some of them will represent real innovation. But the banks that will leave an impression and pave the way forward won’t be the ones with the most impressive tech stack slide. They’ll be the ones who can point to a live partnership and say: here’s what happened when we connected verified spending data to a partner who could act on it, and here’s the lift to prove it.
