How to make your next technology investment produce measurable growth

Community banks are investing in technology at a pace the industry has not seen before. Nearly half of bank executives expect technology budgets to rise by 40 percent or more this year, and close to one in five anticipate increases above 60 percent. .Growth is the reason. The American Bankers Association's Community Bank CEO Priorities for 2026 survey, drawn from 362 senior officers at institutions under $3 billion in assets, found that 73 percent are prioritizing organic growth in their local markets, with core deposit growth named as the greatest threat to their growth prospects. Since 87 percent of checking accounts are tied to an active digital user, conversion at branch and online levels are key factors to growth and deposit acquisition.Increased spending and current priorities point in the same direction, while results across the industry remain strikingly uneven. McKinsey found that only 30 percent of banks that have undergone a digital transformation report successfully implementing their digital strategy, with the majority falling short of the objectives they set for themselves. Banks routinely attribute that gap to budget. McKinsey's own observation is that institutions that allocated significant resources to transformation still struggled to execute, which points to something other than money determining the outcome.The budget explanation does not hold upThe reason is partly inherited, because technology gets purchased in the way peer group benchmarking taught the industry to purchase it. A bank sizes its options by asset tier, sets a budget band based on what institutions of similar size spend, shortlists the vendors that fit inside it, and manages the rest of the decision as an implementation project. The approach produces a defensible board recommendation and a familiar reference list.It also assumes banks of similar size want similar things from the same product, which rarely holds. A $400 million bank whose board has committed to small business deposit growth over the next three years will use an origination platform very differently than a $4 billion bank that bought one because its peers had. Budget determines what a bank can buy, and leadership intent determines what the bank does with what it bought.Cornerstone Advisors documented the same pattern in its 2026 Digital Banking Performance Metrics report. Institutions running the same tools are producing meaningfully different outcomes, which suggests competitive advantage now comes from removing friction and acting on behavioral data rather than from acquiring capability.What actually gets measured at Go-LiveIf the same tools can produce opposite results, how a bank measures the decision matters more than the decision itself. Ask a community bank executive how the last major technology purchase went and the answer usually involves a date. It launched in the second quarter. It came in close to budget. Nobody missed the deadline. Those are project facts, and they describe execution of a plan rather than movement in the business.Cornerstone’s data shows what that distinction costs. For every digital checking account opened in 2025, financial institutions lost an average of 3.36 applications to abandonment, amounting to roughly 8,900 missed accounts per institution. Institutions at the 75th percentile are losing more accounts to abandonment than they complete. Those are banks with digital account opening in production, launched on schedule, reported to the board as delivered.The same report found that banks consistently underdelivered against their own platform investment plans. As an example, only a portion of those that planned a consumer digital platform replacement in 2025 followed through on it.Leadership intent is the variableThat gap gets established well before launch day. Banks that generate a measurable return treat a technology purchase as an occasion to examine the process it touches. They inventory every manual step in origination, separate the steps that exist for regulatory reasons from the steps that exist because a person has always performed them, and rebuild what remains. That requires operations, compliance, and lending in the same room several times before anything gets configured.The work is painstaking for a bank of any size, and it is the closest thing this industry has to a reliable predictor of whether an investment shows up in funded accounts. McKinsey's large-scale IT project research, spanning two decades, traced most of the shortfall in these projects to organizational and cultural execution rather than to the software.Business account opening is where the difference becomes most visible. Entity structures, beneficial ownership collection, and business verification requirements defeat any flow built as a consumer application with additional fields. A smaller bank that has thought carefully about how a two-owner LLC moves through its process will outperform a much larger one that bought a capable platform and configured it quickly to protect a launch date.Most of the work belongs to the bankProtecting that date is where good intent most often gets spent. Time to value belongs in the business case, because a cheaper platform that takes a year to launch costs more than its contract suggests. Beyond that, a launch date measures project management.In a well-run implementation, most of the schedule goes to decisions only the bank can make. Which products go on the platform first. How disclosures are handled. What the back office workflow looks like when applications arrive. How branch and call center staff are trained to route customers into a digital channel rather than around it.Defer those decisions to protect the launch date, and the platform goes live running the process it was bought to replace. The date is met and the bank has automated a workflow nobody examined.Four numbers that keep an investment accountableThat same lack of examination extends to the spending itself. Nearly two thirds of bank executives report that they lack full visibility into total technology spending, with costs distributed across departments, vendors, and legacy systems. Growth accountability tends to be even thinner, because most institutions never named the number the investment was supposed to produce.Four metrics cover most of the ground:Funded accounts per month shows whether the top of the funnel improved.Average deposits per funded account shows whether the accounts are worth having. Instant decision rate shows how much manual effort remains in the process. Staff hours returned shows what the operations side gained. Name a target for each before the contract is signed, then review all four quarterly with the vendor in the room, and the conversation shifts from usage statistics to performance.A bank that does this will occasionally discover the platform is performing well and the process around it is the constraint. That is a useful finding, and no on-time implementation report will ever surface it.The community bank’s advantageThat kind of scrutiny counts for more right now than it has in years. Community banks entered 2026 with real optimism and real pressure. Nearly three in four are pursuing growth inside their existing markets while deposit competition intensifies and technology budgets expand to meet both. What determines which of those investments produces growth has very little to do with the size of the check.A smaller bank with a named outcome, an accountable owner, and four numbers it reviews every quarter will outgrow a larger institution that signed a bigger contract, celebrated the launch, and moved on to the next project. The market has no shortage of capable technology, and a real shortage of buyers who define the outcome before signing and keep measuring it long after the launch.Philip Paul is Founder and CEO of Cotribute, an award-winning fintech platform that enables profitable revenue and customer growth for banks and credit unions. An entrepreneurial executive, Philip has a proven track record of creating and growing innovative technology businesses that serve large enterprises. Visit Cotribute’s website for the 2026 Digital Growth Benchmarks: Community Banking report.