9 Sep, 2026
Most personalization advice suggests financial institutions start with one audience and build out. Q2's guidance is different: Choose the high-value groups at the edges, where needs differ most. The audiences at the ends of the user journey are where differentiation is most valuable, most visible, and, perhaps surprisingly, most achievable.
Consider the differences between a 16-year-old opening his first bank account and a retired grandmother focused on protecting her savings. The gap is wide, and that's exactly what makes these segments the smartest places to start. It's a principle borrowed from product design: Solve the hardest problem first, and everything else gets easier. Personalize for the audiences with the most distinct needs now, and personalization for everyone in between is simpler later.
Personalization takes the right technology and strategy
Personalization requires the technology to configure and target tailored experiences combined with the right strategic focus. The Q2 Digital Banking Platform delivers the technology with Q2 SMART to define and target audiences and Experience Builder to configure what each audience experiences. Q2's audience guides provide resources to help financial institutions move from personalization in concept to real-world execution, starting with the groups where impact is greatest.
Introduced at CONNECT 2026, here’s how the guides come together.
Three ways to personalize
Before choosing an audience, it helps to understand what personalization will look like inside digital banking. There are three approaches, and each has a specific purpose.
Reprioritize. Consider changing the order in which existing content appears for a specific audience. For example, if savings goals or tools already live on your baseline consumer dashboard, moving them higher for underinvested account holders can meaningfully shift behavior without changing the overall experience.
Add content. Introduce new audience-specific content blocks, the modular elements of the digital banking dashboard. This is the smartest approach when a segment has unique needs: a family banking content block for parents, for example, or a wealth summary for high-net-worth clients.
Refine the baseline. For some audiences, the most impactful move is to remove them from the standard experience entirely and curate something built specifically for them. Your oldest account holders, for instance, may benefit from a simplified experience focused on essential tasks rather than the full breadth of the baseline dashboard.
"Personalization is not about adding more to the Composable Dashboard," said Teresa Bobadilla, Q2's director of product management for consumer banking. "It's about leveraging the data we have about users to anticipate needs, surface the most relevant tools, and prompt them to take the next best step to improve their financial lives."
Four audiences where personalization pays off first
Q2's audience guides focus on four specific segments, the edges of two key consumer journeys.
The first journey spans life stages, from youth banking through the golden years. The second spans financial engagement, from underinvested account holders to wealth management clients. Together, these define the four audiences whose needs differ most, at the edges of the financial journey. A fifth companion guide supports the parents of youth account holders, a group whose experience shapes engagement across generations.
Why start personalization at the edges?
It's smartest to start personalizing at the edges because the gap between what a 16-year-old needs and what a 65-year-old needs—or between an underinvested account holder and a wealth management client—is dramatic. Solving personalization at these edges, where needs differ most, makes personalization for everyone in between easier.
Here's what each of these audiences needs and how the audience guides recommend reaching them.
Youth and family
Youth banking is one of the most strategic long-term investments a financial institution can make. The audience guide focuses on 16- to 18-year-olds, young adults potentially earning some income independent of their parents and actively learning to manage finances.
The recommendation for this group is to exclude them from the baseline consumer experience and curate one designed for them. For example, a bold, playful theme and gamified financial literacy content to reinforce good savings habits makes sense here. A companion parent audience guide includes integration with the family finance app Greenlight and content designed to foster family financial conversations.
Golden years
For older account holders, accessibility and safety are the primary strategic focus. The audience guide highlights simplified experiences, larger font support with high-contrast-mode capabilities, and content that emphasizes fraud protection and estate planning.
Underinvested account holders
These are usually consumers who are early in their financial journeys and lack extensive credit history, so they rely primarily on cash. Some may be working in the gig economy, outside traditional payroll norms. The strategic focus for this audience is building trust, self-confidence, and the foundational financial habits that create long-term financial security.
The audience guide for underinvested account holders recommends reprioritizing goals and savings content to the top of the dashboard since these are high-impact tools for this group. It also suggests introducing partners from the Q2 Innovation Studio fintech partner ecosystem, including those offering fractional investing as an entry point to the markets and gamified financial literacy content.
Wealth management clients
At the other end of the financial journey are high-wealth account holders with complex portfolios, business accounts, and multiple financial institutions to manage. Trust with the institution is already high. The strategic goal is to deepen and consolidate the relationship.
The wealth management guide recommends a curated experience built around visibility and control: a condensed account view for users with many accounts, paired with an account summary content block that shows total assets and liabilities at a glance. Q2 Innovation Studio partners like ModernFi for sweep accounts help institutions serve customers whose deposits are approaching or exceeding FDIC insurance limits.
How Lake City Bank puts personalization strategy into practice
Successful strategy depends on effective execution. Lake City Bank (Lake City), a $7.1 billion institution headquartered in Warsaw, Indiana, with 55 branches, is putting audience-based personalization into practice. Its partnerships with two Q2 Innovation Studio fintech partners map directly to two of the edge audiences.
Scott Karbach, Lake City’s vice president of digital strategy, says his team is using Eco to reach underinvested account holders, particularly younger customers.
"Eco was one I pushed. It serves the underinvested audience," Karbach said. Lake City's existing wealth advisory product had a $25,000 minimum investment. Eco allows customers to start with as little as $10.
Karbach was clear about the strategic intent behind the decision. "Eco is a revenue opportunity, but that was not my goal. My goal was to get the younger generation in and help them with integration."
Lake City has seen strong adoption across its customer base for a product aimed primarily at younger and underinvested segments. And while adoption skews younger, Karbach noted the appeal has extended across generations: "It definitely trends to the younger audience, but we've seen it adopted across multiple segments."
The strategic payoff Karbach sees is long-term relationships. "Once you engage the younger generation, I have found they tend to remain loyal to your digital banking platform. I'm happy with the results."
For wealth management clients, Lake City is rolling out Wealth Access, a Q2 Innovation Studio partner that provides centralized financial visibility.
"Wealth Access gives us a single view of the full financial picture. For Lake City Bank, this provides valuable insight into the wallet share of our overall client relationship," Karbach said. "This has been a proven, powerful tool for joint calling efforts and is highly valued by private banking and commercial lenders."
Lake City’s results across both partnerships reinforce that strategy plus execution equals impact.
Getting started
Q2's audience guides are available now, accessible through the customer portal. Each guide includes these components:
- The traits to define the audience
- Recommended content
- Q2 Innovation Studio partner suggestions
- Campaign suggestions
- Outcomes and metrics to measure impact
Additional guides are in development. Small business, mortgage-only, HSA, and other single-product-focus audiences are on the near-term roadmap, driven by direct feedback from financial institutions.
For teams new to personalization, the recommendation is simple: Pick one audience, apply the guide, measure the impact, and expand from there.
"Personalization is imperative to reach your users and to serve them," Bobadilla said. "Get started, pick one of the audiences, try it out. Then give us feedback and share your success stories.”
Personalization in practice
Financial institutions must create personalized experiences to thrive but many struggle to deliver them. Personalization at scale requires a strategy that focuses effort where impact is highest and the technology to execute without friction is leveraged.
Q2 delivers both: Personalization technology built into the digital banking platform and audience guides that turn it into a plug-and-play playbook. Together, they accelerate how financial institutions get from concept to production.
For institutions ready to move from personalization as an ambition to personalization in practice, audience guides are here. If you’re a Q2 customer, explore the audience guides now in the Q2 documentation portal, and connect with your Q2 success team to learn more about how to put audience-based personalization into practice at your institution.
Not yet a Q2 customer? If you're ready to deliver personal experiences that win and keep account holders, let's talk.