Imagine a bank with a perfectly respectable savings account and a suddenly inconvenient competitor. Across town, somebody is offering a better rate. The obvious response is to match it. The less obvious question is what happens to all the money already sitting in the bank. A promotion meant to attract fresh deposits can also make existing deposits more expensive. The scoreboard says growth. The interest bill tells another story.
- Curinos sells banks a view beyond their own books: market benchmarks, behavioral analytics and pricing tools.
- Its customers include KeyBank, HSBC and Synovus, which appear in public testimonials.
- Its newer platform connects customer decisions across marketing, product and pricing.
Curinos works in that awkward space between an attractive number and a useful decision. It supplies financial institutions with data, software and advice across deposits, lending and digital banking. Its specialty is understanding how customers respond, how peers perform, and what a bank might gain or sacrifice by changing course.
The trouble with a better rate
Consider some deliberately simple arithmetic. Raise the annual rate on $1 billion of deposits by a quarter of a percentage point, and the annualized interest expense rises by $2.5 million, assuming balances stay unchanged. That is before any new customer arrives. A pricing team therefore needs to distinguish money genuinely won from another institution from money moved between its own products.
Illustration only. Unchanged balances, full-year repricing; excludes customer responses.
Retail Deposit Optimizer models the trade-off between rates, balances and profitability using customer behavior and price sensitivity. A bank can compare scenarios before making a change. The useful output is a decision about which balances to pursue, which relationships to protect, and how much growth is worth buying. Treasury, marketing and pricing all have a stake in the answer.
A five-year-old company with a longer memory
Curinos arrived in 2021 through the combination of Novantas and Informa’s Financial Benchmarking & Omnichannel Experience business, known as FBX. Inflexion invested alongside Informa and Novantas shareholders. This was an assembly of existing capabilities, including competitive intelligence, financial analytics and banking software. The brand was new; the underlying work had a substantial history.
Inflexion describes helping create a unified data fabric to improve product integration and cross-selling. That is a revealing detail. Bringing two businesses together creates an opportunity to connect their information, but somebody still has to make the pieces work together. In December 2024, Informa sold its interest to Inflexion for $200 million in cash, with a contingent earnout. That amount concerns an ownership stake.
The company now reports more than 1,500 clients globally and data covering over $6 trillion in deposit balances. Its public customer comments show the range: KeyBank discusses deposit optimization, HSBC describes using digital feature and journey analysis, and Synovus talks about marketing personalization. The common purchase is perspective a single institution cannot assemble from its own transactions alone.
From the model to Monday morning
The product range follows the decisions. Deposit analytics supports funding strategy. Digital Banking Analyzer helps teams examine competitors’ features and customer journeys. Lending intelligence informs pricing and market comparisons. Advisory engagements cover product design, marketing investment, branch networks, treasury and merger support. Curinos occupies the meeting point of specialist software, financial data and consulting.
In September 2025, Curinos introduced CurinosCopilot inside Retail Deposit Optimizer. It translates forecasting and pricing-model outputs into conversational explanations and shareable materials. Pete Gilchrist framed the aim as giving teams more time for decisions by reducing presentation work. A recommendation that travels clearly between teams has a better chance of surviving the journey to an executive meeting.
“We help clients focus on decisions, not formatting.”Pete Gilchrist / CurinosCopilot launch, 2025
Curinos One, launched in May 2026, takes on a broader task. Capture targets prospective customers with an emphasis on future relationship value. Compound works on deepening existing relationships. The architecture sits between the bank’s existing data infrastructure and its customer channels. It is designed to connect a recommendation with an email, an app interaction or a banker’s next conversation, then learn from the outcome.
The expensive part is acting on it
That distinction matters when evaluating the AI. In its October architecture explanation, Curinos separates reinforcement learning that selects actions within configured guardrails from generative AI that helps explain insights. The bank remains responsible for the rules and oversight. For a buyer, the practical questions follow: can the team trace a recommendation, see why a customer qualified, and measure what happened afterward?
The commercial pressure is plain. In its May 2026 summit analysis, Curinos put the 2025 cost per checking acquisition at $559. Its argument is that account-opening volume obscures whether relationships become valuable. A cheaper response can produce a lightly funded account that disappears. A costlier acquisition can produce balances that stay. The comparison needs time, funding behavior and retention.
Curinos’s launch release reports more than $1.6 billion in additional deposits at one unnamed early-adopting bank. That is a company-reported deployment result, not a forecast for the next buyer. A sensible evaluation would compare a defined customer group with a control, separate new money from internal transfers, and count interest costs alongside retained balances.
Buyers have alternatives. Nomis combines customer and product intelligence with pricing execution; Earnix offers pricing optimization and governed simulations for lenders. Curinos’s case rests on its combination of proprietary cross-bank benchmarks, banking expertise and tools extending across customer relationships. It sells institutional software, data access and advisory work through a sales-led process.
Start with one measurable decision: an acquisition audience, a renewal offer or a relationship-deepening campaign. Agree on the comparison group and review period before launch. That approach makes it easier to see whether better targeting creates value after funding and servicing costs.
There is a useful lesson here even for people who never buy banking software: choose the outcome before celebrating the activity. A bank still needs usable data, connected channels and people who agree on what success means. A model trained on past behavior needs checking when behavior changes. Better coordination is work. Curinos is betting banks will pay to make that work repeatable.
