Walk into almost any strategy meeting at a bank or credit union and ask what the most important product in a customer’s or member's life is. Someone will say the mortgage. Probably several people will say the mortgage. It is the biggest balance, the longest relationship, the product that gets its own team, its own dashboard, its own quarterly review.
And sure, mortgages matter. Nobody is arguing otherwise.
But here is the uncomfortable question nobody in that meeting is asking. By the time a customer or member gets a mortgage, how many other financial decisions have they already made without you?
The answer, more often than not, is a lot.
For a 24 year old, the first mortgage is probably a decade away. Maybe longer, given where home prices sit right now. But the first investment account? That could happen this year, this month, tonight, on a phone, in about four minutes, with an app that has nothing to do with your institution.
That first account matters more than people give it credit for, and not just because of the dollars involved. It matters because of what behavioral finance calls the primacy effect. The first version of something tends to become the default version. The first bank account a kid opens shapes how they think about banking. The first investing app someone uses shapes how they think about investing, often for years.
Once a habit forms around a platform, that habit is sticky. Not because the platform is necessarily better. Because it was first, and first got comfortable.
So when a 24 year old opens a Robinhood account because it was the easiest option available at the time, you are not just losing a small account with a few hundred dollars in it. You are losing the anchor point for their entire investing identity. Every future dollar they think about investing gets measured against that first experience, and that first experience did not happen with you.
Here is the part that should really get attention. Younger generations are not drifting toward investing slowly. They are sprinting toward it, and the housing market is a big reason why.
According to research from the JPMorganChase Institute, retail investing activity among 25 year olds has climbed sharply over the past decade. Roughly 37 percent of 25 year olds added money to a retail investment account last year, compared to just 6 percent back in 2015. That is close to a sixfold increase in under ten years.
The researchers point to housing affordability as a major driver. When the traditional path to building wealth, buying a home, gets pushed further out of reach, people look for another path. Stocks and ETFs become the more accessible asset. The median age of a first time homebuyer recently hit a record high, and a large share of Gen Z say they worry they may never own a home at all.
Put those two facts together and the picture is clear. The generation least likely to get a mortgage anytime soon is the generation most likely to be actively investing right now. If your institution is built around waiting for the mortgage moment to start a real relationship, you are waiting for a moment that keeps arriving later and later, while a different, earlier moment quietly passes you by.
Nobody opens an investment account expecting to get rich overnight from $100. That is not the point, and customers and members know it.
The point is what that first $100 represents. It is a decision to start. It is the moment someone stops thinking about investing as something other people do and starts thinking about it as something they do. Once that switch flips, it rarely flips back. They keep contributing. They keep checking the balance. They keep building the habit, wherever that first account happens to live.
If it lives with a fintech app they downloaded on a whim, that is where the relationship deepens. If it lives inside your mobile banking app, next to the checking account they already trust you with, that is where it deepens instead.
This is really a question of sequencing. Most institutions have spent years optimizing for the big product moments: the auto loan, the mortgage, the home equity line. Those moments still matter. But they are lagging indicators of a relationship that was often decided years earlier, in a much smaller and much less flashy moment that nobody was paying attention to.
Being first does not require a massive lift. It requires making investing available before the customer or member goes looking for it somewhere else.
That starts with visibility. A lot of customers and members genuinely do not know their bank or credit union offers investing at all, so the first job is simply letting them see it, right inside the app they already use every day.
It also means lowering the barrier to that first dollar. Five dollars to start is not a gimmick, it is a psychological unlock. Nobody feels intimidated by five dollars. Automated, robo advisor style options help too, since they remove the pressure to know everything about the market before getting started.
And it means keeping the whole thing native. Customers and members should not have to leave your app, create a new login, or think of investing as some separate vendor relationship bolted on the side. When it feels like a natural extension of the accounts they already have, it feels like it belongs to your institution. When it feels like it belongs to your institution, they stay.
Mortgages will always be a big, important product. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. But they are not where the relationship begins anymore, not for the generation that is now moving into their prime earning years.
The first $100 someone invests says more about where their financial life is headed than any single loan ever will. The institutions that recognize this and show up early, before that first account gets opened somewhere else, are the ones that will still be relevant when the mortgage conversation finally does happen.
Because by then, the member will already be yours.
The above does NOT constitute an offer, solicitation of an offer, nor advice to buy or sell specific securities. The opinions listed above are not the opinions of Unifimoney Inc. or Unifimoney RIA, Inc. but represent the opinions of independent contributors. These contributors may or may not hold positions in the stocks discussed. Investors should always independently research any stocks listed and form their own opinions, while recognizing that any investments made may lose value, are not bank guaranteed and are not FDIC insured.
