The Banking Industry’s Newspaper Moment

In 2000, USA Today was the most circulated newspaper in the United States. More than 1.6 million copies were printed each day. Over 6.6 million readers picked it up. It sat in every hotel lobby and at every airport gate. It was the newsprint on the hands of every business traveler sitting on airplanes waiting to take off.  USA Today wasn’t just a newspaper — it was the country’s shorthand for news you could trust and easily consume.

It was also the industry’s master class in brand building. It scaled fast. It distributed wide. It nailed the format. But two decades of digital rewrote the rules.

At the end of 2024, USA Today’s daily print circulation had collapsed to 132,640 — a 92% drop. Its digital subscriber base of 2 million feels like a bright spot…until you follow the money. The revenue from those subscriptions and online ads doesn’t come close to the dollars that print once brought in. USA Today no longer carries the financial weight of the Gannett empire. It is now just one of many titles inside a portfolio whose revenue appears to be slowing.

Two decades of digital rewrote the rules.

Gannett’s quarterly revenue in 2000 was $1.36 billion. Annual revenues hit  $3.3 billion in 213. It is expected to end 2025 somewhere between $2.4 and $2.5 billion. USA Today doesn’t break out its numbers. It doesn’t have to. The trajectory seems to tell the story.

But this isn’t just a USA Today story. It is the story of the newspaper industry.

In this story, even the biggest players with the deepest pockets struggled to adapt. Local papers, with smaller ambitions and lower overhead, found niche relevance. But the middle, once rich with reader loyalty and ad dollars, got squeezed out. Too generic to keep an audience. Too burdened with legacy  to move at the pace of industry change.

The same forces may now be at work in banking.

Digital Starts to Dominate

Chime, a mobile-first banking platform with no branches, went public on June 12, 2025, in an oversubscribed IPO. Its market cap on day one surpassed that of long-established regional banks that have been around six times longer with better balance sheets. Today it trades with a valuation that is more than two-thirds of many of those traditional challengers.

That’s not because Chime reinvented banking. It didn’t. In fact, it offers only a fraction of the products and services found at most traditional banks. But it rethought how banking is delivered. It provides what consumers who felt underserved by traditional banks care about most, delivered through the device they also use the most. Chime reports that it has become the primary bank for 67% of its customers. But not by expanding the breadth of services, but by getting a few things right that its target customers value.

Wall Street appears to be betting on that formula. That mobile-first “neobank” platforms like Chime and others can stand up new products faster and at lower cost. That many traditional players are still figuring out how to retrofit digital on top of legacy core systems that weren’t built for real-time anything.

And doing that at the same time they are working to integrate GenAI into the consumer and business banking experience.

The Lesson from Newsprint

For more than 100 years, newspapers ruled the information business. The model worked.  Create exclusive content and attract a mass audience, then advertisers will beat a path to your front door. The barriers to entry were high. Owning a press, paying reporters and distributing daily editions took capital, coordination and a lot of people.

The internet blew up that model.

Suddenly the news was free. And everywhere. No delivery trucks required. Craigslist gutted newspaper classifieds. Google and Facebook absorbed ad dollars. The same AP story ran across hundreds of newspaper websites, rapidly spread through social media. Breaking news flooded social feeds. Speed and reach were democratized.

Traditional players are still figuring out how to retrofit digital on top of legacy core systems that weren’t built for real-time anything.

The value of the newspaper was replaced by faster, cheaper digital alternatives that delivered information in real time and on demand. Sports scores, stock prices, weather, politics — once the backbone of print — were now found online within seconds.

The survivors split into two camps. The giants like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg built digital brands around investigative journalism and deep content with analysis. They invested in subscriptions and paywalls. Their scale helped them transform.

Then there were the hyper-locals and digital specialists. The small-town papers that covered what no one else did. They didn’t need millions of readers. They  just needed relevance in their ZIP code. Digital  specialists built audiences and followers and business models by focusing not on the news of everything. Like  digital-only banks, they traded on thecontent that their customers wanted to read, delivered by a brand they trust.

The middle tier got stuck in the mud.

Those mid-sized metropolitan dailies and regional papers lacked the resources to produce truly distinctive content but carried the overhead costs of traditional newsroom operations. Many closed entirely, while others reduced staff, cut coverage areas and limped along with skeleton crews.

Today’s newspaper industry is a shell of its former self. In the last twenty years, more than 2,500 newspapers have closed in the U.S. Newspaper ad revenue has dropped over 80% from its 2000 peak. The few survivors have learned hard lessons about differentiation and value creation.

And the need to adapt to changing customer preferences with new ways to create, package, price and distribute their core product.

Banking on Inertia — Not

Over many decades, banks have built their business models around exclusive access to physical branches and complex financial products that require human expertise to navigate, sometimes even delivered only in person. Friction became a source of stickiness because switching banks became too much of a pain.  Moving money between accounts at different banks was easy, provided the customer drove to the bank to complete that transaction. I’m only half joking here.

FinTech companies like Chime and SoFi are capturing younger consumers by meeting them where they are. On their mobile devices with simple interfaces, a small set of products that meet their needs in the moment, and transparent pricing.  In real time and on demand. Cash App and Venmo turned peer-to-peer payments into a social experience. Yet, none of these players are reinventing financial products. They’re reinventing the packaging, the experience, the delivery and the economics of getting them into the digital hands of their customers. PYMNTS Intelligence data finds that 25% of Gen Z have their primary bank account with a digital-only bank.

Now, AI and GenAI are accelerating this transformation.

GenAI-powered financial advisors, automated lending decisions and personalized financial products are raising customer expectations for intelligent, proactive banking services.

GenAI-powered financial advisors, automated lending decisions and personalized financial products are raising customer expectations for intelligent, proactive banking services. Traditional banks must now navigate complex integration challenges to deploy GenAI across their existing systems. Digital banks can build AI-native experiences from the ground up.

Whether these digital banks become the new financial services orchestration layer with APIs and more user-friendly experiences is unclear. But they seem to be betting that it is a better and more customer-friendly business model than what traditional players now offer.

Generation Impatient Isn’t Waiting

Generation Z and Millennials, who are now the banking industry’s big bet, interact with financial services the same way they consume news. Instantly, mobile-first, using QR codes. And with zero tolerance for friction.

These younger consumers view traditional banking rituals like visiting branches, waiting for checks to clear, paying monthly fees for basic services and ATM fees as antiquated inconveniences rather than necessary aspects of their financial lives.

They’ve grown up with Amazon’s one-click purchasing, Netflix’s personalized recommendations, and Uber’s on-demand transportation. They can buy fractional shares of stock and crypto using their Robinhood accounts with a few taps. They set up multiple accounts with ease to keep their side hustle earnings separate from other sources of income. And they expect to move money between those accounts domestically and cross-border easily, instantly and on demand.

They want banking that happens invisibly in the background of their lives.

These digital-native customers expect real-time notifications and proactive financial insights. They want banking that happens invisibly in the background of their lives, not services that require them to adapt their behavior to institutional processes. They’re comfortable with app-only interfaces and cloud-based security, and see  physical documentation and in-person interactions as unnecessary complications rather than reassuring touchpoints.

This demographic shift represents more than a change in consumer preferences. Easier access to banking services makes it easier for Gen Z’s to engage with them.  PYMNTS Intelligence data finds that 1 in 5 Gen Zs are digital financial enthusiasts and 60 percent of them are financially engaged. They over-index on using mobile banking and digital investing, budgeting and other financial apps.

The Account Is the Platform, Not the Product

Like newspapers discovering that weather reports, stock prices and sports scores could be found anywhere, banks are learning that basic transactional services like checking accounts, savings, payments, even lending, are rapidly becoming commoditized. Consumers can get those services anywhere, often with better user experiences and lower fees.

For decades, the checking account was the cornerstone of traditional retail banking. Not  because it was sophisticated, but because it was essential. The checking account was the place where paychecks landed and bills got paid.

But digital challengers see that account not as an endpoint, but as a launchpad. As the gateway to financial engagement, a home base for money in and money out. And the starting point for a host of embedded services, from budgeting tools to rewards, investing and credit. For many of those challengers, debit is becoming the new credit as Pay in 3 or 4 options make it possible for purchases made using it to be spread over time. Tailor made for the Gen Z customer base.

Banks once used the checking account to cross-sell. FinTechs use a digital account to integrate and embed other features and capabilities of value to their accountholders — and create value by turning  every financial interaction into an embedded experience.

The Survival of the Financial Services Fittest

Just as the newspaper industry is now defined  by giants with scale advantages and smaller players with specialized focus, the rise of digital-only banks could drive banking toward a similar fork in that road.

The biggest banks have the resources to have feet in both worlds. They can modernize while maintaining legacy systems. They can invest billions in R&D. They can innovate, hire engineers, build interfaces and weather the cost of transformation. Their scale gives them room to maneuver.

The question for all banks is how to better align the products and services that worked well for the last hundred years with the next-generation banking customer who’s never heard a dial tone.

Niche players may thrive by focusing. Community banks know their towns. Credit unions serve loyal member bases. They know what makes them matter. And they are leaning into developing the partnerships that can help accelerate that journey.  Today, PYMNTS Intelligence data reports that only 7% of Gen Zs bank with a regional bank, less than those who bank with a community bank (14%) or credit union (8%). And when this generation gets restless and goes bank shopping, they tend to look past regional banks to national, local or digital-only providers.

The question for all banks, especially the regional players who may still be mapping where exactly they fit, is how to better align the products and services that worked well for the last hundred years with the next-generation banking customer who’s never heard a dial tone.

A customer that can’t imagine walking into a bank to deposit their paycheck or cash a check or sit down with a banker and open up an account.

What’s Next

For traditional financial institutions, this moment represents an inflection point. Every bank now faces a new kind of competition. One driven not just by price or product, but by the experiences their products offer. And the embedded value that makes the account the centerpiece of a real-time, dynamic relationship with the customer.

Jamie Dimon, in J.P. Morgan Chase’s 2024 shareholder letter, acknowledged the threat posed by nimble FinTechs and the pace of technological disruption. He cautioned that traditional players could suffer “collateral damage” if they fail to adapt fast enough.

The market seems to agree. Investors are voting with its capital, valuing digital banking experiences over physical assets and decades of operational history. The question now is whether traditional banks can shed their legacy constraints fast enough to compete in a world where customers expect their banking to work as seamlessly as their smartphones. Or  whether they’ll become the next cautionary tale of an industry that confused past success with future relevance.

Today’s banking industry looks a lot like the newspaper business did in 2005. Legacy players still hold the infrastructure, the deposits and the trust. But the newcomers have the momentum, a new model and a customer who feels underserved. And now the options and mobile devices to play the field.

Banks that fail to learn from history may soon be written into it.

The newspaper industry’s lesson is clear. When customer behavior shifts fundamentally, legacy advantages become legacy liabilities. And very quickly.

That makes the real risk to banks clear. It’s not legacy systems. It’s inertia.

As the once-crowned kings of the newspaper dynasty can attest, transformation is inevitable. It comes fast, hits hardest in the middle and favors those who either scale massively or specialize deeply. Banks that fail to learn from that history may soon become part of it.