Top of Wallet, Top of Mind: How Credit Unions Grow Deposits Through Conversion

If you run a credit union, you’ve already won the hard part. Sixty-one percent of your members consider you their primary financial institution, and 87% are very or extremely satisfied. No digital bank or FinTech is close. The relationship is yours.

The question is what that relationship is earning you. Because when a member reaches for a card at checkout, yours wins less than half the time—48% against 69% for national banks. Every one of those swipes is engagement, data and interchange fees going to a competitor instead of you.

Here’s why it matters to your numbers, not just your brand. The members who put your card on top aren’t just spending more. They’re depositing more. Thirty-one percent of consumers who converted to a credit union report making more deposits. For SMB convertors, the rate is 41%. Consumer top-of-wallet members grew deposits 30% since 2024; SMB converters grew 28%. No other segment came close. Top-of-wallet conversion isn’t a card metric—it’s a deposit-growth engine and a retention signal wrapped together.

The gap is concentrated and fixable. Your card already wins the automated bills—rent, utilities, internet. You lose in discretionary spend, where rewards decide the swipe. Cash back is the top card-choice factor for 44% of your cardholders, but just 32% of those who’ve already converted. Translation: The members you haven’t won are telling you exactly what they want.

And you may already have the margin to give it to them. If your institution falls under the Durbin exemption—with less than $10 billion in assets—you keep more interchange per transaction than national banks do. That’s the revenue to fund competitive rewards without sacrificing margin. For your SMB members, the lever is different: purpose-built business cards with expense tracking and higher limits, not repurposed consumer cards.

Download the Playbook Credit Union Innovation Readiness: Consumers Trust Credit Unions but Don’t Always Reach for Their Cards

About the Credit Union Innovation Readiness Playbook

“Consumers Trust Credit Unions but Don’t Always Reach for Their Cards,” created in collaboration with Velera, is based on a survey of 14,218 U.S. consumers fielded from February 1–28, 2026, and a parallel survey of 3,529 U.S. SMBs fielded from February 1–March 25, 2026. The report examines how U.S. consumers and SMBs choose and use cards across financial institution types, with particular focus on top-of-wallet conversion among credit union account holders. Both samples were collected via an online panel and balanced on age, gender, income, region and ethnicity for consumers and on equivalent firmographic variables for SMBs.