This sort-of happened in the USA, in a small way, during the fallout of the 2016 Wells Fargo scandal. Public sentiment of the big-name, national retail banks was awful and credit unions capitalized on the moment with advertisements contrasting profit-centric national banks with local, cooperatively-owned credit unions.

In this article where consultants to credit unions were queried a year later, there’s still some questions as to the long-term effects that may have benefited the credit unions.

I once came across a comment somewhere online that suggested – sadly without hard evidence – that the scandal may have been a win-win, since the sort of customers willing to uproot themselves from Wells Fargo tended to have smaller balances while still incurring the bookkeeping costs. And that credit unions were able to scale up to take in new customers while saving on advertising dollars.

It’s a plausible idea, that a new equilibrium would be found in the banking market. Logically extending the idea further, though, would lay bare how much additional integration credit unions would have to do with each other to achieve a truly seamless customer experience. Of course, with more young people mostly sticking to online and mobile banking, this might come in the form of backroom operational improvements, rather than a revamped brick-and-mortar experience.