A Banker’s Guide to Digital Relationships That Grow Deposits

Linker Finance Founder and CEO Jorge Garcia joins Kiah Haslett to explain why opening more accounts online isn’t the same as growing deposits.

For more than a decade, banks have focused on making it easier to open accounts online. The result: plenty of new accounts, and too many that never get funded, never see activity and eventually close. In this conversation, Kiah and Jorge make the case that the account opening problem was never really about opening accounts. It’s a growth problem.

The problem

Account opening rates hide what matters. A high completion rate means little if part of those accounts are fraudulent or sit empty. Many banks also run account opening, funding and post-onboarding on separate vendors, with ownership split across marketing, operations and retail. Each team sees one piece of the funnel, and no one sees where deposits are actually lost. Add rate pressure, tech-forward competitors and an outdated digital front door, and every dormant account costs more.

The approach

Jorge breaks deposit growth into a simple formula: total deposits equal funded, active customers multiplied by the average balance per funded account. Every step that moves those two numbers, from acquisition to funding to relationship expansion, can be measured and improved.

Linker Finance brings those steps into one platform: real-time core connectivity, fraud detection at the front door, instant funding at account opening, and a data layer that shows which customers are ready for a deeper relationship. The playbook comes with it, so banks can see results in a quarter instead of a multi-year roadmap.

Bank of Brodhead’s digital brand, Vault, is a good example. After adjusting paid acquisition and the funding flow, the bank grew core deposits 16% year over year in 2025, five times its 2024 pace, while lowering marketing spend and keeping fraud losses minimal. In 2026, it hit its core deposit goal by June.

In this episode:

• Why funded, active accounts matter more than accounts opened
• The one action that best predicts whether a new customer funds and stays
• How to deepen relationships without competing only on rate
• How to stop fraud before it gets in
• How Vault turned a digital brand into a source of deposits and new relationships

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