Your Next Generation of Borrowers Won't Wait 42 Days

March 24, 20268 min read

54% of Gen Z rely primarily on non-traditional financial providers. 61% switched banks in the last two years. Only 14% trust traditional banks "a lot." Your future borrowers aren't just preferring digital — they're already gone.

The Generational Shift, in Hard Numbers

The data on younger consumers and banking is no longer directional. It is definitive.

According to a 2024 J.D. Power study, 29% of Gen Z consumers now consider a digital bank their primary checking account provider — up from 11% in 2020. Across all age groups, 44% of new checking accounts opened in 2024 went to fintechs and neobanks, not traditional banks (Cornerstone Advisors). Among Gen Z specifically, 54% rely primarily on non-traditional financial providers for core banking services (TransUnion, 2024).

And they are not sticking around to be won back. 61% of Gen Z consumers switched their primary bank in the past two years (Bankrate), compared to 28% of Gen X and 15% of boomers. Only 14% of Gen Z say they trust traditional banks "a lot" (Morning Consult).

This is not a preference. It is a migration.

For community banks, where the median customer age skews older and relationship tenure is measured in decades, these numbers represent a slow-moving but existential problem. The generation entering its prime borrowing years — first homes, auto loans, small business starts — is building financial relationships with Square, Chime, SoFi, and Robinhood. Not with your branches.

The Experience Gap

Gen Z logs into mobile banking 21 times per month, compared to 14 for millennials and 9 for boomers (Insider Intelligence). They interact with financial services more frequently than any prior generation — but through their phones, not your lobbies.

This is the context in which they encounter mortgage lending for the first time.

J.D. Power's 2024 U.S. Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study pegged overall satisfaction at 760 out of 1,000 — with digital experience scores declining year-over-year. The specific pain points tracked directly to what younger borrowers tolerate least: lack of transparency into loan status, excessive document requests, and slow response times from loan officers.

When borrowers need to call for a status update, NPS drops by 83 points (ICE Mortgage Technology). For a generation that tracks packages in real time and gets Uber ETAs down to the minute, calling a loan officer to ask "where's my file?" is not an inconvenience. It is a disqualifying experience.

What "Digital" Actually Means to a Borrower

Many banks describe their lending process as "digital" because they offer a PDF application form on their website, or because borrowers can upload documents through a portal. That is not what digital lending means to a Gen Z borrower.

Here is what digital lending looks like from the borrower's side at the fintechs already winning this generation's business:

Figure: The borrower opens a link on their phone. They enter basic information, connect their bank account, and receive a HELOC approval in 5 minutes. Funding arrives in 5 days. No branch visit, no document scanning, no phone tag with a processor. Figure funded $6 billion in home equity products in 2024, at a cost of $730 per loan — versus the industry average of $11,230 (Figure S-1 filing).

Better.com: A borrower can get a mortgage commitment letter in 24 hours and a HELOC approved in the same day. Better's HELOC volume grew 416% year-over-year in Q4 2024. Their positioning is explicit: "The traditional processes around homeownership are opaque and stressful... the industry operates in the same way it has for decades."

Rocket Mortgage: Approval in 8 minutes. Closing 2.5x faster than the industry average. Rocket processed $130.4 billion in originations in 2025 and built its market share to 6.33% — largely by making the borrower's experience feel effortless. Behind the scenes, Rocket processes 1.5 million documents per month, with 70% auto-identified and routed without human intervention. Borrowers never see the work.

The common thread is not that these companies have superior underwriting judgment. It is that the borrower's experience — the part they see — requires almost nothing from them. Open a link. Connect your bank. Done.

Contrast That With the Typical Community Bank Experience

A first-time homebuyer walks into a community bank branch (or more likely, finds the bank's website). Here is what follows:

  • Download or print a multi-page application
  • Gather two years of tax returns, two months of bank statements, pay stubs, W-2s, ID documents
  • Scan or photograph each document (often poorly)
  • Upload to a portal, email to a loan officer, or physically deliver to a branch
  • Wait for the loan officer to review, request clarifications, ask for additional documents
  • Repeat the document cycle two or three more times as underwriting surfaces questions
  • Call or email for status updates, often getting voicemail
  • 42 days later — if the loan doesn't fall through — close in person at a title office
Every step in that process is a step where the borrower can abandon. And they do. 68% of mortgage applications started online are never completed (MBA). Among borrowers who experience digital friction, 48% take their business to a competitor (Signicat).

For a Gen Z borrower whose baseline expectation was set by Figure and Rocket, this process is not "traditional." It is broken.

Community Banks Can Deliver the Same Experience

The good news: the technology gap between fintechs and community banks is not about proprietary algorithms or billion-dollar R&D budgets. When you break down what Figure and Better actually do, the speed advantage comes from one thing — automated data aggregation and verification.

Instead of asking borrowers to gather documents, these lenders pull the data directly. Income comes from payroll connections and bank transaction analysis. Identity is verified against authoritative databases in seconds. Employment is confirmed through direct employer integrations. Property data is pulled from public records and automated valuation models.

The borrower's experience is fast because the borrower doesn't do the work. The system does.

Community banks do not need to build this infrastructure from scratch. They need access to the same verification pipeline, delivered in a way that fits their existing workflows.

RAVEN: The Fintech Borrower Experience, Through Your Bank

RAVEN gives community banks the same automated verification layer that powers Figure, Better, and Rocket — without requiring a new LOS, a six-figure platform fee, or a dedicated IT team.

Here is what the borrower experience looks like with RAVEN:

  1. Your loan officer enters the borrower's email address
  2. The borrower receives a single link — works on any device
  3. The borrower enters their SSN and connects their bank account — under 5 minutes
  4. RAVEN pulls and cross-references identity verification (Socure KYC, fraud scoring, OFAC/PEP watchlist screening), income and financial data (Plaid bank connections), employment verification (Truework), and property data (Melissa + ATTOM) — all automatically
  5. Your bank receives a complete verification report with confidence scores, source attribution, and a full audit trail
The borrower's experience is indistinguishable from what they would get at a fintech lender. Five minutes, one link, no document scanning. But the loan closes at your bank, with your relationship, under your brand.

The next generation of borrowers has already decided what lending should feel like. The question for community banks is not whether to meet that expectation — it is how fast you can get there.

See how RAVEN delivers a fintech-grade borrower experience for community banks at reportraven.tech.