Are Banks Accounting for the New Household CFO? Why Women Are the Key to Multigenerational Deposit Retention
By Emily Cisek, Founder & CEO, Paige
Most families have one person who knows what’s going on with the household finances and paperwork. The will, insurance policies, the password to the account that auto-pays the mortgage. They hold the keys to the family’s financial kingdom, and usually, everything else that needs care and organization.
Now, in a majority of American households, that person is a woman.
A 2026 study from Allianz Life found that 53% of women identify as the CFO of their household, up from 41% in 2021. A separate CFP Board report found that nearly 70% of women are the primary investment decision-makers for their families. That’s a pretty astounding structural shift when you consider that just two generations ago, many women couldn’t even get a credit card without their husband’s permission.
With this, and so many other changes taking place across the financial world, institutions are playing catch up.
Women and the Great Wealth Transfer
For banks and credit unions, women couldn’t be more important right now. They increasingly control the financial relationships in their households, and they’re also the ones who will inherit the bulk of generational wealth. Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion will transfer by 2048, and women are expected to receive roughly 70% of it. They’ll inherit from their parents first, and then, because women outlive men by an average of five years, they’ll inherit from their spouses too, managing that combined wealth over decades before passing it on to their kids or loved ones.
The institutions that retain those assets are the ones that built the relationship with the women who manage them before any transfers occur. Banks that wait for the inheritance to arrive — or try to keep it as it’s walking out the door — are starting the conversation at the worst possible moment, when grief, logistics, complexity, and sometimes family conflict are all landing at once. When that moment goes badly, the assets follow the heir to a new institution. According to Cerulli Associates, more than 70% of heirs switch financial advisors after a wealth transfer event. Keeping those assets means earning her business long before they transfer to her.
The CFO title is only half the job
When we talk about women managing household finances, we’re describing something larger than budgeting or investment decisions. These are the same people organizing health records, managing digital accounts, keeping the kids’ summer camp calendar, planning vacations, tracking appointments for aging parents, and holding the family history together in ways that no spreadsheet captures.
Research consistently shows that women approach financial planning through a caregiving lens. In the CFP Board study, only 22% of advisors reported that their women clients are primarily focused on their own financial situation. The rest are thinking about their children, their parents, or both. Women are more likely than men to prioritize long-term care planning, philanthropic giving, and healthcare costs alongside traditional wealth goals.
This isn’t a softer version of financial planning. It’s a more complex one, where women sit at the intersection of financial responsibility and family caregiving. It requires tools built to meet those needs — but first, institutions need to fully understand them.
What these women actually need
I’ve spent the last several years building Paige, a digital legacy and estate planning platform distributed through community banks and credit unions. Paige helps families create wills, organize financial accounts, passwords, beneficiary designations, and the personal things that sit alongside the practical ones: messages for their loved ones, memories they want preserved, instructions that live in their heads but need to exist somewhere else.
What women tell me consistently is that they don’t need another banking app. They need solutions that take into consideration the full weight of what they’re carrying. The bank account is one part of a constellation of things they manage, and in their minds, it’s all connected. The will and the heartfelt letter that goes with it. The beneficiary designations and the passwords to those accounts. The financial plan and the people it’s actually for.
They want their institutions to see that. To offer real guidance that goes beyond the purely financial, because for them, none of this is purely financial. It’s about protection. It’s about reducing friction in a life that has very little margin for it.
In practice, that looks like a platform that prompts a member to store her will and related documents in a secure digital vault the moment she updates her beneficiary designations online, so everything tied to that decision lives in one place. Or an annual account review that flags she has no legacy plan on file and walks her through setting one up in minutes. Small interventions, delivered at the right moment, that signal something important: we see the whole picture, not just the account balance.
Organizing a family’s financial life is an act of care, and the banks that recognize and build tools for that are the ones that will earn something harder to replicate than a deposit: genuine trust.
The product gap is a relationship gap
The financial services industry built most of its tools around wealth accumulation, and those tools are good at that. But the fastest-growing segment of household decision-makers is looking for something different: guidance, organization, and the reassurance that the people they love will be taken care of.
When a bank or credit union shows up for a woman in that role, she notices. She stays. She brings her aging parent in, her adult children follow, her network comes with her. The Family CFO isn’t just a customer; she’s a connector. Earn her trust and you’re not acquiring one relationship, you’re gaining a foothold in a network that compounds across decades and generations.
The women running America’s household finances have been underserved not because they’re a niche, but because the industry didn’t look closely enough at who was already in the room. They’ve been the CFO for years. The institutions that figure that out now will have a meaningful advantage over the ones that figure it out later.
