An Open Letter to Neo Financial

Banks Sell Accounts. Customers Manage Their Lives Through Money.

TLDR

Jeff Adamson’s LinkedIn post framed the opportunity well: most Canadians did not choose their bank. They inherited it. Banking should be a relationship to be earned.

That is the right opening. The respectful challenge is this: Neo should not answer that opportunity by becoming a better account company or a better credit card company. Those are useful products, but they are not the real relationship.

Neo is already close to the answer. Its loyalty and cashback model connects customer spending to merchants. Its public positioning recognizes that the future of banking may not be a bank. Its merchant network gives it a way to become more than another fintech product bundle.

The risk is that the credit card becomes Neo’s version of the airline seat. It is countable, monetizable, and easy to market, but it can also become too small a definition of value.

The bigger opportunity is to make Neo a customer-first financial and local-commerce membership platform for Canada. The card and account should be rails. The customer relationship should be the product.

That also means the means of engagement can be broader than today’s artifacts. A card records a transaction. A customer-led phone interaction can signal intent, merchant interest, and local economic demand before a purchase happens.

Costco is a useful analogy. Costco sells products, but strategically it sells membership. The warehouse proves the value of the membership. Neo can do the same thing with financial services, merchant rewards, customer advocacy, and local economic participation.

If Neo can put the customer first, diversify revenue sources, support local merchants, and create a real customer-voice layer, it can become something much more than a neo bank. It can become the Canadian standard for customer-first money movement and local merchant advocacy.

Dear Jeff

When I asked whether you would be interested in an article that applied the same logic from my airline piece to banking, your answer was yes.

This is that article.

The airline’s argument was simple. Airlines sell seats, but passengers buy trips. The mistake occurs when the company optimizes the internal artifact rather than the customer’s actual objective.

Banking has the same problem.

Banks sell accounts, cards, loans, fees, rates, statements, and digital access. Customers are trying to manage money inside a life. They are trying to pay bills, raise families, build stability, recover from shocks, support their communities, avoid embarrassment, reduce anxiety, and make better decisions.

The account matters. The card matters. The savings product matters.

But each is only a component.

The customer does not experience their financial life as a product catalogue. They experience it as an ongoing relationship with money.

That distinction matters because it changes what Neo should become.

Neo does not need to market itself as a bank. In fact, it should be careful not to. The Canadian market already has enough institutions that behave like banks, talk like banks, price like banks, and ask customers to accept the same old account-first logic with a cleaner interface.

Neo has a chance to do something better.

The LinkedIn Post Already Names the Gap

Your LinkedIn post says:

Most Canadians didn’t choose their bank. They inherited it.

That is a powerful marketing insight because inheritance is not loyalty. It is inertia. It is a relationship carried forward because changing feels difficult, not because the customer feels understood.

The post also says banking should be a relationship to be earned, not an inheritance to be managed.

That is exactly the right frame.

The strategic question is what actually earns the relationship.

A better credit card can earn attention. A better account can earn trial. A better rate can earn comparison traffic. None of those automatically earns a relationship.

A relationship is earned when the customer believes the company understands what money means in their life. It is earned when the company helps customers make better decisions, supports the merchants they care about, avoids unnecessary fees, resolves problems without humiliation, and makes them feel that their voice matters before they are forced to go public.

That is why the marketing roles in the post are so revealing.

Integrated marketing matters. Marketing analytics matters. Lifecycle analytics matters even more. If Neo wants to understand what happens after sign-up, then it is already moving beyond acquisition into the real customer relationship.

The question is whether Neo will let that insight reshape its business model, or will mainly use it to sell more financial products.

What Neo Already Has Right

Neo’s public message is already pointing in the right direction.

The company asks what the future of banking looks like if it is not a bank. It describes Canadians as underserved by the current financial system. It talks about smarter spending, saving, rewards, insights, and partnerships.

That is not ordinary bank language. It is closer to a platform thesis.

Neo is also structurally interesting because it is not simply a branchless version of the big banks. It works with regulated financial partners for accounts, uses Mastercard rails for card acceptance, and builds its own customer experience, merchant network, and rewards model on top.

That structure can be seen as a limitation if the goal is to look like a traditional bank.

But it can also be an advantage if the goal is to stop thinking like one.

The most important part is the merchant network.

Neo’s loyalty program is not just a rewards feature. It is a signal that Neo understands something important: customer spending does not end inside the financial product. Money goes somewhere. It lands with merchants. It shapes local economies. It strengthens or weakens communities.

That is the opening.

Most banks treat rewards as an afterthought attached to a card. Neo can treat rewards as proof of a broader relationship between customers, money, and merchants.

Where Neo Can Still Get Pulled Back Into Bank Thinking

The danger is that the credit card becomes Neo’s version of the airline seat.

It is countable. It fits interchange economics. It fits acquisition funnels. It fits promotional marketing. It fits product comparison pages. It fits the financial model.

That does not make it the correct strategic center.

If the customer must use the Neo credit card for the merchant relationship to become meaningful, then the card is still acting as the gatekeeper. The relationship is constrained by the artifact.

That may work commercially in the short term, but it limits the larger opportunity.

There is a broader data question here, too.

Neo can learn from card and account activity, but that keeps the relationship anchored to financial artifacts. A more customer-first model would also let the customer use the phone as a permissioned engagement surface.

The card records the transaction. The phone can become a customer-led signal.

When a customer chooses to engage with Neo at a local merchant, even before making a purchase, they help Neo understand intent, interest, and local economic demand. That is valuable precisely because it is not surveillance. It is the customer using Neo to further their own goal: making their money work better for the businesses and communities they want to support.

This matters because being in a merchant location and browsing without buying is powerful information. It can mean price friction, uncertainty, missing inventory, weak offer design, comparison shopping, or simple curiosity. A completed transaction tells one story. A permissioned engagement signal can explain the demand that did not convert.

The privacy line has to be clear.

This should not mean background location tracking. It should not mean selling customer data. It should not mean turning the phone into a monitoring device. The value is in a customer choosing to scan, check in, save an offer, ask a question, join a local program, or otherwise identify intent on their own terms.

That gives Neo a better signal-to-noise ratio without requiring the customer to apply for another account or route every interaction through a card. It also gives local merchants a cleaner picture of interested demand without forcing them into the economics of paid ads, platform dependency, or blind discounting.

The same is true of accounts.

Accounts are necessary. They hold money, move money, and satisfy regulatory and operational requirements. But when a bank or fintech treats the account as the first-class citizen, the customer becomes secondary. The business begins asking how to sell another account, fund another account, or attach another feature to an account.

The customer is asking a different question.

How do I make my money work better for my life?

That is the question Neo should own.

The Canadian Context Matters

Canada is a complicated market for this conversation.

Many Canadians do not love their banks. They tolerate them. They need them. They trust the system enough to keep using it, but that is not the same as feeling respected by it.

The frustration is not limited to banking. Canadians often feel similar pressure in telecom, health access, insurance, and other concentrated markets where choice exists on paper but power still feels centralized.

People can switch providers and still feel trapped inside the same pattern.

That feeling matters.

A company that wants to challenge Canadian banking should not only ask whether it can offer a better card or account. It should ask why Canadians feel so little affection for institutions that handle such personal parts of their lives.

The answer is not only fees. It is not only product design. It is not only about app quality.

It is the absence of respect.

Customers often feel that the institution understands the account better than it understands the person. It understands the transaction better than the context. It understands compliance better than consequence. It understands profitability better than dignity.

That is the gap Neo can enter.

The Customer Should Be the First-Class Citizen

A customer-first financial model starts with a different data shape.

The customer is not a container for accounts. The customer is the main object. Accounts, cards, merchant offers, savings goals, credit products, disputes, support cases, local preferences, and financial insights attach to the customer.

That customer may be the purchaser or the seller.

The household trying to manage money is a customer. The local merchant, trying to survive, serve, and grow, is also a customer. A customer-first Neo should make both sides stronger without forcing either side to become subordinate to the card or account.

That sounds like a software distinction. It is really a business distinction.

If the account is first, the business optimizes account behaviour. If the card is first, the business optimizes card usage. If the customer is first, the business optimizes financial confidence, purchasing power, loyalty, community value, and long-term trust.

That leads to a different operating model.

Neo would not ask only, “ How do we get more spending on the card?

It would ask, how do we help this customer make better use of every dollar?

Neo would not ask only, “How do we grow account balances?”

It would ask, what financial outcome is the customer trying to create, and how can our products quietly support it?

Neo would not ask only, “How do we increase merchant participation?”

It would ask, how do we make local merchants more visible, more trusted, and more economically relevant to the customers around them?

That is a different company.

The Costco Lesson

Costco is useful because it separates what the company sells from what the customer thinks they are buying.

On the surface, Costco sells groceries, electronics, clothing, tires, pharmacy items, travel, fuel, and household goods. But strategically, Costco sells membership. The warehouse proves the value of the membership.

That difference is everything.

Costco can price aggressively because the point is not to maximize margin on every item. The point is to make the membership feel obviously worth renewing. Customers return because the relationship keeps proving itself.

Neo should study that pattern carefully.

If Neo makes the card the hero, it is competing inside the card market.

If it makes the account the hero, it is competing inside the account market.

If it makes membership the hero, it can compete at a different level.

The Neo membership would not merely mean a subscription fee. It would mean belonging to a customer-first financial and local-commerce network where customers receive economic advantage, merchant relevance, service confidence, and a voice.

The card becomes one rail.

The account becomes one rail.

The merchant network becomes one proof point.

The membership becomes the relationship.

Revenue Diversification Is the Strategic Unlock

This is not an argument against revenue. It is an argument for better revenue.

If Neo relies too heavily on card usage, the business will keep steering customers back to the card even when the broader relationship could be more valuable. The company will be tempted to optimize the artifact because it drives revenue.

A customer-first model should diversify revenue streams so that Neo can afford to serve customers at a price point that traditional competitors cannot match. (read that twice!)

That is where the Costco comparison matters again. The strategic power comes from using one economic engine to make the customer-facing experience more compelling than competitors can match.

For Neo, that could mean several reinforcing revenue layers.

• Merchant-funded demand generation, where local businesses pay because Neo can prove it influenced real customer activity.

• Membership revenue, where customers pay directly only if the value is obvious, recurring, and materially better than normal banking.

• Financial product revenue, where accounts, cards, mortgages, savings, and investments still exist, but are adopted because they fit the customer’s life rather than because they were pushed as products.

• Merchant services revenue, where local businesses receive tools, visibility, analytics, campaign support, and customer relationship infrastructure they cannot build alone.

• Permissioned customer-intent insight, handled carefully and transparently, where aggregated signals help merchants and communities understand demand without turning the individual customer into an exploited data product.

• Service and advocacy value, where Neo wins trust by helping customers resolve financial friction instead of leaving them to fight alone through call centres, forms, and escalation paths.

The point is not to bolt on revenue streams randomly.

The point is to make the customer relationship valuable enough that Neo is no longer forced to extract all value through a single product rail.

Local Merchants Should Be the Strategic Center

This is where Neo can become more than a fintech.

Local merchants need help. They are competing against national chains, global platforms, online marketplaces, delivery intermediaries, paid search, social media algorithms, and now AI-mediated discovery.

The local merchant is often the one with the weakest technology position and the strongest community value.

That is a dangerous imbalance.

If local merchants disappear, local economies weaken. Money leaves the community more easily. Customer choice becomes thinner. Streets become less interesting. Employment becomes less personal. The economy becomes more efficient in a way that feels worse to live inside.

Neo’s merchant network gives it a way to intervene.

The company could position itself as the de facto standard for local merchant advocacy in Canada. Not a directory. Not just cashback. A real economic operating layer that helps customers discover, support, reward, and stay connected to local businesses.

Imagine the message changing from:

Earn cashback on your Neo card.

to:

Make your money matter more where you live.

That is a stronger position.

It gives customers a reason to care beyond points. It gives merchants a reason to participate beyond discounting. It gives Neo a mission that is larger than financial product acquisition.

It also fits the Canadian moment.

Many people do not want every dollar to flow upward into multinational platforms that know how to extract attention but do not reinvest meaningfully in local life. They want convenience, but they also want their communities to survive.

Neo can make that choice easier.

CustomerGravity.cloud: The Missing Door

There is another part of customer-first design that most corporations still avoid.

Customers need a door.

Not a support queue. Not a chatbot loop. Not a generic complaint form. A real door where the customer can express what happened, why it matters, what impact it had, and what pattern it may reveal.

This is where CustomerGravity.cloud matters.

CustomerGravity.cloud is the recognition that customer experience is not only satisfaction data collected by the company. It is market force expressed by customers when the relationship breaks down.

Media programs like CBC’s Go Public exist because customers often run out of institutional options. When a story becomes public, corporations frequently move faster. Not always because the facts suddenly changed, but because the exposure changes the consequences of ignoring the customer.

That should tell every corporation something uncomfortable.

The customer did not need drama.

The customer needed a door.

A truly customer-first Neo should build that door before the market forces it open from the outside.

This does not mean every complaint is automatically correct. It means every serious customer signal deserves a structured landing place, a fair process, pattern detection, and visible accountability.

The goal is not to embarrass the institution. The goal is to prevent avoidable frustration from becoming public distrust.

If Neo wants to be different from Canadian banks, this is one of the places where different has to become operational.

A Different Marketing Position

The marketing opportunity is not simply to say Neo is better than a bank.

That is too small.

Neo should say something closer to this:

Your money should work for your life, your community, and your future. Neo helps Canadians manage money, earn more value from everyday spending, support local merchants, and be heard when financial services fail them.

That is not a card message.

That is not an account message.

That is a market position.

It allows Neo to talk about the card without making the card the company. It allows Neo to talk about accounts without making the account the relationship. It allows Neo to talk about merchants without making rewards feel like a coupon engine.

It also gives Neo a more durable answer to the question: “Why should I trust you?”

Because Neo is not merely trying to sell you a product. Neo is trying to make your money more useful to you and more valuable to the community around you.

What I Would Challenge Neo to Build

If I were translating this into a high-level marketing and operating plan, I would focus on six moves.

First, make membership the strategic product. Let the account, card, savings product, mortgage, investment, and merchant rewards serve as proof of membership. Do not let any single artifact define the company.

Second, loosen the mental dependency on the credit card. The card should remain important, but the customer relationship should be bigger than card usage. If merchant value only exists when the card is used, the model is still too narrow.

Third, make the phone a permissioned customer engagement surface, not a surveillance surface. Let customers choose to signal local intent, merchant interest, questions, offer saves, visits, and unresolved friction without requiring every useful signal to become a card transaction.

Fourth, make local merchant advocacy a central mission in Canada. Neo should be the company that helps customers keep more value in local markets and helps merchants compete against platforms they cannot outspend.

Fifth, build customer voice into the platform. Do not wait for customers to go public. Give them a credible, structured, respectful way to surface unresolved issues and patterns of institutional friction.

Sixth, diversify revenue so Neo can deliver financial services at a cost and value level that traditional banks struggle to match. That is how the customer-first position becomes economically durable rather than only emotionally attractive.

None of this requires Neo to abandon financial products.

It requires Neo to put them in the right order.

Customer first. Membership second. Merchant network third. Permissioned engagement fourth. Products fifth. Revenue everywhere the relationship creates real value.

Why This Matters

The strategic danger for Neo is not that it fails to look enough like a bank.

The danger is that it succeeds too well at becoming a modern version of the same account-and-card logic customers already understand and already distrust.

The Canadian market does not need another institution asking customers to admire its products.

It needs a company that understands the customer as a first-class citizen in the financial system.

Money belongs to customers. Accounts are only one way to hold it. Cards are only one way to move it. Merchants are one place it lands. Software is one way to coordinate it. Banking partners are one way to regulate and safeguard it.

The customer is the economic center.

When that relationship is understood properly, the business model changes. Marketing changes. Product design changes. Revenue changes. Support changes. The role of the merchant changes. The role of the customer voice changes.

That is the bigger opportunity.

Closing Perspective

Jeff, this is a respectful challenge.

Neo is close to something important because it already sees that the future of financial services does not have to look like a traditional bank. Its merchant network, rewards model, Canadian identity, and fintech structure all point toward a broader possibility.

But the broader possibility will be constrained if the card and account remain the main story.

Banks sell accounts. Customers manage their lives through money.

Neo should build around the second sentence.

The strongest version of Neo is not a better bank. It is not even a better credit card company.

It is a membership-based financial and local-commerce platform that helps Canadians make money work better, helps local merchants matter more, and gives customers a meaningful door when the relationship breaks.

That would be worth talking about.

More importantly, it would be worth joining.

Source Note

This article was informed by Neo Financial’s public pages, reviewed on May 21, 2026, including About, Accounts, Advanced Insights, Partners, Legal, and Help Centre. Those pages describe Neo’s fintech positioning, financial products, merchant network, account-provider structure, and public founder roles.

It also responds to the LinkedIn post provided as the prompt for this article, especially the argument that Canadians inherited their banks and that Neo wants to become the brand Canadians choose.

• Neo About: https://www.neofinancial.com/company/about

• Neo Accounts: https://www.neofinancial.com/accounts

• Neo Advanced Insights: https://www.neofinancial.com/insights

• Neo Partners: https://www.neofinancial.com/partners

• Neo Legal: https://www.neofinancial.com/legal

• Neo Help Centre, Everyday Account: https://support.neofinancial.com/hc/en-001/articles/21190171447309-Introducing-the-Neo-Everyday-account