2026 Customer Trends: How Expectations Are Shifting and What It Means

Our members, partners, and communities are living through a period of rapid change. Financial lives are more complex and interconnected than ever: families are sharing responsibilities across generations, small businesses are blending personal and professional risk, and more decisions are being made in real time, on mobile devices, in the middle of already busy days.

At the same time, technology is rewriting the rules of engagement. AI tools and digital assistants are becoming many people’s first stop when they feel financial stress or have a question about their coverage. Always-on apps in other parts of life—from navigation to health and shopping—have trained people to expect proactive notifications, tailored recommendations, and problems solved in the background before they fully surface. These experiences are no longer “nice extras”; they shape what customers expect from every brand they trust with their money, protection, and future.

Within this context, Nationwide’s promise—to protect people, businesses, and futures with extraordinary care—matters more than ever. But how that promise shows up is changing. Relevance is no longer defined only by having the right product or the lowest price. It’s defined by how easy it is to find help, how clearly we explain choices, how well we support entire households, and how consistently we show up when it matters most.

To help us navigate this shift, the Customer, Strategy & Innovation Office partnered with Accenture Song to identify four customer trends shaping expectations today and over the next several years: Converging Paths, Simple Truths, Shared Lives, and Experience Premium. These trends are not a list of projects or technologies. They’re a lens we can all use—across every business unit and function—to design experiences that keep Nationwide relevant and trusted.

Four trends reshaping customer expectations

1. Converging Paths – Experiences are becoming fluid and uninterrupted

Customers and intermediaries no longer think in terms of “call center,” “portal,” “agent,” or “app”—they think in terms of the goal they’re trying to reach and expect support to follow them without starting over. People move fluidly between Google, ChatGPT, mobile apps, advisor portals, and “their person,” often within the same decision. AI copilots, ambient interfaces, and humans are now operating in the same stream, which means interactions follow intent, not our internal channel architecture. Nearly half of auto policies are already bought online, and more than half of U.S. adults have used AI for financial advice—especially when speed matters.

Leaders are responding by dissolving channel silos and designing for continuity across every touchpoint. That means orchestrating by intent (routing based on what someone is trying to do, not where they showed up), persisting context across systems so no one has to re-explain their situation, and unifying customer and intermediary operations so both see the same journey state, signals, and next-best actions. If we allow journeys to break at handoffs or restarts, our relevance breaks with them.

2. Simple Truths – Complexity will no longer be tolerated

Life moments don’t map neatly to our internal product lines or organizational charts. Customers experience needs as a single, continuous story—“Can I afford this?”, “Am I on track?”, “What happens if something goes wrong?”—while most institutions still organize products, data, and decisions by lines of business. People increasingly expect clarity they can act on, not jargon, disclosures, or category labels they have to decode. As AI makes it easier to explain complex topics in plain language, what used to feel like a tolerable level of complexity is becoming an unacceptable burden.

Companies that design around life, not lines, and around real questions, not internal structures, are already seeing higher growth and satisfaction. Leaders are simplifying without oversimplifying: translating real-life complexity into guided decisions, intuitive indicators, and proactive explanations that “speak human” in real time. Clarity isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s becoming a core expectation and a key driver of trust.

3. Shared Lives – Interconnected households value proactive, holistic guidance

Financial decisions are rarely made in isolation. They’re negotiated across partners, parents, adult children, caregivers, and increasingly chosen family—and these relationships are now supported by shared digital spaces that turn households and support networks into collective decision-makers. One in four Americans is simultaneously caring for children and aging parents, and a massive intergenerational wealth transfer is underway, even as a large share of today’s advisors approach retirement. Yet most systems still assume a single account owner and treat households as a set of disconnected individuals.

Leaders are starting to treat the household—in all its forms—as the real unit of planning. That includes shared access and permissions, unified household views across protection and wealth, tools that help intermediaries “see around corners” for life events, and experiences that make estate transitions and cross-generational planning more human and less administrative. Brands that design for people and the circles who support them will stay relevant as wealth and decision-making become more collaborative; those that don’t will push intermediaries and customers toward more human-centered platforms.

4. Experience Premium – Customers seek human insight as a true differentiator

As products and prices blur together, people increasingly reward the experience wrapped around them, not the features within them. Customers stay loyal to whatever feels most trustworthy, clear, and proactive—especially when stakes are high. “Easy” digital self-service is now table stakes; the real differentiator is how intelligence and humanity come together to make interactions feel effortless for both members and intermediaries. Always-on services in other parts of life have reset the bar: people expect brands to prevent problems, not just react to them, and they remember who “carried the load” during stressful moments.

For Nationwide and our intermediaries, this means elevating human advice as a premium feature, not a bottleneck, and surrounding it with smart, proactive, always-on support. Leaders are giving intermediaries better tools, context, and automation so they can focus on judgment rather than paperwork—and they’re building loyalty through positive touchpoints even when nothing is wrong. Experience is no longer a layer on top of the business; it’s how we protect relevance in a market where products alone can’t.

From insight to action

Customer Trends 2026 is a directional tool, not a list of projects. Across the work, several imperatives repeat:

• Design around lives and households, not lines and channels.
• Give clarity a delivery system with simple language and visible next steps.
• Make continuity the default, so context and intent follow customers and intermediaries.
• Elevate intermediaries with better tools, blending their insight with carrier intelligence.
• Build always‑on value through proactive alerts, check‑ins, and micro‑interactions.

These are shared design challenges across P&C and financial services, direct and intermediated business, and our technology and operations foundations.