Mole Street is taking new research on financial services marketing performance to the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Midwest Summit, where the HubSpot consultancy plans to discuss how banks, credit unions and other financial institutions are addressing fragmented data, marketing technology and customer growth.

The company will exhibit at the eighth annual DMFS Midwest Summit, held September 22–23 in Chicago. Brendan Walsh, Mole Street's co-founder and chief revenue officer, and solutions architect Tony King will represent the company at Booth 5.

The event brings together more than 300 marketing leaders from banking, credit unions, insurance, wealth management, lending, payments and fintech. Its agenda includes AI-powered personalization, MarTech investment, omnichannel customer experience and marketing ROI—areas increasingly connected as financial institutions modernize their customer and marketing infrastructure.

Mole Street specializes in implementing HubSpot for financial services organizations, including migrations from legacy platforms and integrations with core banking, practice management and operational systems. The objective is to connect customer data with marketing and revenue workflows rather than leaving marketing teams dependent on disconnected systems.

The company cites implementations for Keesler Federal Credit Union and accounting firm Hill, Barth & King as examples. For Keesler Federal, Mole Street connected core data with HubSpot to give the credit union greater marketing autonomy. At Hill, Barth & King, the consultancy rebuilt the HubSpot CRM so information covering more than 20,000 clients could synchronize automatically.

The larger issue is one faced across financial services: marketing teams need personalization and measurable attribution, but customer information often remains distributed across systems built for different operational functions.

Market Landscape

Mole Street is also using the event to present findings from The State of Financial Services Growth, a 2026 report produced with HubSpot based on a survey of 270 U.S. financial services leaders.

The research found that customer retention and expansion were priorities for 41% of respondents, while 40% identified acquiring new clients or members as their primary focus. Personalized recommendations and communications emerged as one of the most difficult customer expectations for organizations to meet.

Data fragmentation was a significant obstacle. According to the research, 78% of respondents said organizational silos, disconnected systems or incomplete customer data limited their ability to deliver a modern customer experience.

That finding highlights a recurring problem in financial services MarTech: adding another marketing application does not necessarily solve an underlying data architecture problem. CRM, core banking, analytics, marketing automation and customer-service systems need to exchange information before marketers can reliably build personalized journeys or attribute revenue.

The research also found that compliance was no longer the leading obstacle identified by respondents. Instead, proving the return on marketing technology and dealing with fragmented or poor-quality data emerged as major barriers.

AI is becoming part of that equation. Mole Street and HubSpot report that advanced AI adopters were 68% more likely to report significant improvement in customer retention over the previous year.

The findings align with a broader enterprise trend. Gartner reported in 2026 that CMOs allocated an average 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, although only 30% reported mature or fully developed AI-readiness capabilities.

Strategic Outlook

For financial services marketing teams, the significance of Mole Street's research is less about adopting a particular platform and more about the infrastructure required to make personalization and AI useful.

A modern financial-services MarTech stack needs to connect customer data, marketing automation, CRM, analytics and operational systems while maintaining appropriate governance. AI can accelerate recommendations and automate parts of customer engagement, but poor data quality can limit the usefulness of those systems.

This also explains the growing importance of revenue attribution. As marketing budgets face greater scrutiny, financial institutions need to understand whether investments in automation, personalization and customer data infrastructure contribute to acquisition, retention and expansion.

Mole Street's positioning around HubSpot reflects one approach to that challenge: use a centralized CRM and marketing platform as a connective layer between customer information and marketing execution.

The company and HubSpot are scheduled to continue the discussion at Money20/20 USA in October, where they plan to present the report's findings to financial services leaders.

Top Insights

• Mole Street's new research identifies disconnected systems and incomplete client data as major barriers to delivering personalized financial services experiences.
• The State of Financial Services Growth survey found retention and expansion were priorities for 41% of financial services leaders, closely followed by acquisition at 40%.
• Seventy-eight percent of surveyed leaders said silos, disconnected systems or incomplete data limit their ability to deliver modern client experiences.
• Advanced AI adopters were 68% more likely to report significant improvement in client retention, according to the Mole Street and HubSpot research.
• Financial services marketers increasingly need integrated CRM, marketing automation, analytics and customer data infrastructure to prove measurable growth.

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