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See where performance is breaking down.

Most financial institutions have the data. Fewer have clarity on where to act across cost, operations, and revenue.

 

 

Where performance gaps begin to show.

Financial institutions face interconnected challenges across vendor management, operational performance, enterprise transformation, and strategic growth. Ceto brings specialized expertise and intelligence to each area, helping banks and credit unions identify opportunities and take meaningful action.

What happens when visibility becomes action.

Ceto helps financial institutions move from fragmented information and disconnected priorities to clearer decisions, coordinated execution, and measurable improvements across cost, operations, and profitability.

Visibility

Continuous Visibility

Understand the factors influencing vendor costs, operational performance, technology initiatives, and financial results so leaders can make more informed decisions.

Prioritization

Clearer Priorities

Identify where opportunities, risks, and performance gaps warrant attention, helping institutions focus resources on initiatives with meaningful potential impact.

Impact

Measurable Impact

Connect specialized expertise and actionable intelligence to improvements in expense management, operational efficiency, transformation execution, and profitability.

Closing the gap between insight and action.

Performance gaps rarely exist in isolation. They show up across cost structures, operational performance, pricing, and market positioning — often without clear visibility into where to act first.

Ceto NOVA™ brings these signals together into a connected intelligence environment, helping financial institutions move from fragmented visibility to clearer priorities and faster decisions.

Trusted by institutions. Proven by results.

“ The professionalism, expertise, and perspective that Ceto incorporated into our recent Market View engagement was a great complement to our efforts to maximize profitability. Without question, this has been one of the best engagements that we have completed with a consulting firm.”
cashmerevalley Cashmere, WA
Total Assets: $2.2 Billion
“ We recently completed a Market View analysis that has the potential to be one of the most cost-beneficial projects we have conducted. Ceto was able to identify various areas of opportunity where we could generate additional income while remaining competitive in our markets."
logo (1) RBFCU, Live Oak, TX
Total Assets: $15.3 Billion
“ Ceto was instrumental in assisting with the process of implementing and monitoring the recommendations to assure that we met the benefits that they had projected.”
cnb-logo Citi National Bank, Clearfield, PA
Total Assets: $5.2 Billion
“ We were able to implement the recommendations that our executive management team approved with relative ease. We also tracked the actual results and custom-built monitoring reports provided by Ceto and realized the additional revenue quickly.”
Affinity_Federal_Credit_Union Affinity, Basking Ridge, NJ
Total Assets: $3.8 Billion
“ We engaged Ceto for the Market View program and we were extremely satisfied with the results of the entire process. We are very happy that we chose Ceto as the vendor and partner for our revenue enhancement and product pricing initiatives.”
logo-horizontal-1 Numerica, Spokane, WA
Total Assets: $3.5 Billion
“ Ceto's recommendations were meaningful and focused not only on revenue enhancement but also on bringing greater value to our clients through changes to our depository products.”
FirstBankLogo First Bank, Hazelwood, MO
Total Assets: $6.9 Billion
“ Ceto’s experience in core conversions and the confidence we have built with them over the years made them the clear choice for this crucial effort. The strong recommendations we received from other credit unions meant a great deal to me and our leadership team."
logo250 Joseph Tedesco, President/CEO, Ocean Financial Total Assets: $383 M.

Start with understanding your performance.

A focused conversation to identify where performance gaps may exist across cost, operations, and revenue—and where to act first.

Frequently Asked Questions
What types of challenges can Ceto help community banks and credit unions solve?

Ceto helps community banks and credit unions address challenges related to profitability, operational efficiency, vendor costs, technology transformation, competitive positioning, and growth. These challenges can include pricing gaps, rising expenses, inefficient processes, difficult vendor negotiations, core conversions, fragmented information, and uncertainty about where performance can improve. Ceto combines banking consulting expertise, proprietary intelligence, benchmarking, and software to help leaders identify opportunities and take action.

Which Ceto offering is right for your community bank or credit union?

The right Ceto offering depends on the business challenge your community bank or credit union is trying to solve.

  • Strategic growth: Ceto helps institutions improve profitability, pricing, product performance, and market strategy through its MarketView™ solution.
  • Vendor management: Ceto helps institutions optimize vendor costs, strengthen contracts, evaluate vendors, and improve vendor accountability through its VendorLink™ solution.
  • Enterprise transformation: Ceto helps institutions execute technology conversions, integrate acquisitions, and optimize core systems through its NexBridge™ solution.
  • Connected banking intelligence: Ceto NOVA™ brings competitive, operational, vendor, market, demographic, and growth intelligence together in one platform, with Lucira™ AI helping leaders interpret insights and determine where to act.

Ceto can combine consulting expertise and software when priorities span multiple areas.

Can Ceto help our institution improve its efficiency ratio and support strategic growth?

Yes. Ceto helps community banks and credit unions improve their efficiency ratios and support strategic growth through its MarketView™ solution. Through MarketView™, Ceto identifies revenue leakage, optimizes pricing, improves product performance, and reduces the cost to serve. These capabilities strengthen revenue generation across interest and non-interest income while addressing operational efficiency, product profitability, and market strategy.

How does Ceto help with vendor management?

Ceto helps community banks and credit unions improve vendor management through its VendorLink™ solution, helping institutions reduce vendor costs, strengthen contracts, and improve vendor performance and accountability. Through a VendorLink™ engagement, Ceto evaluates vendor pricing, contract terms, renewal opportunities, fees, and service commitments to identify savings and improvement opportunities. Capabilities include contract intelligence, cost optimization, vendor performance oversight, and vendor evaluation and selection.

What support does Ceto provide for enterprise transformation?

Ceto helps community banks and credit unions execute enterprise transformation through its NexBridge™ solution. Capabilities include technology conversions, M&A integration, and core system optimization. Through NexBridge™, Ceto supports data validation, testing and readiness, integration coordination, and post-conversion stabilization, alongside ongoing core system optimization and DNA platform support—helping institutions move from planning to coordinated execution.

What is Ceto NOVA™?

Ceto NOVA™ is Ceto’s connected banking intelligence platform for community banks and credit unions. It brings competitive, operational, vendor, market, demographic, and growth intelligence together in one environment, with Lucira™ AI helping leaders interpret information and determine where to act. Ceto NOVA™ provides ongoing software-based intelligence, while Ceto’s consulting solutions provide deeper expertise and execution support around specific business challenges.

Does Ceto provide consulting, software, or both?

Ceto provides both consulting expertise and software for community banks and credit unions. Ceto supports strategic growth through MarketView™, vendor management through VendorLink™, and enterprise transformation through NexBridge™. Ceto NOVA™ complements these consulting solutions with ongoing banking intelligence through software, helping institutions identify opportunities and make informed decisions.

Can Ceto tailor an engagement to a specific business problem?

Yes. Ceto can tailor consulting engagements around the specific goals, challenges, and priorities of a community bank or credit union. One institution may need focused support around pricing, vendor negotiations, profitability, or a core conversion, while another may have priorities that span several areas. Ceto can align its consulting expertise, solutions, and software capabilities with the scope and needs of the institution.

What makes Ceto different from other community banking consulting firms and software providers?

Ceto combines banking-specific consulting expertise, proprietary intelligence, benchmarking, software, and execution support within one organization. This combination helps community banks and credit unions identify opportunities, understand what is driving performance, and take action through consulting engagements and ongoing software-based intelligence. Ceto brings more than 30 years of industry experience and has worked with more than 2,000 organizations across the banking and credit union market.

Where does the data in Ceto NOVA™ come from, and how current is it?

Competitive pricing data in NOVA Vantage™ is gathered and maintained by Ceto's research team, which monitors rates, fees, and product terms across the competitors each institution selects. Updates are made at your preferred cadence, and changes that affect competitive position trigger alerts within the platform.


Operational benchmarks in NOVA Pulse™ draw on Ceto's more than 30 years of engagements with community banks and credit unions, presented as peer segments rather than individual institutions.

NOVA Nexus™ reflects your institution's own vendor contracts and obligations, NOVA Atlas™ draws on established market and demographic data sources, and NOVA Vector™ applies predictive models across combined market and growth data.

What does it take to get started with Ceto NOVA™?

Ceto NOVA™ requires no installation or on-premise infrastructure. Ceto handles hosting, configuration, and onboarding, and works with your team to load the information each module requires, such as your competitor set for NOVA Vantage™, vendor contracts for NOVA Nexus™, and operational data for NOVA Pulse™.
Most institutions are up and running within a few weeks, with training and ongoing support provided by Ceto's client success team.

What makes Lucira™ AI different from Copilot, ChatGPT, or other AI tools we could use in-house?

General-purpose AI tools know nothing about your institution, your competitors, or your market until someone gathers the data, formats it, and pastes it in. Lucira™ AI is built into Ceto NOVA™ and works directly with the data already in the platform. When a leader asks a question, Lucira identifies what is being asked, determines which data is relevant, retrieves it from the appropriate Ceto NOVA™ sources, and answers in plain language.

Every response is grounded in real platform data rather than the general knowledge of a public model. Lucira also applies the analytical methods Ceto has refined over more than 30 years of consulting engagements with more than 2,000 community banks and credit unions. Lucira interprets your data the way an experienced banking advisor would rather than the way a general assistant might.


Finally, Lucira operates entirely within Microsoft Azure, with all data access managed through secure, controlled connections to your institution's Ceto NOVA™ environment. Leaders get the speed of AI-assisted analysis without moving institutional data into a consumer tool or relying on an assistant that has no visibility into the business.

You don’t have to be ready to talk to start getting clarity.

Most leaders spend months mapping where performance is breaking down before they engage anyone. If that’s where you are, you’re not behind — you’re being deliberate. We put what we know about the patterns, the pressure points, and where institutions typically find the most leverage into one place.  Read The Banking Performance Gap on your own time.

The system behind stronger financial performance.

How Ceto helps financial institutions connect data, align decisions, and move from fragmented visibility to measurable performance improvement