The good news is that, most banks have made great progress toward becoming more "customer centric" over the past few years. In part, this is because many bank CEOs have taken a personal interest in getting closer to their customers. Indeed, according to KPMG's 2017 Global CEO Outlook, two-thirds of bank CEOs feel personally responsible for representing the best interest of their customers, and 65 percent say they can confidently articulate the customer value proposition.

At the same time, we've seen many of the large banks start to invest significant capital and resources into improving the customer focus of their organizations. They are testing out new technologies that promise to speed transactions and processes, taking steps to align their middle-and-back-office processes around the customer, developing financial technology (fintech) strategies to improve the customer experience, and putting serious effort into improving their customer data and analytics approaches.

Living up to customer expectations: Talking to bank CEOs