Beyond Churn: Predicting Financial Fragmentation in Retail Banking with Temporal Machine Learning

Abstract

Retail banking attrition is usually represented as a terminal binary event, even though client relationships often weaken earlier through partial movements of deposits, investments, and recurring activity to external financial institutions. This paper defines that preceding state as financial fragmentation and presents an end-to-end temporal machine-learning system for predicting it before complete disengagement. Using anonymized multi-source data from a large retail bank, the framework predicts whether a valid external transfer or investment event will occur within 90 days. The study uses 595,220 client-month observations, with 346 engineered features combining monthly client profiles, balances, product relationships, prior flow-of-funds behavior, macroeconomic conditions, and competitor activity. A four-stage XGBoost cascade estimates (1) whether an external outflow will occur within 90 days, (2) the expected amount, (3) the originating product, and (4) the destination financial institution. The primary classifier achieved a test precision-recall area under the curve of 0.823. At the validation-selected threshold, it produced 86.4% precision, 75.1% recall, and an F1 score of 0.803. Ranking test observations in descending Stage 1 fragmentation score, the top 1% of clients yielded 95.3% precision, while the top 5% captured 78.7% of observed outflow cases. The amount model placed 94.9% of predictions within an adjacent amount bucket. Destination prediction reached a macro-F1 of 0.81 across 27 classes; source-product prediction achieved a weighted F1 of 0.92. By moving the analytical focus from terminal churn to earlier fund migration, the proposed approach provides a practical foundation for proactive, explainable, and economically informed client-retention decision support.