Beyond uncertainty: middle market strategies for 2026 success
As we look ahead in 2026, middle market leaders are navigating a familiar mix of opportunity and uncertainty. In conversations with the private and public companies we serve, we find they’re not waiting for perfect clarity. Instead, they are making targeted, strategic moves to help their companies grow.
Three themes have emerged for continued success in 2026: expanding digital reach, leveraging M&A for transformation, and prioritizing employee financial wellness.
Digital Success Starts with Outcomes, Not Tools
The most successful digital journey starts with the client, not the technology. This includes B2B companies, where clients now expect the same seamless digital experiences in business as they encounter in their personal lives, making client journey-mapping a critical first step.
An effective approach involves clarifying the client engagement moments that matter most, from discovery and buying to onboarding and service. The client experience and data flows should be designed around these critical touchpoints. This means defining what data to capture; assigning clear data ownership and standards; and providing relevant teams with a single, secure view. When
Provo
Dan Briggs Bank of America
the right people have the right information at the right time, decision-making accelerates and satisfaction increases.
A good digital strategy will also help improve employee experience, freeing up employees’ time from manual and tedious tasks and creating more room for higher-value, innovative and creative work. This can help attract more digital-savvy employees who can leverage AI, provided data is clean and governed and leaders keep humans in the loop for critical decisions.
Consider Shaping the Future Through M&A
Deal activity is expected to continue in 2026, and mergers and acquisitions can be a powerful tool to accelerate growth and support succession planning. Specifically, M&A offers several strategic avenues for growth and resilience:
• Diversifying into adjacent products or services can broaden a portfolio and deepen client relationships through additional offerings.
• Consolidation can strengthen a company’s competitive position by expanding distribution and removing duplicative costs.
• Cross-border deals offer a path to faster market entry and local expertise.
• Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) allow owners to sell all or part of the business, while keeping stakeholders invested in the company’s success.
Prioritize Your Team’s Financial Wellness
The financial health of your employees can impact the financial health of your overall company. While many employers remain focused on offering traditional benefits — such as retirement and health care — employees are asking for a more holistic approach to their benefits package.
Employers must think of financial wellness benefits as more than a perk; these resources can help quell employees’ financial anxieties. The 2025 Bank of America Workplace Benefits Report found that personal debt is a significant source of strain for employees, with 46 percent saying it actively causes them stress and 35 percent saying it interferes with their focus and productivity at
work. In a particularly competitive labor market, offering these benefits can help drive job satisfaction, talent retention, work productivity and more.
To help meet employees’ financial wellness needs, employers should begin to look beyond traditional benefits. Our research found that employees are looking for unique resources to support their financial health, including:
• Retirement education and planning.
• Learning how to generate income in retirement.
• Online tools to measure and improve financial wellness.
• Financial guidance and resources on emergency savings, mortgages and paying for college.
And while nearly all employers feel responsible for their employees’ financial well-being, less than half offer financial wellness programs to support it. Closing this gap could be a critical step toward building a more engaged and resilient workforce.
In the face of continued uncertainty, middle market companies that embrace a customer-centric digital strategy, consider growth through strategic M&A, and prioritize the financial wellness of their employees will be best positioned for lasting success throughout 2026 and beyond.
among the lowest tenure rates for nation’s homeowners
U.S. homeowners are staying in their houses for the longest time in at least 25 years, largely thanks to their low mortgage rates, data shows. That’s according to a study by Realtors.com published by Axios. Contrasting that is Provo, which posted the shortest tenure in the study. That — along with still-high home prices and tight inventory — is keeping the housing market on ice.
The study said sellers at the end of 2025 had owned their homes for an average of 8.6 years — a record in data go-
ing back to early 2000, when the average was 4.2 years.
Homeowner tenure has increased steadily in almost every major metro area over the past two decades, according to ATTOM, an industry data provider. The “trend is especially pronounced in coastal and Northeast metros, where tenure often exceeds a decade, while many Sun Belt and Midwest markets continue to see comparatively shorter ownership periods,” CEO Rob Barber told Axios.
Before changing hands in Q4 2025, homes in Barnstable, Massachusetts (14.1 years); Springfield, Massachusetts (13.5 years); and New Haven, Connecticut (13.4 years) saw the longest average ownership among metros with at least 200,000 residents. Tenure rose the most from the prior year in Merced, California (34 percent, to 12.5 years); Lakeland, Florida (18 percent, to 8.3 years); and Chattanooga, Tennessee (17 percent, to eight years).
But Provo had an average tenure of
6.9 years, followed closely by Crestview, Florida (seven years) and Oklahoma City (7.3 years).
“Markets with historically longer or shorter ownership cycles have largely stayed that way, even as tenure has increased overall,” Barber said.
Some “golden handcuffs” are starting to come loose. For the first time since 2020, the share of U.S. homeowners with mortgage rates of 6 percent or higher exceeds those with rates below 3 percent, a new Realtor.com analysis finds.
