The Jacksonville, Fla.-based FIS' PACE Index shows financial institutions worldwide are leveraging digital channels to meet customers' needs for convenience, choices and accessibility, but display an inability to build deeper relationships and meet overall customer expectations.

Credit unions and community banks received strong responses for quality of service and in-person experience and surpassed customer expectations in those categories. Despite serving the bulk of U.S. customers, large banks on the other hand dragged down the national index based on consumer perceptions around fairness and transparency.

The PACE (which stands for Performance Against Customer Expectations) Index, which comprises 1,000 individual customer surveys in each focus country, looks at providers identified across nine countries and includes traditional banks, Internet-only banks, postal banks, state-owned banks, co-operative banks, building societies, credit unions and other types of providers. In the report, the term "bank" is an all-encompassing term for the collection of primary banking services providers identified in the survey.