Key takeaways

• Commercial clients are increasingly dissatisfied with their banks due to fragmented experiences, slow onboarding, non-seamless payments, and overburdened relationship managers.

• The core problem is not a lack of technology investment, but a misalignment. FIs invest in isolated systems while clients expect unified, intuitive, and fast digital journeys.

• A unified digital platform is essential to serve retail, SME, and corporate clients from a single environment, reducing complexity, cost, and experience fragmentation.

• Seamless digital banking experiences now require consumer-grade UX: familiar interfaces, frictionless navigation, end-to-end orchestration, and personalization across all channels.

• Relationship value is a key differentiator. Free RMs from administrative work and equip them with data, insights, and tools to become proactive, strategic advisors.

What is wrong with commercial banking?

Commercial clients are not satisfied with financial institutions for several reasons. Onboarding has become a major operational pain point, payment experiences are still far from seamless, real-time, and frictionless, and relationship managers are absorbed by administrative work instead of focusing on strategic advisory.

This reflects a clear misalignment between where financial institutions invest in technology and what clients actually value. The result is a suboptimal experience, fewer than half of commercial banking clients (46%) rate the overall service quality of their primary bank as excellent or very good.

3 things commercial clients’ need

1. A unified platform

Most commercial financial institutions still rely on separate digital platforms for retail and commercial clients, along with disconnected systems for payments, lending, compliance, and CRM, all loosely tied together by middleware that connects but does not truly unify them.

This fragmentation undermines critical processes such as onboarding, relationship management, and payment approvals, among others. To address this, financial institutions require a unified platform that enables them to serve retail, SME, and corporate clients within a single, cohesive digital environment, eliminating the complexity, cost, and inconsistent experiences associated with multiple disparate systems.

Modern architectures increasingly blend robust out-of-the-box capabilities with low-code extensibility, allowing banks to go to market faster and continuously evolve their digital experiences without the need for replatforming.

Dig deeper:

• Unify retail, SMB, and commercial banking in a single platform
• Design made easy: unlock a unified UX/UI for financial services
• SMB onboarding bottleneck: turning a 3-week process into 30 minutes

2. Seamless digital banking experiences

The expectations of commercial banking clients have structurally shifted. As digitally-native challengers continue to raise the bar on commercial banking experiences, the distance between what experience-first institutions deliver and what fragmented incumbents deliver grows year on year.

Commercial users no longer compare financial institutions to other financial institutions, they compare them to the best experiences they get in any industry.

In fact, McKinsey research¹ found that clients value user experience more than a robust product suite, and they will switch to competitors if they are not satisfied.

Financial institutions can overcome this challenge with user-centric design, familiar interfaces, and smooth navigation inspired by leading tech brands like Google and Apple.

This allows banks to meet rising expectations for simplicity, speed, and personalization. By orchestrating end-to-end customer journeys and reducing friction at every touchpoint. Platforms such as ebankIT's help institutions shift from complex, disjointed interactions to fluid digital experiences that delight commercial clients and strengthen engagement.

3. Relationship value

Weak relationship management (often driven by RMs being overloaded with administrative tasks) limits the ability to provide meaningful advice or strategic support.

Commercial clients expect their bank to act as a trusted partner, delivering tailored insights and proactive guidance. When interactions feel purely transactional rather than relationship-driven, satisfaction declines and the risk of client churn increases.

To build stronger partnerships, institutions must move beyond product offerings and invest in understanding each client’s business model, challenges, and growth ambitions. This involves delivering tailored solutions, proactive insights, and industry-specific expertise.

Shifting from transactional to consultative banking requires a mindset change supported by technology and data. Banks need to empower RMs with holistic client views, predictive insights, and tools that enable personalized recommendations. Instead of reacting to requests, RMs should proactively advise clients on cash flow optimization, risk management, and growth opportunities. 

Financial institutions can improve relationship manager (RM) efficiency by automating administrative tasks, streamlining workflows, and providing integrated digital tools that centralize client data and insights. Advanced analytics and CRM systems further enable RMs to prioritize opportunities, anticipate client needs, and deliver more timely, informed interactions.

The role of AI in this

AI is a force multiplier, but only in unified environments.

AI has the potential to deliver US$ 321 bn. in value to corporate banking services; however, most banks remain unable to operationalize these gains at scale due to legacy systems, fragmentation, and limited standardization.

In distributed environments, AI does not just underperform; it amplifies underlying structural problems, acting on incomplete or inconsistent data in ways that create operational and compliance risk.

In unified environments, AI accelerates the experience by enabling real-time decision support, automating routine financial workflows, enhancing fraud detection and compliance monitoring, and delivering contextual, personalized insights at scale.

It is not a question of technology but of human relationships

Commercial banking has always been relationship-led. 

The value of a great RM is not something technology replaces. But technology can remove the operational friction that currently prevents that value from being delivered consistently.  

The architecture of the future of banking is unified, intelligent, and humanized. The question for every commercial bank reading this is not whether to transform. It is whether to lead the transformation or be led by it.

The experience gap in commercial banking and how to close it

Banks are investing more in technology but clients are less satisfied than ever. Explore why financial institutions are struggling to meet the expectations of today’s commercial clients and how to overcome it.

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Source:

1. Charting a path to increasing transaction banking value by 50 percent, McKinsey, 2025