The business banking experience gap: What modern SMEs expect from their financial institution

Key Takeaways

• SMEs increasingly expect consumer-grade digital experiences from their financial institutions.
• Traditional business banking processes remain a significant source of friction.
• Onboarding, user administration, servicing, and payments continue to challenge many institutions.
• Modern business banking requires end-to-end digital journeys rather than isolated digital features.
• Banks that prioritize experience modernization will be better positioned to drive acquisition, loyalty, and growth.

Financial institutions face a growing challenge: despite years of digital transformation efforts, many business banking experiences still fail to meet modern expectations.

Pedro Azevedo, Chief Product Officer at ebankIT, told The Financial Brand that "it's important to start from the user’s perspective. Design what they want — the experience they should have — rather than focusing on your existing architecture and how it can be made right.” Lengthy processes, extensive paperwork, and workflows that simply don’t fit today’s demands.

The problem lies in the experience itself. Low speed, no customization, manual processes, and a sense of using just another app. As competition intensifies and SMEs become more digitally sophisticated, financial institutions must rethink what modern business banking truly means.

Why business banking is under pressure to evolve

For years, business customers accepted complex banking processes. It almost felt like a “tradition” perpetuated by the banking industry, where everything was hard to use just for the sake of it:

• Opening accounts required different documents;
• Managing users often depended on manual intervention;
• Accessing services involved branch visits or long phone calls.

Today, customers demand more, better, and faster.

Business owners use intuitive digital tools to manage accounting, payroll, procurement, communications, and operations. As a result, they expect banking experiences to be equally seamless, accessible, and efficient.

However, there’s still a lot to do.

While modernization hit retail banking soon enough, business banking hasn’t seen the same progress. In many institutions, digital channels were added on top of legacy infrastructure rather than designed around an organized experience strategy.

The result? A (huge) gap between what businesses expect and what many banks deliver. One of the main problems sits right at the start.

Complex onboarding processes

The first interaction between a customer and a financial institution should create immediate confidence. Instead, onboarding often becomes the first point of frustration, experiencing challenges such as:

• Excessive paperwork;
• Manual verification steps;
• Repetitive data collection;
• Limited transparency throughout the process.

Now, you should be asking… why does this matter? The longer onboarding takes, the higher the likelihood of customer abandonment. And no customers means no revenue.

That’s why financial institutions should transform onboarding into a streamlined, digital-first journey — that prioritizes speed without compromising compliance.

Business banking goes beyond a single user experience

Unlike retail customers, businesses operate in teams. A single organization may include: approvers, administrators, operational staff, financial controllers, and more.

However, many institutions still struggle to provide flexible user and entitlement management, which reflects how businesses actually operate.

What modern businesses expect

Nowdays, there's a lot at stake. A single process or institution works around daily, complex tasks. The better they work, the happier everyone gets, mainly customers. All in all, modern businesses want to:

• Add and remove users independently;
• Configure approval workflows;
• Manage permissions;
• Adapt roles as their organizations evolve.

And they want to do that (and even more) without relying on manual intervention from the bank — long phone calls, or visits to the branches.

Self-service has become a fundamental expectation. Today's SMEs value autonomy. They expect the ability to manage their banking relationships on their terms and schedule. This means providing digital access to services like:

• Reporting;
• Profile updates;
• Service requests;
• Payment tracking;
• User administration;
• Account management.

Once customers understand what they can do without assistance or supervision, the more satisfied they are. And when that happens in one platform alone, everything changes.

The omnichannel challenge

While handling their busy schedule, customers interact with their bank through multiple touchpoints:

• Branches;
• Online banking;
• Contact centers;
• Mobile applications;
• Relationship managers.

And that wouldn't be a problem if all interactions were connected. As they aren't, this is what happens: customers start a process in one channel to discover they must repeat steps or submit information elsewhere to complete it.

This bounce creates unnecessary friction and damages confidence in the institution's capabilities.

If you think about it, financial institutions and customers want the same: to save time. Every unnecessary step, approval, login, or form only lengthens the process. Modern business banking must eliminate this friction if they want to retain customers.

See how a unified omnichannel platform eliminates friction across channels.

What businesses want (and need)

Businesses need real-time access to essential information, or they’ll never make informed decisions. This includes cash positions, payment statuses, transaction activity, user actions, or financial insights.

Visibility enables organizations to make faster, more informed decisions. At the same time, their customers don’t want to navigate multiple systems to perform basic banking tasks. They expect intuitive and connected experiences that reduce complexity rather than add to it.

They want a banking partner that supports growth. Businesses expect their financial institution to do more than provide transactional services.

They want support, guidance, and digital tools to help them manage risk, access financing, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and scale their operations. Institutions that deliver this can strengthen relationships and differentiate themselves in competitive markets.

Closing the gap: The foundations of modern business banking

Closing the experience gap requires more than launching new digital features. It demands a comprehensive transformation strategy built around the needs customers prioritize:

• Digital onboarding: Accelerate account opening and reduce operational friction.
• Intelligent automation: Simplify processes while improving efficiency and consistency.
• Personalization: Deliver relevant experiences based on customer profiles, behaviours, and needs.
• Flexible business administration: Enable organizations to manage users, permissions, and workflows independently.
• Unified omnichannel experiences: Ensure that customers end processes exactly where they began them.

The institutions that succeed in the coming years will be those that view business banking not as a product line, but as a strategic growth engine focused on customers’ experience.

Pedro Azevedo, Chief Product Officer at ebankIT, highlighted just that to The Financial Brand. The user must be at the center of every decision, so that digital experiences create smooth processes regardless of where they're used.

It’s undeniable that business customer expectations have evolved faster than many business banking experiences.

The question is no longer whether business banking should evolve. It’s whether institutions can evolve quickly enough to meet the expectations of the businesses they serve.

Ready to transform your business banking experience?