The problem hiding in plain sight
According to Fenergo’s 2025 Financial Crime Industry Trends survey of 600 senior banking executives, a record 70% of financial institutions lost clients in the past year due to slow onboarding — the highest rate ever recorded, up from 67% in 2024. The pain point that most banks attribute this to isn’t a lack of products. It isn’t pricing or service quality. It’s the connection — or rather, the absence of one.
Banks have spent years building exactly the services their enterprise customers need: trade finance, letters of credit, FX, real-time payments, supply chain finance, working capital solutions. The gap isn’t in what banks offer. It’s in how those services reach customers. Today, most banks still cannot efficiently deliver their product suite inside the workflows where enterprise customers actually operate. Instead, they rely on slow, expensive, one-at-a-time integration models that were never built to scale.
How the current model fails banks
There are two dominant ways banks connect with enterprise customers today. Neither works well at scale.
For large corporates running ERP platforms like NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, or MS Dynamics, the standard approach is host-to-host integration. Each connection is built custom, takes 6 to 8 weeks to stand up, costs up to $100,000 per customer, and must be repeated from scratch even when two customers run the exact same ERP. The bank builds a separate solution for every customer, negotiates a separate commercial agreement, and takes on all the maintenance overhead that follows.
For SMBs using accounting packages like Xero, QuickBooks, or Zoho, the situation is starker: there is no integration at all. These customers access banking services manually through a portal — a workflow that scales to nothing and offers the bank almost no visibility into how their customers are actually using their services.
The downstream effects compound: limited visibility and control across the customer base, high maintenance burden on IT teams, security and compliance overhead that grows with every new connection, and a fundamental inability to offer the digital services enterprise customers increasingly expect.
The compounding cost of 1:1 integration
The deeper problem with the current model is architectural. Each ERP platform requires a separate technical solution. Each new enterprise customer requires a separate commercial agreement, adding delays and complexity before the relationship can even begin. McKinsey research has found that as many as half of all banks have no tech solutions in place for many of their own onboarding processes — meaning the gaps are structural, not just operational.
The bank’s ability to scale is constrained not by customer demand, but by the architecture of how it connects.
As enterprise customers’ needs grow more complex — multi-bank ecosystems, digital payment rails, embedded supply chain finance, real-time FX — the 1:1 model creates a ceiling. Banks that want to offer new digital products often find they cannot without risking the integrity of existing integrations. The result is a service model that is simultaneously expensive, brittle, and hard to expand.
What the infrastructure layer of the future looks like
The answer isn’t building better one-to-one connections. It’s replacing the connection model entirely.
An intelligent connectivity layer sits between ERP systems and the bank, handling integration once across many enterprise customers — rather than repeatedly for each one. The key characteristics of this model are what make it transformative for banks:
A single unified interface across multiple ERP platforms. Rather than maintaining separate solutions for NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, MS Dynamics, Xero, QuickBooks, and Zoho, the bank integrates once and reaches all of them. New enterprise customers on those platforms can be onboarded in minutes, not months — following a three-step sequence of Integrate, Activate, and Transact.
API-first, cloud-native, and modular by design. The architecture is built to evolve. Banks can customize their product offerings, update services, and launch new digital capabilities without any risk of breaking existing integrations — something the current 1:1 model makes effectively impossible.
Full visibility and analytics across all connections from a single dashboard. Instead of fragmented, per-customer views, banks gain a real-time picture of their entire enterprise portfolio: which customers are using which services, where there are gaps, and where there are opportunities to expand the relationship.
What this unlocks for banks
The commercial implications are significant. When integration cost drops to zero per new customer, the economics of serving enterprise clients change entirely. Banks can onboard new corporate customers at scale without a corresponding increase in IT cost or compliance burden. They can offer new digital products — embedded payments, real-time trade finance, contextual insurance, supply chain financing — that simply aren’t possible to deliver through existing 1:1 architectures.
The connectivity layer also creates a new revenue stream in itself: API-enabled services that extend the bank’s reach into its customers’ daily financial workflows rather than waiting for those customers to log in and transact manually.
The infrastructure is the competitive moat
The banks that win the next decade of enterprise relationships won’t simply have better products. Every large bank has good products. What will separate the winners is infrastructure — the ability to deliver those products efficiently, at scale, inside the operating environments where enterprise customers live.
The integration layer is not a technology project. It is a strategic position. Banks that build or adopt it own the relationship. Banks that wait will continue losing customers to the friction they can’t get out of their own onboarding process.
The infrastructure layer of the future already exists. The question is which banks choose to use it.