The connected back office customers are building without you

Datos Insights published new research this month on how community banks compete for commercial relationships. Our thanks to CSI for making The New Commercial Standard: How Community Banks Compete Through Modern Treasury available to the industry.

Read it as a list of capability gaps and you'll miss what it says. Read the demand data together and a picture assembles itself.

What are small businesses actually asking for?

Not features. A system.

When Datos asked community bank small business customers what they expect from digital banking, the top answers weren't products. Payment workflows that align with how the company operates reached 79%. A dashboard showing business health on one screen reached 67%. Transactions performed in third-party software and synced back to the bank landed at 66%.

Alignment. One screen. Sync. Each one describes a relationship between things, not a thing.

The wish list says the same. Asked where their financial institution should invest, small businesses name real-time payments first at 40% and banking from an accounting system second at 37%. Asked which operations they most want to run without navigating somewhere else, the answers cluster around daily work: cash management at 54%, payments at 46%, and billing and invoicing at 41%.

That's not a shopping list. It's a description of money moving through one place.

Where do they go when their bank doesn't offer it?

Everywhere else.

Seventy-one percent of small businesses already work directly with a nonbank fintech for at least one financial capability. Among midsize and large organizations, 79% work with at least one for cash management or payments, and 45% work with two or more. Adoption doesn't flatten as businesses grow. It compounds.

Every one of those relationships started as a business solving a connection problem. Invoicing that feeds the books. Bill payment without a separate login. Cash that's current rather than reconciled at month end.

The business wanted one system. It couldn't get one from its financial institution, so it built the closest approximation, one tool at a time.

Why is fragmentation the top complaint if customers chose the tools?

Because parts that were never designed to connect don't assemble into a system. They assemble into a pile.

Ask community bank small business customers to name their biggest pain point in managing cash flow, invoicing, and bill payments, and the leading answer is managing multiple software systems that don't communicate with each other, at 27%. High fees rank fourth, at 19%.

Below that headline the theme repeats. Reconciling payments with accounting records sits at 15%. Tracking what's owed to the business and what it owes others sits at 12%.

None of those are complaints about a single tool. They're complaints about the space between tools. The fragmentation your customers describe is the residue of the system they tried to build on their own.

Doesn't this only apply to larger commercial customers?

That assumption is the expensive one, and Datos is direct about it. Sophisticated cash management no longer begins at the top of the business banking market, and the report's leading recommendation is to push that capability well below the $20 million revenue mark. Waiting until a business scales all but guarantees it has adopted a fintech's workflow.

Micro and small businesses reach this ceiling first, not last. Fewer people, less tolerance for manual reconciliation, no back office to absorb the gaps. Reserving cash management for larger relationships is a decision to arrive after the workflow has left.

What does building it inside digital banking look like?

It looks like the capabilities being connected to each other before the customer ever touches them.

Autobooks brings receivables, payables, accounting, and Autobooks Capital together inside digital banking. The business owner sends invoices and accepts payments, pays bills and manages expenses, keeps organized books when accounting is enabled, and applies for working capital. One place. No new app, no new login, and no reconciliation between tools that were never built to speak to each other.

Because those capabilities share data across one connected system, they produce Cash Flow Intelligence: AI and system rules working across that data to surface proactive insights and produce a True Cash Balance informed by what has settled and what is coming. That's the dashboard on one screen. That's the payment workflow aligned to how the business operates. Not four answers to four survey questions. Outputs of one system.

Through the Hub, bankers get the other half. Which businesses are healthy, which need attention, and where lending opportunities exist, across the portfolio.

What this means for your institution

Your customers have already told you what they want, and most have approximated it themselves. Every tool they added is a workflow you don't see.

The opportunity isn't to match a fintech on any single capability. It's to offer what none of them can assemble alone. A system where getting paid, paying bills, keeping the books, and borrowing all connect, inside the digital banking your customers already use.

Start with receivables. It turns the checking account into a daily business tool, and the payment data flowing through it is what everything else builds on. See how it works inside digital banking.

Related questions

Isn't adding four capabilities just more systems to manage?

Only if you buy them separately. Four vendors means four contracts, four implementations, and four more disconnected tools. When small businesses evaluate a new cash management solution, ease of implementation ranks third at 39%, ahead of breadth of features at 20%. They're protecting against a difficult rollout, not shopping for capability.

How do we know a relationship is eroding before the account closes?

You usually don't. Datos describes the sequence. A workflow leaves first. Then the operating deposits follow, because the activity that generated those balances now happens elsewhere. Full attrition comes last. The account stays open through most of it, so switching statistics record the loss long after it started.

Sources

• The New Commercial Standard: How Community Banks Compete Through Modern Treasury, Datos Insights, September 2026. Made available by CSI.