Banks allocated roughly $650 billion to IT spending globally in 2024, more than any other industry as a percentage of revenue. In retail banking, the results are visible: consumer apps are sleek, fast, and intuitive, and customer satisfaction with digital banking climbed from 44% in 2022 to 52% in 2024, according to Coalition Greenwich research.
Then your corporate treasury client logs into their portal and it feels like time travel to a less convenient decade.
The investment disparity wasn’t accidental. Prioritising ten thousand retail customers over five hundred corporate clients seemed like a reasonable strategic call. But the math ignored something fundamental: one corporate client leaving takes 100 times more revenue with them than one retail customer. And those corporate clients are now comparing your experience not just to other banks, but to every B2B software platform they use every single day.
What “stuck in 2010” looks like in practice
This isn’t about aesthetics or whether your portal uses the right shade of blue. It’s about workflow friction that costs corporate treasury teams real hours every week. Today, the typical corporate banking experience involves logging into three separate systems to execute a single cross-border payment with FX hedging, using “export to Excel” as the primary bridge between bank systems and the client’s ERP, and navigating approval workflows that require leaving the portal, emailing a colleague, waiting for a reply, and then returning to complete the transaction.
Reporting generates PDFs instead of actionable data. Multi-entity clients with subsidiaries across five countries cannot get a consolidated view without manually aggregating information themselves. Cash positioning reports show yesterday’s balances when treasury teams need to know where they’ll stand three days from now given pending transactions.
Chris McDonnell, Head of Commercial and Digital Banking Analytics at Coalition Greenwich, captures what forward-looking banks are beginning to acknowledge: the focus on TMS and ERP integration isn’t incidental. It’s what corporate clients really need, and most banks still aren’t delivering it.
Why Corporate Banking Got Deprioritized
The logic seemed sound at the time. Smaller customer counts made urgency feel lower, higher transaction complexity made quick wins harder, and regulatory requirements appeared to justify a slower pace of change. The biggest assumption, though, was that corporate clients valued relationships over experience. They do, but not unconditionally.
The relationship matters enormously when you’re negotiating credit facilities or structuring complex financing. It doesn’t excuse a portal that requires eight clicks and two separate logins just to check an FX rate and execute a trade. Corporate clients now have alternatives that simply didn’t exist five years ago: fintech platforms built specifically for treasury management, neobanks offering specialised corporate services, and payment specialists who move money across borders faster and more cheaply than traditional banks. These platforms aren’t trying to replace the entire banking relationship. They’re quietly taking the pieces where user experience matters most, leaving banks with the lower-margin lending business.
The result is wallet share erosion that happens slowly, then becomes suddenly visible in a quarterly review when someone finally asks why FX revenue from a major client dropped 60% year over year.
Three ways poor UX costs banks more than they realise
| Pattern | What it looks like | What the bank loses |
| FX and payments bleeding to specialists | Client keeps the lending relationship but executes transactions elsewhere because a competitor’s platform takes three clicks instead of eight | Transaction revenue while the relationship appears intact |
| Treasury management fragmentation | Client uses your platform for basics but runs actual cash positioning in their own systems because your tools don’t connect to their ERP | Visibility into client goals; the relationship becomes transactional rather than advisory |
| Loss of data advantage | Clients working around your system means you lose the behavioural visibility needed to offer proactive guidance | The ability to offer intelligent liquidity or FX recommendations disappears entirely |
A 2024 study on digital transformation in corporate banking found that 60% of financial institutions still rely on legacy systems and remain in the early stages of digital transformation. This is no longer a technology constraint. Banks have the budget. It is a prioritisation failure that is now showing up directly in business outcomes.
What modern corporate banking UX actually requires
Corporate treasury teams don’t care about visual design awards — they care about platforms that understand what they’re trying to accomplish and help them do it efficiently. That requires four capabilities working in sync:
- Workflow intelligence that recognizes what treasury teams are trying to accomplish across multiple transactions, not just individual requests.
- Integrated multi-entity views that bring together subsidiaries, currencies, and jurisdictions into actionable intelligence.
- Predictive cash positioning that looks ahead to forecast where the organization will stand in the next few days, not just report yesterday’s balance.
- Contextual recommendations based on real behavioral data rather than pre-set product calendars.
This is the gap that Clayfin’s BFM (Business Finance Management) platform was built to address. Not by digitising existing clunky processes, but by applying cognitive banking specifically to corporate complexity. The platform recognises that a business customer’s behaviour signals something fundamentally different from a retail customer’s, that the same transaction volume increase could indicate healthy growth or developing cash flow stress depending on the business context, and that corporate clients need intelligence that spans entities and jurisdictions rather than siloed views per subsidiary. Two decades of production corporate banking experience across diverse markets and regulatory regimes are embedded in how the platform thinks, not just in how it looks.
The fintech threat banks underestimated
Corporate banking assumed relationship stickiness would provide protection, that credit facilities and balance sheet strength would keep clients anchored even as the digital experience lagged. Fintech platforms didn’t operate under that assumption. They built for experience first, knowing that proving value in one workflow was enough to expand from there.
Payment specialists are taking transaction volume by offering better execution. Treasury platforms are winning business through analytics and forecasting that traditional portals don’t provide. Trade finance platforms have integrated genuine workflow automation instead of asking clients to navigate disconnected systems. Banks still hold real structural advantages in balance sheet capacity, regulatory trust, and relationship depth. But the UX gap is eroding those advantages faster than most executives realise. The conversation in CFO offices has quietly shifted from “we bank with X because of our twenty-year relationship” to “we bank with X for lending, but we use Y for payments and Z for treasury because those platforms actually work.”
The window is narrowing
Corporate clients who tolerated clunky systems because they valued stability are running out of patience. The expectation bar shifted the moment fintech platforms proved that corporate banking could be as intuitive as consumer apps while still handling regulatory complexity.
Closing this gap isn’t about incremental portal updates or adding a mobile-responsive layer. It requires treating corporate banking as a cognitive platform that understands business workflows, applies intelligence to treasury complexity, and delivers proactive value rather than reactive processing. The banks that retain corporate wallet share through 2025 and beyond will be the ones building for where client expectations are now, not patching infrastructure from a decade ago. Corporate clients have options, the relationship still matters, but experience has become a deciding factor in ways banks are only beginning to fully appreciate.
Sources
- Coalition Greenwich Research: “Top trends to watch in U.S. commercial banking in 2025” (February 2025)
greenwich.com/commercial-banking/top-trends-watch-us-commercial-banking-2025 - Banking IT Spending Data: McKinsey & Company, “Managing bank IT spending: Five questions for tech leaders” (October 2024); Gartner enterprise IT spending forecasts
mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/managing-bank-it-spending-five-questions-for-tech-leaders - Digital Transformation Research: Unblu, “Digital banking trends transforming CX in 2025”; Straits Research digital banking platform market analysis
unblu.com/en/blog/trends-transforming-digital-banking - Celent Corporate Banking Report: “Corporate Banking IT Pressures & Priorities 2024” on cloud migration and payment modernization priorities
- Clayfin Technologies: Business Finance Management (BFM) platform for cognitive banking solutions in corporate treasury and multi-entity management
