For small business owners, banks still have a long way to go: just 7% view their bank as a true strategic partner, according to Grasshopper Bank’s recent survey.
A major problem, says Grasshopper's Danielle Kane, is that many banks still see small-business banking as a product category rather than an operating environment with distinct needs.
For fintechs seeking U.S. bank charters, the OCC is asking: Do the management, capital, risk, and compliance infrastructure hold up? And is the institution ready to operate as a bank, not just alongside one?
The OCC may be widening the path to a charter, but it’s also raising the bar for proving readiness.
BILL is embedding AP payments directly into major ERP and payroll platforms, turning fragmented SMB finance stacks into one seamless workflow with an 8M-business network behind it.
New AI agents are slashing manual work in tax form collection and reconciliation by 80%+, part of BILL's bigger bet on becoming the financial infrastructure layer for the "Fortune 5 Million."
As banks weave AI into their customer experiences, many are looking for ways to translate years of customer data into a more complete picture of each customer's needs and context.
The difference isn't the data itself, but how well a bank makes sense of a customer's context and goals and builds the right response around that.
Bank of America has resisted the urge to use AI as a shortcut to efficiency, a temptation that has driven many companies into expensive and poorly conceived AI investments.
EricaAssist offers the clearest example of Bank of America's data-first AI strategy, with the bank recently enhancing the employee assistant by integrating Gen AI capabilities.
