Not products, but pipes: How incumbent institutions are piecing together the next era of finance
- The big story across incumbent institutions right now is less about shiny launches and more about the deeper rewiring of how money moves, how clients are supported, and how the industry defines 'service.'
- Insitutions' operating system is slowly being rebuilt through digitization, APIs, and programmable money -- with Amex, Citizens, and BNY each highlighting different facets of that shift.
The future of banking is not in a single, clean leap. It’s showing up in fragments: APIs on top of legacy systems, automation paired with human judgment, digital tools balanced by hand-holding for companies new to the digitization journey. Emerging from these fragments aren’t just new tools or products, but a slow rebuild of banking’s operating system.
My recent stories on Amex, Citizens, and BNY highlight different layers of this rebuild. Together, they sketch an industry that is adapting to guide customers through change while rewiring its infrastructure for the API era, and experimenting with programmable money without disrupting what already works.
Targeting the messy middle: Amex’s case for service as the real edge
Talk to businesses about digitization and you won’t hear about blockchain or tokenized assets — the first thing you’ll hear about is the headache of moving away from checks, invoices, and half-digital workflows. That’s the ‘messy middle’ American Express has decided to make its turf.
Amex’s ‘One Amex’ servicing model isn’t about chasing the latest rail. It’s about making sure customers actually adopt the digital tools on offer. A small business owner just starting to automate gets guided onboarding and tutorials through its Business Blueprint platform. A multinational with complex treasury needs gets APIs, reporting dashboards, and a dedicated relationship lead.
The philosophy is what Tom Taris, SVP, Commercial, Merchant & Banking Servicing at Amex, calls “relationship servicing”: treating the customer journey as one continuous relationship, rather than a patchwork of product interactions. The company is training teams to reflect that, upskilling employees across product lines and exploring generative AI for tools like “Knowledge Hub” – not to replace service, but to make it faster, smarter, and more predictive.
It’s a reminder that in banking, adoption – not invention – is the bottleneck. And service, human or AI-augmented, is often the difference between a client stalling and scaling.
Citizens is centering its strategy on APIs as the glue between systems
While Amex is dealing with the last mile of digital adoption, Citizens Bank is tackling the pipes beneath. Its new open banking API framework eliminates the old patchwork of customer-segment-specific integrations in favor of one standards-based endpoint.
The API design is simple: one endpoint, many doors. The system flexes its output depending on the account type. A retail customer, a small business, and a multinational company all access the same gateway, while the system adjusts behind the scenes to accommodate their specific profiles.
The payoff is already visible: Oscar Gonzalez, Head of Product Management for Access & Delivery Channels at Citizens, notes that screen scraping traffic is down 96%, and onboarding times have dropped from weeks to minutes.
The new API design also lays the groundwork to incorporate more types of commercial data. The bank is widening its open banking stack beyond deposits and money markets to cover loans, wealth balances, positions, and transactions. Built on a single architecture, new features can scale quickly across all customer types.
BNY reimagines treasury through APIs and programmable money
For BNY, APIs are becoming the connective tissue of treasury: linking core services with new layers like FX settlement, blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits.
BNY aims to evolve treasury from a back-office cost center into a data-driven ecosystem. That means automating sweeps and reconciliations, layering predictive analytics onto FX exposures, or enabling corporate treasurers to move cash flow into tokenized assets after hours and back into central bank money the next morning.
The underlying logic is hybrid, not revolutionary: don’t rip out existing rails, but overlay them with programmable layers that work 24/7. “Over the long run, Stablecoins and tokenized deposits will be complementary, not competitive,” notes Carl Slabicki, who leads treasury platform strategy at BNY.
APIs serve as the orchestration layer, tying together legacy systems, instant payment networks, and emerging token rails into a more continuous system. Slabicki frames it as rewiring the world’s money pipes. Instead of tearing down what works, the upgrade happens through bridges and overlays: SWIFT stitched into local instant networks, RTGS fused with tokenized ledgers, compliance harmonized across corridors.
The goal is a sustained, global flow of value, built corridor by corridor.
The throughline: Orchestration as service
Across Amex, Citizens, and BNY, the themes converge. Institutions are becoming infrastructure orchestrators, smoothing client journeys, retooling integration backbones, and experimenting with programmable money.
Amex shows why service still matters when adoption is messy. Citizens demonstrates how a cleaner API design can change integration economics overnight. BNY illustrates how combining digitization, APIs, and blockchain innovations, such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits, can enhance what treasurers can achieve through connectivity.
The throughline is service, but in a new sense. It’s less about call centers or glossy brochures, and more about orchestration: designing systems that keep people, processes, and platforms in sync.