Nick Merritt, Executive Director, Designit
There is a question that the corporate banking industry has successfully avoided for a decade. Not the technology question – that one has been answered, expensively and repeatedly, by almost everyone. Not the product question, or the regulatory question, or the talent question. Those have entire conference tracks dedicated to them.
The question nobody is asking is simpler and harder: who are you, and does your client feel it?
The race that ended in a draw
Every major corporate bank now has APIs. Everyone is exploring tokenisation, automating mandates, and embedding AI into credit and servicing workflows. The infrastructure arms race that defined the last decade has produced something nobody planned for: a market where every serious player looks, from the outside, essentially the same.
This is not a failure of ambition. It is the natural endpoint of a race where everyone runs in the same direction. When technological capability becomes universal, it stops being a competitive advantage and becomes the cost of entry. The floor, not the ceiling.
The CFO selecting a cash management bank is no longer choosing between meaningfully different products. They are choosing between institutions, and most corporate banks have never seriously examined what their institution actually stands for at the point of experience.
What hospitality understood first
Consider what separates a truly great hotel from a comfortable one. It is not the thread count or the room service menu. Both have those. It is whether the experience feels, at every point of contact, like it was designed for you specifically, even though you know, rationally, that it wasn’t.
The handwritten note. The preference remembered from a previous stay. The problem resolved before you thought to raise it. None of these are expensive. All of them are intentional. They are expressions of a brand philosophy so embedded in the operation that it shows up consistently, across every touchpoint, delivered by people who understand not just what they are doing but why.
That is not a hospitality idea. It is an identity idea. And it is precisely what most corporate banks lack.
The technology is the room service. Expected, necessary, and not why anyone comes back.
The swan problem
Before the industry can have an honest conversation about identity, it needs to have an honest conversation about where it actually is.
Much of what currently presents as seamless in corporate banking is not. Behind the clean interface, the automated confirmation, the frictionless journey, there are frequently people. Operations teams manually bridging legacy systems. Relationship managers chasing approvals that should never have required human intervention. Processes that were broken before digitisation and are now broken at scale, presented in a better UI.
The swan looks effortless. Its legs have never stopped running.
This matters not because it is embarrassing, complexity is real and legacy infrastructure is a genuine constraint, but because it represents a fundamental misallocation of human effort. The energy spent propping up processes that should be automated is energy not available for the moments that genuinely require a person.
And that distinction matters enormously. A payment status query does not need a human. A conversation about a covenant breach does. A mandate renewal reminder does not. The call the night before a significant acquisition closes absolutely does.
The banks that get this right will not deploy fewer people. They will deploy better ones, in the right moments, with the full context they need, doing the work that actually builds a relationship.
The API is not a pipe
Nowhere is the gap between claim and reality more visible than in API strategy.
Ask any major corporate bank about their approach and the answer is confident, consistent, and remarkably similar across the market. Embedded. Seamless. Client-centric. Having looked closely at what the market is actually delivering, the reality is more modest.
Connectivity exists. True embeddedness, the kind that makes a bank a functioning part of a client’s operation rather than a service they log into occasionally, is almost nowhere.
That gap represents the most significant missed opportunity in corporate banking right now. Because an API strategy designed with genuine embeddedness as the goal is not an infrastructure play. It is an identity play. When a bank is integrated into a client’s treasury system, their ERP, their operational workflow, it stops being a vendor. It becomes something closer to a permanent member of the finance team. One that happens to sit inside the technology stack.
The best professional services firms have always understood this dynamic. The goal is not to complete an engagement and leave cleanly. It is to become load-bearing, so embedded in the client’s next decision that your absence would create a gap. Not through lock-in. Through genuine indispensability.
That is what an API strategy could be, for the banks willing to design it that way. The difference between building a door and being given a key.
The gap is inside the building
What makes this particularly striking is that the knowledge of how to do this already exists, in most cases within the same institution.
The premium and private banking divisions of the world’s major banks hold a materially different standard. The relationship is anticipatory. The team understands the client’s context before the conversation begins. The experience, personalised, proactive, coherent, feels like it comes from somewhere with a clear sense of who it is and who it serves.
In a different division of the same building, the corporate treasurer gets a ticket number.
This is not a technology gap. The data exists. The systems exist. The organisational understanding of what a genuinely personal, anticipatory service looks like exists. What is missing is the will to extend it, and the recognition that the CFO managing a nine-figure cash position carries exactly the same underlying expectation as the private banking client, even if the relationship looks different on the surface.
The reference point has already moved
That expectation is not softening. It is hardening.
The finance professionals sitting on the other side of these relationships are consumers before they are clients. Before the treasury management system is open, they have used services that know them, anticipate them, and remove friction before it registers. They are not comparing their corporate bank’s experience to a competitor’s. They are comparing it to every well-designed service they encountered before they got to the office.
That bar is rising faster than corporate banking is moving.
Identity is the only thing left
Which returns us to the question the industry has been avoiding.
In a market where infrastructure is equivalent, products are comparable, and pricing is negotiable, the only durable differentiator is a coherent identity expressed through every client experience . Not a brand campaign. Not a values statement on a website. The felt sense, at every touchpoint, that this institution knows why it exists and has built everything around that.
That coherence is what makes the digital and the human feel like they come from the same place. It is what turns a capable bank into a trusted one. It is what makes a client build their own operation around yours rather than treating you as interchangeable infrastructure.
People do not choose their corporate bank for the product anymore. Products are equivalent. They choose, and stay, because of something the technology cannot replicate. A felt sense of identity. A consistent experience of being known.
The banks that answer the identity question first will find that the technology question becomes much easier. The ones that don’t will remain functional, forgettable, and increasingly easy to route around.
The floor is not the ceiling. But far too many banks have stopped looking up.