For much of the past decade, corporate banking was defined by problem-solving, with banks stitching together their own products to meet individual client needs. That model is now breaking down.
The rapid rise of fintechs, advances in banking software technology and the growing digital maturity of treasurers have fundamentally changed what is possible. Businesses are no longer content with standalone financial products. They expect financial services to integrate seamlessly into their operations, appearing where decisions are made and transactions are executed.
For banks, this creates two uncomfortable but unavoidable questions: how do you modernise at speed in the most efficient way, future proofing your organisation; and how do you navigate partnerships while preserving security, data protection and regulatory compliance?
We find ourselves returning to the same conclusion across conversations with banks, fintechs and software providers. The defining challenge is not innovation itself, but orchestration – the ability to combine internal capabilities with external ones, to manage complexity rather than eliminate it and to deliver consistent value across increasingly distributed models.
No institution has fully cracked this yet. That is precisely why orchestration will sit at the heart of our assessment in the 2026 Euromoney Awards programmes in corporate banking and transaction banking. We are less interested in isolated innovations than in how organisations are making deliberate choices about what they own, what they partner on and how they remain accountable in the process. Ambition for corporate banks should be to integrate financial capabilities so deeply into clients’ business processes that banking functions become an invisible infrastructure: reliable, resilient and rarely noticed by the end-user.
The siloed state of corporate banking
Banks have spent years talking about the end of the product silo. In reality, most corporate banking models are still organised around narrow mandates, separated technology stacks and incentives that encourage optimisation at a business-unit level, not an institutional one. The few that have successfully dismantled those lines have seen measurable gains in efficiency and profitability.
Legacy infrastructure is the real bottleneck
Corporate banks cannot operate as integrated platforms while their core systems remain fragmented and batch based. Many still rely on infrastructure that predates real-time processing, open APIs and embedded finance, which directly caps their ability to scale, personalise or automate services.
Attempting instant payments on legacy architecture also creates systemic risk, opening doors to fraud, operational errors and regulatory exposure. For institutions burdened with complex infrastructure, orchestration is the most pragmatic route forward. It allows banks to connect front-end corporate platforms to multiple back-end systems without full-scale replacement, embedding payments, FX and liquidity functions directly into operational workflows.
Regulation is reshaping product strategy
Tighter capital and liquidity rules under Basel IV and related frameworks are forcing banks to reassess how corporate banking consumes balance sheet. Heightened expectations around counterparty risk, know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions screening increase cost and complexity. This also means that compliance now absorbs a significant share of transformation budgets.
Global standards, regional rules and data regulations such as GDPR require constant system updates, documentation and controls. Legacy infrastructure is structurally incapable of coping with this level of dynamism. Hence, integrated, automated compliance becomes a competitive advantage.
A broken first experience
Onboarding remains one of the weak points in the corporate banking value chain. In a market where lending, payments and liquidity products are increasingly commoditised, friction in onboarding is one of the main reasons clients switch providers. Manual forms, duplicated data requests and opaque processes slow down revenue, frustrate clients and increase operational risk.
Based on responses from more than 5,400 corporates with global and regional roles and revenues above $500 million in the Euromoney Cash Management Survey 2025, satisfaction with onboarding improved slightly year-on-year but still ranks only around 15th out of more than 30 client satisfaction metrics.
Effective onboarding is not about collecting less data, but collecting the right data, in the right sequence, based on risk, geography and business model. That requires dynamic, profile-based workflows rather than a single process applied to all clients.
Personalisation becoming a core capability
Corporate banking has long treated users as broad, undifferentiated groups. Treasurers and CFOs are no longer asking for more data, but for the right data at the right moment. As a result, hyper-personalisation is becoming a structural requirement.
Role-based dashboards, intelligent workflows and automated approvals now allow decision-makers to act faster and with greater confidence. Banks are shifting towards behaviour-driven processing models in which routing, pricing and service levels adapt to user profile, transaction type and risk context. In practice, this translates into differentiated FX execution, prioritised settlement paths and dynamic limits delivered at machine speed.
To support this, the operating model must evolve. Consolidated interfaces and cross-trained teams enable banks to deliver tailored experiences without additional complexity or headcount. The most advanced platforms already adjust in real time, incorporating location, regulation and user behaviour into each decision.
Embedded finance is restructuring the value chain
Embedded finance is a structural redefinition of where banking happens. Procurement platforms, logistics providers and accounting systems are now embedding payments, FX, lending and liquidity directly into their workflows. These platforms are not competing with banks – they are absorbing banking functionality and redistributing control.
The winners in this model will be banks and fintechs that offer turnkey, pre-compliant APIs: onboarding, KYC, payments, reporting and controls embedded as a single, modular service. This is particularly critical in cross-border environments, where complexity has traditionally been a barrier to entry for non-banks.
But this model also weakens traditional accountability lines. When a platform facilitates a payment or extends credit through an embedded partner, responsibility for KYC, AML, data protection and reporting must be contractually and technically explicit.
Mapping the modern financial infrastructure stack
As corporate banking moves away from monolithic delivery models and towards modular, embedded and API-driven architecture, the industry is transforming into a layered financial infrastructure stack. Each layer plays a distinct role in enabling the real-time, data-led and embedded services that banks are now expected to deliver to their clients.
Across corporate banking, Euromoney identified nine functional layers that emerged as the structural backbone of modern infrastructure:
Banking-as-a-service providers
At the foundation sits the regulated layer. Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) providers and licensed infrastructure players hold, extend or provide access to markets across the world, enabling third parties to launch regulated financial products without becoming banks themselves.
They provide accounts, safeguarding, settlement and access to payment and clearing systems. For banks, these players increasingly serve as both partners and distribution channels: expanding reach while maintaining regulatory control.
Core banking and financial infrastructure platforms
The engine room of modern banking now sits with a new generation of cloud-native, API-first, microservices based platforms. These systems manage ledgering, account structures, product rules, orchestration and transaction processing.
They are at the centre of the industry’s most significant transformation: the shift away from rigid, decades-old mainframes to flexible, composable and interoperable architecture.
For incumbent banks, this is the foundation upon which everything else rests. No amount of front-end innovation can compensate for a constrained or fragmented core.
Payments, money movement and wallets
This layer is responsible for the flow of funds across the economy: acquiring, account-to-account transfers, domestic instant payments and cross-border remittances. It is where cost, speed, reach and optionality compete.
For transaction banks, this is both the most mature and most disrupted segment. Margins are being compressed, but volume and strategic value are increasing. Ownership of this layer is less about transaction fees and more about data, control and positioning inside client workflows.
Embedded finance and issuing
Directly above that sits the embedded finance layer, where non-financial brands integrate cards, wallets, accounts and lending into their customer journeys.
These platforms combine issuing capabilities, compliance abstraction and balance-sheet access into configurable infrastructure. A retailer becomes a lender. A software platform becomes a treasury layer. A marketplace becomes a payment hub. For banks, these platforms act as distributors of their balance sheets.
Lending, credit and decisioning infrastructure
This layer brings intelligence into risk. Credit assessment, underwriting, portfolio management and collections are increasingly driven by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decisioning platforms. The traditional line between a bank lender and an embedded lender is narrowing. Technology is standardising access to sophisticated models, at speed and at scale.
For banks, this is less about replacing underwriting expertise and more about embedding it across more use cases, in more places, with greater discipline.
Data and open banking
Data has become connective tissue. Secure access to account and transaction data underpins everything from account verification and reconciliation to forecasting and automated decision-making.
Open banking and open-finance capabilities sit at the heart of ecosystem interoperability. They enable banks to enrich their view of the customer, integrate with third-party platforms and embed themselves in corporate systems.
Digital identity, KYC, fraud and trust
This layer has evolved from back-office compliance into critical infrastructure. Identity verification, behavioural biometrics and fraud monitoring are now real-time, technology-led disciplines. Trust is no longer primarily a human or regulatory construct. It is an automated, machine-driven function embedded at every point of interaction.
For banks dealing with instant payments, embedded finance and remote onboarding, this is non-negotiable.
Risk, AML, compliance and RegTech
As regulatory pressure intensifies across jurisdictions, automation in compliance is no longer seen only as an efficiency tool. These platforms support monitoring, reporting and investigation, reducing operational burden while strengthening defences against financial crime.
For institutions trying to scale in a complex ecosystem, this layer enables growth without proportional increases in headcount or risk exposure.
Customer engagement and digital channels
Finally, all of this infrastructure is mediated through the customer-experience layer. From treasury portals and mobile applications to chat-based support, embedded finance widgets and decision dashboards, this layer shapes how financial services are perceived, used and valued.
For banks competing with technology-native platforms, this is where relevance is either reinforced or lost.
Where partnerships are shaping the future
In the past few years, collaboration had become the defining motif across these layers. The most important developments are not single-product innovations, but partnerships that connect layers together into working systems.
In payments and data, the partnership between Dwolla and Plaid became a clear signal of where account-to-account models are heading. By combining Plaid’s data connectivity with Dwolla’s payment rails, the collaboration unified authentication and money movement. For merchants seeking alternatives to card networks, this delivered lower cost, stronger authorisation and a more seamless experience.
In the core banking and lending layer, the integration of Zest AI’s decisioning capabilities into Temenos’ platforms in 2025 marked another important shift. Sophisticated, AI-driven underwriting moved out of innovation labs and into production. For banks, that meant stronger portfolios, faster decisions and embedded intelligence inside mainstream operations.
In embedded finance, scale became the differentiator. The merger of Railsr and Equals Money in 2025 illustrated a wider trend: fewer, larger and more institutionally capable providers offering multi-service embedded infrastructure rather than fragmented point solutions. For banks, this signals consolidation with partners that can support them at scale, across markets and use cases.
Other examples reinforced the same structural shift. Onfido and Mambu’s partnership proves that identity is now intrinsic to modern core banking architecture. It is not a peripheral add-on, but a foundational capability embedded into onboarding, controls and access management.
Breaking down the barriers
Corporate banks are rebuilding the ecosystem in stages. The shift is not driven by any single technology, but by the need to connect fragmented systems, move money faster, embed control into real-time services and distribute capability through partners. The following examples show how ecosystem participants are addressing each part of that journey.
Fixing the data foundation
The starting point for any ecosystem strategy is data. Legacy systems continue to prevent banks from achieving a consolidated view of the customer and from using data to personalise services.
Best SME Banking Ecosystem
Part of the Euromoney Awards for Excellence, the Best SME Banking Ecosystem category recognises banks and fintechs that go beyond traditional banking to build integrated, digital-first ecosystems for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The award celebrates institutions that bring together banking and non-banking services—such as payments, accounting, invoicing, financing and business tools—into a seamless, connected proposition that supports SME growth, efficiency and resilience.
Full eligibility criteria and submission guidelines are available in the Awards for Excellence corporate banking guidelines.
“Open banking success hinges on leveraging customer data effectively,” says Andrew Moseley, head of solution consulting, Europe at ACI Worldwide. “A single customer view is necessary but challenging due to fragmented legacy systems.”
ACI is addressing this through ACI Connetic, a cloud-native platform designed to orchestrate payments across multiple schemes using modular components. The platform enables banks to embed services across channels, apply least-cost routing and customise transactions based on user behaviour and institutional priorities. Full API enablement allows banks to integrate with fintech partners and open banking ecosystems as requirements evolve.
Fragmentation is not only a client-facing problem. At an infrastructure level, large acquirers and processors now handle hundreds of payment methods. While this diversity lowers costs, it significantly increases data complexity.
Building with scale in mind
Once data is connected, the next challenge is scale: moving money quickly across borders, rails and use cases.
Equals Money x Railsr provides turnkey APIs and platforms covering compliance, KYC and infrastructure, allowing non-technical businesses to integrate financial services with minimal friction. The model reflects growing bank-fintech collaboration in cross-border payments, where banks retain the customer relationship while fintechs power execution.
There is increasing interest from banks in outsourcing parts of the external payments journey to fintech partners, says James Simcox, chief operations and product officer at Equals Money x Railsr.
“Open banking hasn’t taken off meaningfully in credit-heavy markets like the UK and US, as it lacks the protections credit cards offer,” he continues. “Users still prefer secondary accounts for spending insights rather than aggregating accounts via open banking.”
For merchants, however, the economics are more compelling. “Open banking is a much cheaper product for merchants and offers better KYC insight into the customer,” adds Simcox. “In the longer term, access to financial data will lead to smarter consumer decision-making when it comes to switching utility providers, for example.”
Another example is IFX Payments, which focuses on enabling flow through self-service and integration. “Our API first approach is about empowering clients to move at their own pace and on their own terms,” explains COO Adam Dowling. “Whilst the client may prefer complete autonomy, we also have an implementation team that ensures seamless integration and provides expert support at any critical moment.”
As account-to-account payments mature, scale is also becoming visible. For example, Token.io is now powering pay-by-bank solutions for three of Europe’s five largest institutions. CEO Todd Clyde adds: “I often caution fintechs against working with banks because it demands a very particular long-term perspective – the lengthy sales cycle and level of security and resilience required are incredible, although the net result is they are typically long relationships and very sticky after that.”
Banks’ roles are expanding beyond pay-by-bank at checkout. “In the early days of account-to-account payments in general, all the attention was on pay-by-bank as an alternative to card payments,” he adds. “Banks are now offering pay-by-bank as an option for deposits and loan and credit card repayments.”
Alternative rails are increasingly central to the payments conversation, with stablecoins emerging as a credible solution for specific cross-border use cases, says Barry O’Sullivan, director of banking and payments at OpenPayd.
“Businesses need real choice in how they move money,” he says. “Domestic and regional instant payment schemes such as Faster Payments in the UK and Sepa Instant in Europe have gone a long way towards removing friction locally. But once funds need to move across borders, traditional correspondent banking routes can still take several days.”
O’Sullivan emphasises the importance of flexibility as payment models continue to evolve. “The payments landscape is evolving rapidly, with new providers and new rails reshaping expectations,” he says. “Digital assets and stablecoins will play an important role in certain scenarios, but they won’t underpin every transaction. The priority is remaining open-minded and choosing the right infrastructure for each use case.”
Embedding intelligence, trust and compliance
Speed alone is not enough. As transaction banking becomes more real time and embedded, intelligence, risk management and trust must be built into every layer.
Liberis is already deploying generative AI across underwriting, collections, customer service, compliance and quality assurance within its embedded finance business. Human judgement remains central, says CEO Rob Fairfield.
“If we take underwriting as an example, the normal process for complex cases involves manually reviewing data from multiple sources like open banking, credit bureaus and Companies House records,” he says. “Now we have a system that can automatically surface key risk factors, trends and anomalies across all these data points, significantly reducing the time our underwriters spend on data gathering and allowing them to focus on making better-informed decisions. AI also helps us identify patterns we might have missed – both hidden risks in applications we’ve approved and potentially good customers we may have unfairly declined.”
AI is also reshaping customer support. Generative AI can identify when issues can be resolved through chatbots, which account for roughly two-thirds of calls, allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases with faster access to relevant information. Fairfield expects AI to become embedded in everyday decision-making.
Identity verification is also becoming foundational. Systems designed around outdated assumptions will not scale, argues Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of Veriff. “Many banks have their own proprietary systems that struggle to adapt to change,” he says. “They also want to have control over deployment and have everything done in-house. But everyone needs to understand that everything we have previously connected to trust – voice, video, pictures – can now be generated by fraudsters.” Kotkas stresses the need for industry-wide cooperation to reduce friction while maintaining trust.
Regulation remains a critical driver of architecture decisions. The partnership between Sumsub and Tuum reflects a broader move towards modular, API-driven onboarding.
“The premise of PSD3 is more protection for the consumer, more transparency and therefore greater trust in the overall process, which is important for the adoption of open banking,” says Fernando Zornig, senior partnerships manager at Sumsub.
“Under PSD2 there is a big question mark about the APIs they are putting out and the quality of these APIs, which can be inconsistent. PSD3 aims to ensure the quality of APIs regardless of jurisdiction.”
Orchestrating distribution through ecosystems
With data, flow and control in place, the final challenge is distribution: how banks deliver services through partners without losing ownership.
Jifiti positions itself as a technology partner for banks and lenders, enabling them to digitise and embed their loan products through white-labelled customer journeys. Speed is critical. “Once a loan is approved, the transaction needs to take place in a matter of milliseconds,” says CEO Yaacov Martin. “This is challenging for banks because they are not in the technology business and their workflows are generally not built for this type of real-time decisioning and automated underwriting. So, we built a technology stack that layers on top of a bank’s core systems, giving them these capabilities to compete in the digital and embedded lending market.”
Jifiti identified the need for seamless fraud, AML and KYC processes woven into the customer journey, and responded by building a third-party orchestration layer, connecting banks to an ecosystem of specialist providers.
Banks that want to compete with fintechs with a digital lending offering need to balance the seamless experience that customers expect with compliance and regulatory requirements – there’s everything from anti-fraud and KYC to open banking and credit reporting to consider. Each time a bank enters a new market, a regulation is changed or offers a new loan product, there are new vendors to be added or models to be updated. The challenge is that banks simply don’t have the resources and capabilities to engage in these ecosystems while retaining trust, control and full regulatory compliance. Martin clarifies: “Integration is about connecting systems. Orchestration is about making them work together harmoniously and optimally – to make it simple for the bank, seamless for the customer and fully aligned with local regulations.”
NatWest Boxed, NatWest Group’s banking-as-a-service business, offers a bank-led view of ecosystem distribution. Scale is the first filter. “We need to drive meaningful growth across the products we provide,” says CEO Andrew Ellis. “These are quite complex deals that require a lot of activation, support and co-responsibilities in terms of regulation, as well as working together on pricing and product features.”
Client behaviour has shaped delivery choices. “We thought that most consumer-brands would want our API and plug it into their existing journey, whereas most want to use our web app, which has been a bit of a learning for us,” he says. “So, the easier we can make it, the better for the client.”
Ellis notes that regulatory requirements extend beyond the point of sale, making simplistic API approaches insufficient. Over time, greater standardisation will be essential.
“We’ve built a robust foundation, streamlining the user experience and optimising our lending capabilities from the ground up,” he says. “At a transaction banking level, in the future we may explore a bank-wide distribution strategy and see what we can do with services such as payments and FX, and start to put those services into this ecosystem.”
Orchestration underpins all of this. Icon Solutions focuses on helping banks move from monolithic systems to connected ecosystems by combining in-house development with specialist partners. “The idea of allocating various functionality into an ecosystem and running it as business process using orchestration is where most of the industry is going,” says strategy director Toine van Beusekom. “We are now looking at transferring this open model to corporates and public sector entities.”
Banks increasingly retain product ownership while sourcing targeted third-party functionality externally. “Because payment processing is not something that you can charge a lot of money for, we have seen the pendulum shift to where a lot of banks actually want to service those clients themselves directly,” says Van Beusekom. The risk is treating orchestration as an integration exercise rather than a strategic redesign. “We are at a very interesting inflection point in the industry where if you don’t think creatively about what the end state should be, there is a danger of treating processing as an afterthought,” he adds.
Finally, collaboration remains the common thread. “The ecosystem is predicated on partnerships,” says Ugne Buraciene, group CEO of payabl. “We talk to the merchants that use our services all the time to make sure we are building products they actually need.”
Balancing control and usability remains difficult. “We have to be compliant and have all the necessary fraud-prevention tools in place while still allowing clients to meet their day-to-day payment needs,” she says. “It’s about making sure that all the parts of the process are looked at in the right order.”
The ecosystem era of corporate banking
Fintechs, platforms and non-bank providers increasingly sit between banks and their clients. The challenge for banks is to engage in these ecosystems while retaining trust, control and full regulatory compliance.
Jifiti’s Martin clarifies: “Integration is about connecting systems. Orchestration is about making them work together harmoniously and optimally – to make it simple for the bank, seamless for the customer and fully aligned with local regulations.”
The emerging model is pragmatic. Banks are increasingly retaining core activities such as balance-sheet management, savings and mortgages, while integrating specialist capabilities through APIs. This allows institutions to expand functionality and distribution without rebuilding every layer themselves. It is not a retreat from ownership, but a clearer definition of it.
At the centre of this shift sits data. Payments are no longer just a means of moving money, but a source of insight that underpins personalisation, transparency and new revenue models. “We talk more and more about payments as data, but getting that understanding of who your customer is in order to leverage some of those propositions and offer direct-to-client products is a challenge,” says Richard Albery, head of commercial at ACI Worldwide. “It is only when banks get to the modernised technology state that they can really start to embrace initiatives like Swift value add services and open banking.”
Yet modernisation does not happen in a vacuum. Regulation remains a binding constraint, shaping how quickly banks can move and where they invest. “Banks are having to invest so heavily in compliance that there are less funds for some of the discretionary modernisation and innovation that they could be offering to end-consumers and businesses,” Albery says. “What I see in the future is more API connectivity to the solutions ecosystem and less in-house build as banks focus on their core financial products, balanced always with control.”
As financial services move into non-bank environments, access to ecosystems becomes a prerequisite for growth, not an optional channel. “When we talk about embedded finance, it is very important to have access to an ecosystem,” says Simcox of Equals Money x Railsr. “This is very different to traditional banking in that the focus is on moving money through the system and getting funds from A to B as fast as possible.”
In this model, infrastructure matters more than branding. “The foundation of this business is APIs that make it easy to open accounts, issue cards or make payments,” he adds. “The value lies in keeping money inside the ecosystem, as that is how banks can monetise their customers.”
At the same time, transformation is incremental. Legacy rails, correspondent banking and domestic real-time payment systems will continue to coexist with newer models.
“There will be use cases for blockchain-based solutions, but adoption will take time as users become comfortable with data processing for applications such as transaction monitoring and fraud prevention,” says IFX Payments’ CEO Will Marwick.
The conclusion is not that banks must choose between old and new – it is that corporate banking is now defined by orchestration. Banks that succeed will be those that modernise with intent, partner with discipline and retain control where it matters most: trust, governance, balance sheet and the client relationship.