TL;DR
- Heading into 2027, most commercial banking trends lists treat AI, payments, embedded finance and onboarding as separate bets, but the trend underneath all of them is that the relationship manager-led operating model has stopped working.
- Cost-to-serve through the RM model exceeds 55% of income, and RMs spend up to 60% of their day on internal administrative work, which makes it a platform problem rather than a people problem.
- Onboarding a single commercial client costs $20,000 to $30,000 and takes more than 16 weeks, in a market where one company in five switches its primary operational deposits partner in any given year.
- AI pays back when it runs inside the daily work of RMs and clients: banks that applied it to bottlenecks like onboarding realized up to 60% efficiency gains.
- Fifth Third now reports commercial payments fee income to the street, proof that the strategic lens has to change along with the technology.
- The practical route is a unified layer on top of the existing core, rolled out one journey at a time, starting where cost-to-serve and client attrition hurt most.
A mid-market company that picks a new bank can wait more than 16 weeks to be fully onboarded, and the bank spends $20,000 to $30,000 getting it there. Meanwhile, McKinsey's research on global transaction banking finds that as many as one in five companies switch their primary operational deposits partner in any given year. Of all the commercial banking trends shaping 2027, that mismatch is the one we'd put first. Banks spend nearly a third of a year winning clients in a market where a fifth of them move every year.
The usual lists give you AI in lending, real-time payments, embedded finance and faster onboarding, each as its own technology bet with its own budget line. We think that framing misses the trend that explains all of them. The relationship manager-led model commercial banking was built on is broken, and it's broken by the systems around the RM, not by the people in the role. Fix the platform and the separate trends start paying off together. Leave it alone and each new trend becomes one more screen for the RM to log in to.
The top commercial banking trends for 2027
Each of the six trends shaping commercial banking in 2027 runs back to the RM operating model.
- Fixing the relationship manager (RM) operating model. Cost-to-serve through the RM model exceeds 55% of income (McKinsey) and RMs spend up to 60% of their day on internal admin (BCG), which puts reducing cost to serve at the top of the agenda.
- Faster commercial client onboarding. Onboarding one client costs $20,000 to $30,000 and takes more than 16 weeks (Deloitte), while as many as one in five companies switch their primary operational deposits partner in any given year (McKinsey).
- AI moving from pilots into production. Forrester projects that 25% of planned AI spending will be deferred as CFOs demand immediate ROI, so budgets follow AI that runs inside RM and client workflows.
- Commercial payments run as a growth business. Global transaction banking generates almost $1.3 trillion in annual revenue (McKinsey), and Fifth Third now reports commercial payments fee income to the street, treating payments and treasury management as a business line.
- Embedded finance, KYB and fraud converging into one client journey. 83% of midsize and large organizations are engaging or planning to engage directly with fintech vendors for cash management and payments (Datos Insights), and 79% of organizations faced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2024 (AFP).
- Modernizing above the core. Rather than make more foundational investments, banks are focused on activating the value of what's already in place (Accenture), which favors a unified layer on top of the existing core over replacing legacy systems wholesale.
Commercial banking trends all lead back to the RM's desk
Relationship managers are commercial banking's core asset, and the operating model works against them. McKinsey puts the cost to serve through the RM model at more than 55% of income. BCG finds RMs spend up to 60% of their day on internal administrative work rather than with clients, toggling between applications just to get a basic view of their own portfolio. Picture a banker with the CRM in one window, the credit system in another, the treasury portal in a third and a spreadsheet stitching them together, all to answer one client's question about a payment.
Accenture, drawing on work with over a hundred commercial banks, reaches a similar place from another direction. After years of SaaS-led transformation programs, many banks are still waiting to see a full return, and the focus has moved to activating the value of what's already in place. Each of those programs added a capable system. Very few of them took a swivel out of the RM's day.
The obvious objection is that this is a talent issue: hire stronger bankers, train them on AI, raise the targets. But a sharper RM working the same fragmented systems still spends most of the day feeding them. Adding RMs to a model where up to 60% of the day is admin mostly buys more admin. The bottleneck is the platform, and no hiring plan fixes a platform.
Commercial client onboarding is where cost-to-serve and attrition meet
Onboarding is where the cost shows first. Deloitte puts the cost of onboarding one commercial client at $20,000 to $30,000 and the timeline at more than 16 weeks, and KYC review costs reach $175 million a year at many institutions. When the account, the credit line and the treasury services each sit on their own system with their own record of the client, every handoff between them becomes a queue.
Demand isn't the constraint. In the Federal Reserve's July 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, banks reported stronger demand for commercial and industrial (C&I) loans from large and middle-market firms over the second quarter. A bank that needs 16 weeks to onboard a client meets that demand with a waiting room.
The upside is just as concrete. BCG finds that institutions that applied AI to bottlenecked areas like onboarding realized up to 60% efficiency gains. On the credit side, the same logic connects origination to the rest of the relationship, which is how business loan platforms cut approval time from weeks to hours. For many banks, onboarding is the right first journey to fix because it moves cost-to-serve and client attrition at the same time, and it's where banking operations and the client experience meet.
AI in commercial banking earns its budget inside the workflow
The AI conversation in commercial banking has moved from enthusiasm to accounting. Forrester projects that 25% of planned AI spending will be deferred as CFOs demand immediate ROI. Gartner expected 40% of enterprise applications to feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025. Both are true as banks plan for 2027: money is leaving open-ended pilots and following the banks that can show a return.
What separates those banks is mostly plumbing. Over 90% of banking users lack the data they need, according to Deloitte, and an agent can't reason about a client relationship it only sees a slice of. The other barriers are AI literacy, risk and governance frameworks that weren't built for AI, and skill atrophy when people lean on it too hard. Governance holds up best when humans stay in the loop by design, approving what matters, rather than being added after a pilot goes live.
When AI sits inside the RM's workspace, the results move. McKinsey found RMs using AI-powered workbenches saw 9% portfolio growth, five times more cross-selling ideas and 90% less time spent on account planning. Accenture's 2025 commercial banking trends summary expects meeting preparation and follow-up to be significantly automated and RMs to manage larger portfolios, and names turning AI pilots into production as the real differentiator in lending. Its 2026 banking trends report goes further and asks banks to imagine decoupling capacity from headcount. That only happens on a foundation where the agent, the RM and the client share one view of the relationship, which is why the platform matters more than the model.
Commercial payments become a business line, as Fifth Third shows
Payments are where a change of lens shows most clearly. McKinsey sizes global transaction banking at almost $1.3 trillion in annual revenue, roughly half of the wholesale banking revenue pool. Accenture called 2024 a commercial payments wakeup call as clients asked for value-added services such as fraud tools, accounting integrations and real-time dashboards.
On the Banking Reinvented podcast, Fifth Third's Jessika described where the bank started: "Up until what, six months ago, our innovation for digital experience was basically zero within Fifth Third, and my team's done a really great job building out the story in how we really think about reimagining the commercial digital experience."
Fifth Third has also changed how the business is measured. "We are now rebranded as commercial payments. We are reporting to the street our commercial payments fee income. And so there's a very different lens that Fifth Third is putting on commercial payments externally and also internally," Jessika said.
Once payments carry their own fee line in front of investors, the client portal, the treasury tools and the RM's view of payment flows are revenue infrastructure. Datos Insights argues that the defining challenge for 2026 is succeeding at innovation and at maintaining legacy platforms simultaneously, because legacy payment rails still drive the majority of volume and revenue. That mandate doesn't end with the calendar year, and it's the case for modernizing treasury and cash management on top of the rails a bank already runs.
Embedded finance, KYB and fraud are one client journey
Clients aren't waiting. Datos Insights finds 83% of midsize and large organizations are already engaging or planning to engage directly with fintech vendors for cash management and payment services. Deloitte reports that the market share of the top 10 commercial and industrial lenders fell from 40% in 2010 to 23% in Q2 2022. Less than half of executives rate their primary bank's service as excellent or very good (Deloitte), and only 60% of businesses are satisfied with the current accounts major banks offer (McKinsey).
The risk looks like this: the client's deposits stay at the bank while its finance team works all day in an ERP where a fintech's payment and lending options sit one click away. Embedded finance providers are building exactly that, inside the ERP and procurement tools clients already use. Banks can scale embedded finance themselves, but only if the product they embed draws on the same client record as everything else.
Fraud makes the cost of fragmentation plain. Identity fraud and scams cost American adults $47 billion in 2024 (Javelin), 79% of organizations dealt with attempted or actual payments fraud that year (AFP), and Celent estimates AI was behind roughly 20% of fraud in 2024. Siloed prevention can't see the full risk picture. Buy embedded finance, know-your-business (KYB) checks and fraud prevention as three point solutions and you get three more systems with three partial views of the client. The journey that verifies a business at onboarding, embeds payments in its ERP and watches its transactions should run on one understanding of who that client is.
How commercial banks modernize above the core, one journey at a time
None of this argues for replacing the core. Most commercial banks have a working ledger, a CRM and, often, a recently implemented loan origination system. What they lack is the layer that makes the work between those systems run as one.
That's the layer we built the Backbase Banking OS to be. It sits on top of the existing core and connects the commercial client portal and mobile app, the RM and credit workspaces, onboarding and loan origination journeys, and treasury and payments, so RMs, clients and AI agents work from the same context. Banks modernize incrementally, with no rip-and-replace, and start delivering measurable ROI from the first deployment. We've set out how that approach compares with other commercial banking platforms for mid-market and corporate banks, and why AI in banking starts below the surface of the frontline.
Sequence the work by pain, not by hype. Where onboarding drags past 16 weeks, start there. Where RMs lose their days to account planning, start with the RM workspace. Where payments are becoming a reported business line, start with treasury and the client portal. Each journey that moves onto the shared layer takes a swivel out of somebody's day and makes the next journey cheaper to add.
Before your 2027 budget funds the next trend on the list, count two things: the screens your RMs open to answer one client question, and the weeks your newest client waited before it could transact. Those two numbers tell you where to start.
FAQ
What are the biggest commercial banking trends for 2027?
Heading into 2027, AI is moving from experimentation to execution, payments are being run as a growth business, embedded finance is pulling banking into client ERPs, and onboarding speed has become a competitive weapon. Each depends on the same thing: a unified operating model where RMs, clients and AI agents share one view of the relationship.
Will AI completely replace bankers?
No. The evidence points to AI taking over the routine work around bankers so they can manage larger books. Accenture expects meeting preparation and follow-up to be significantly automated and underwriting roles to shift from number-crunching to review and validation, while McKinsey found RMs using AI-powered workbenches saw 9% portfolio growth and five times more cross-selling ideas.
How is AI used in commercial banking?
Commercial banks get the most from AI when it runs inside the relationship manager's workspace, handling meeting preparation, account planning and cross-selling ideas, and inside lending, where it speeds up underwriting. McKinsey found RMs using AI-powered workbenches spent 90% less time on account planning, and BCG found institutions that applied AI to bottlenecks like onboarding realized up to 60% efficiency gains. The limit is data: Deloitte finds over 90% of banking users lack the data they need.
What are the challenges faced by commercial banks?
The biggest challenge is an expensive operating model: cost-to-serve through the RM model exceeds 55% of income, and RMs spend up to 60% of their day on internal admin. Onboarding a client costs $20,000 to $30,000 and takes more than 16 weeks, 83% of midsize and large organizations are engaging or planning to engage with fintech vendors for cash management and payments, and payments fraud touched 79% of organizations in 2024.
How can commercial banks modernize without replacing the core?
By adding a unified layer on top of the existing core that connects the client portal, RM and credit workspaces, onboarding and lending journeys, and treasury and payments. Banks then move one journey at a time, starting where cost-to-serve and client attrition hurt most, so each deployment pays back before the next begins.
Why are commercial clients switching banks?
Service and digital capability lag what clients expect. Less than half of executives rate their primary bank's service as excellent or very good, only 60% of businesses are satisfied with the current accounts major banks offer, and as many as one in five companies switch their primary operational deposits partner in any given year.
