The financial institutions pulling ahead in business and commercial banking aren’t doing more, they’re daring to do what others won’t. There’s a comfortable narrative in banking: keep investing, modernizing and layering in new capabilities and progress will follow. The data suggests otherwise.
The 2026 Update to the Business Banking Digital Maturity Model reveals a quiet divergence between financial institutions that are aligning their strategy to how client relationships actually operate today, and those still organizing around internal structures, legacy processes and incremental change. Leadership teams should view this report and benchmark assessment as a tool to measure their strategy against industry peers. Alkami’s latest research uncovered that the most mature institutions are operating from a fundamentally different playbook.
Consumer Applications (Apps) Have Rewritten Expectations for Business and Commercial Banking
Most institutions believe they’re delivering a strong digital experience, and many are. However, that’s no longer the bar as neobank and fintech challengers enter the market competing for high net worth deposits. Choice changes expectations.
New business applications are surging in the U.S. — up roughly 8% year-over-year — which means more businesses are actively seeking a financial partner who they trust to run their operations.
A great business or commercial banking experience used to mean functional. Today, it means immediate, continuous and connected. The most mature institutions have internalized this shift and are asking how quickly value is delivered to users before intent is expressed.
The Refusal to Accept Friction as a Cost of Doing Business
Nearly every financial institution surveyed offers business account opening. Yet:
- Only 32% allow applications to move across channels without restarting.
- Only 40% enable employees to step in and support those applications seamlessly.
Friction persists because organizations are navigating continuous advancements in technology that mold expectations. Creating an exceptional account opening journey requires coordination across teams, systems and priorities that don’t naturally align.
The opportunity to compete on speed and a seamless experience is paramount if regional and community financial institutions are to have a chance of winning accounts against megabanks. Only 3% of financial institutions enable applicants to open, fund, and onboard new business accounts in 10 minutes or less.
The Adoption of AI in Commercial Banking
One of the more revealing insights was how prevalent artificial intelligence (AI) already is across all stages of production — exploration, piloting and incremental changes — in the commercial banking market.
Financial Institutions’ Approach To Implementing AI While a large group across the cohorts are exploring or piloting AI agents and automation, the most mature institutions are supercharging efficiencies across three areas: Focused execution empowers teams to see what’s moving the needle and what needs to be fixed. Return on investment becomes clearer, and teams can take those learnings and apply them across their organization with well-vetted use cases and governance. Make Data Non-Negotiable This is where a lot of future-focused strategies quietly break down. AI initiatives stall, personalization feels shallow and fraud controls create unnecessary friction because the data foundation hasn’t been set. On the flip side, with that solid foundation in place, banking leaders can connect onboarding signals, digital engagement behaviors, transactional data and fraud indicators into a coordinated response that delivers on performance outcomes in real time. By closing the loop between data, AI models and banking solutions, financial institutions can move from reactive servicing to anticipatory, AI‑assisted relationship management at a pace that matches 2026’s competitive market. The Strategic Choices Separating Leaders from the Pack Rather than trying to get every decision perfect from the get-go, choose a few moments that matter most to business goals and reimagine the system around those objectives.
In this market, there is no version of leadership that doesn’t operate as a data-informed banker. Yet many institutions still treat data as a downstream asset — something to clean, report on or analyze after the fact. The most mature organizations treat it as a prerequisite to their experiences and relationship managers’ approach, with 71% reporting they have rich, complete client data readily available. That represents a level of readiness that directly correlates to their ability to deploy automation, AI and real-time decisioning.
The most digitally mature institutions have stopped treating transformation as a program with an end date, and started making decisions that drive impact across their organizations by asking the hard questions:
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