Why finance teams are still building around their bank accounts, and how they can modernize

Many SMBs are unhappy with their banks. The reasons are pretty obvious: The yield is low and the tools are clunky. Getting anything done takes longer than it should.

The problem is that switching accounts is painful and expensive. Few want to update account details for every customer and vendor, so they go with a workaround: keep the bank account and use a different set of tools for day-to-day operations like payments, expense management, and reporting.

The underlying issue is what a business needs from its money and what a bank is built to do aren’t always the same thing. The data reflects it.

• CGI's 2025 Transaction Banking Survey found that 79% of corporates added banking relationships in the past year, primarily as a way to mitigate risk.
• A separate survey by American Banker found that 61% of small businesses said the ability to connect core banking services with non-core services such as accounting, expense management, and payroll would be a deciding factor in choosing a new primary bank.

We spoke with CFOs and banking analysts to find out why.

They made it clear that the bank account isn’t the problem — it’s everything around it. A traditional bank account may be built for safety, but not necessarily for the day-to-day work of tracking and moving money.

We’ll break down what finance teams actually need from their banking setup today, including:

• Why cash sits in low-yield accounts, and what that costs
• How fragmented data slows down decision-making
• Where traditional banks create friction in payments and approvals
• Why many companies are building a second layer on top of their bank

The yield problem

The challenge with many traditional banks starts with where the money sits. Operating accounts hold large balances earning little to no yield. CFOs may recognize the opportunity, but those accounts are where payroll runs, vendors get paid, and cash needs to be immediately available.

For years, it didn't matter. John McCarthy, a fractional CFO who works with venture-backed startups, says finance teams were conditioned to treat yield as an afterthought.

Evan Pincus, a CFO who has led finance teams at multiple venture-backed startups, remembers raising a funding round and being asked what that cash would earn.

“We had raised like a $50 million round, and our CEO is like, ‘awesome, what are we going to get on this cash?’” he recalled. The answer was pretty much nothing.

The options that existed, like certificates of deposit, meant locking up cash a growth-stage company couldn't afford to lose access to.

“The smaller you are, the harder it is to negotiate a good rate.”
—David True, Partner, PayGility Advisors

That's no longer the case. As rates have risen, the gap between what banks pay on operating accounts and what cash can earn elsewhere has widened into something material.

The national average interest rate on a checking account is just 0.07% APY, according to the FDIC. On a $1 million operating balance, that's $700 a year. A modern alternative earning 2% returns $20,000 — 29 times more — on the same balance.

The problem isn’t just that the yield is low. It’s that the structure of traditional banking has conditioned businesses to accept this model. Operating accounts are typically only designed for liquidity, not returns.

David True, a payments consultant and partner at PayGility Advisors, says yield is now the first number CFOs want to know when evaluating a banking relationship. The way he sees it, CFOs are really asking two questions: what they earn on the balance they leave with a bank, and what it costs them to move money. The objective is to maximize returns while maintaining liquidity.

“The smaller you are, the harder it is to negotiate a good rate,” he says.

Unlike large companies, smaller businesses typically don’t have treasury teams managing cash and optimizing yield. It’s a void some banks and many newer players are looking to fill.

“A lot of fintech companies are building automated treasury management tools that help smaller businesses optimize their yield while keeping enough money in their operating account,” says Alex Johnson, a longtime banking analyst and founder of the Fintech Takes newsletter.

To be sure, not all CFOs are in this situation. Some already have access to competitive yield through relationships with financial institutions or accounts that aren't available to every business. Meir Rotenberg, a finance executive who has worked across multiple venture-backed companies, says some firms bypass low-yield checking entirely through these channels.

“I want them to be sweeping almost all of my money into a full money market rate earnings account every night,” he says.

But he acknowledges that most SMBs are not optimizing their balances this way. It highlights a divide among businesses with the right relationships or scale, and those without.

4 must-haves in a business account

Liquidity

For CFOs, liquidity isn’t optional. It’s what keeps the business running smoothly day to day. For McCarthy, the goal is to get “highest yield possible while maintaining liquidity with zero risk of capital loss.”

The traditional banking structure often forces a tradeoff: move cash somewhere it earns a real return and it gets locked up, CFOs told us.

"You can buy CDs and kind of have your money tied up for some amount of time to try to maximize yield," Pincus says. "But at a growth-stage startup, you don't have that much predictability." When you need to hire, pay a vendor, or cover an unexpected expense, money that’s tied up doesn't help.

That forces some businesses to default to the simplest option: leave cash where it’s easiest to access, even if it isn’t earning anything.

Visibility

CFOs want to know where their money is going. Getting that answer isn’t so straightforward. At many companies, bank data still has to be exported, cleaned, and re-entered into accounting systems before it becomes usable. That’s manageable with a large team. For everyone else, it’s problematic overhead.

Seeing spend trends in a legacy bank platform is “incredibly painful,” says Pincus.

True says smaller businesses are often downloading data separately for card payments, ACH transfers, and wires, then manipulating it in spreadsheets so it flows cleanly into their accounting system. For teams without the staff to do that work, it often doesn't get done at all.

"You can buy CDs and kind of have your money tied up for some amount of time to try to maximize yield. But at a growth-stage startup, you don't have that much predictability." —Evan Pincus, CFO, Stealth startup

What CFOs actually want is simpler: a view of where money is going as it's spent, without the assembly required.

“[With modern tools] you can get really granular into spend by merchant, spend by type, trends over time,” Pincus says.

Speed

Moving money is one of the few things a bank account absolutely has to do. But how quickly and easily that happens tends to vary.

With traditional payment rails, businesses often build in a buffer, sending money a day or two early to make sure it arrives on time. That pulls cash out of interest-earning accounts sooner than necessary. Same-day ACH reduces that gap. When payments can be executed on the day they're due, cash can stay in the account longer before it moves.

At many legacy institutions, moving money takes extra steps and often comes with added cost.

"It's incredibly clunky — it's actually painful to log into one of these old business portals and go through all these security checks, even though it feels like you're answering the same questions over and over," says Pincus. For higher-value transactions, banks may call to confirm details before releasing funds.

“It's going to be annoying because they're going to call you nine different times to verify the wire,” Johnson says. "It's very rarely something that's bundled in as a free service."

On newer platforms, Pincus says, the same actions come down to "a couple of clicks."

Trust

CFOs aren't just evaluating features when it comes to the institutions holding their money. They're asking basic questions like: Where is the money held? What happens if something breaks? Who do I call?

"Your bank account cannot get screwed up," says Johnson. "You'll take chances on a loan, you'll take chances on payments. You will not take a chance on your bank account."

That’s part of why bank accounts are so sticky. Even companies that adopt newer tools often hold on to a traditional banking relationship. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 reinforced that instinct, according to McCarthy.

“Everybody should have a ‘don’t fail’ bank,” he says, describing a setup where companies keep one account for safety and use a second provider for day-to-day operations.

But trust cuts both ways. Fintechs that offer business banking have responded by emphasizing safeguards like expanded FDIC coverage via multiple partner banks and clearer disclosures about where funds are held.

Still, for businesses unfamiliar with them, that trust has to be earned. For newer providers, that answer isn’t taken for granted. It has to be clear enough that a busy finance team can understand it easily, says True.

What a modern alternative looks like

The difference is less about any single feature and more about how the system behaves. Payments, approvals, and accounting no longer sit in separate workflows. They happen in the same place, often in tools finance teams already use.

McCarthy describes routing an invoice approval to a team member through Slack — without ever giving that person access to a bank portal. The approval lives in the tool the person uses every day. Once approved, the payment goes out and flows directly into the accounting system. No manual coding required, and no additional risk introduced.

Johnson points out that better digital experiences reached consumer banking long before they reached business banking. Newer B2B fintech providers are simply catching up. Traditional banks may still appeal to companies that want a human on the other end. Johnson draws a distinction between the “happy path” — routine tasks where fintech platforms feel "kind of magical" — and the “sad path,” when something goes wrong.

"Is it better to go with a fintech app ... or is it better to call someone?" he says.

CFOs say modern platforms often excel at the everyday — sending a wire, checking a balance, routing an approval.

"For 99.9% of use cases, it just works," says Pincus.

Comparison: Traditional banks vs. modern providers

Adapting banking to how finance teams work

Finance teams are less willing to tolerate limitations in their banking tools, especially when capable alternatives exist, analysts say.

"They've kind of woken up and are wanting better products,” Johnson says.

But this doesn't always rise to the top of the priority list. True says the value proposition of a modern, tech-forward banking offering needs to be simple and immediate to get a CFO's attention.

While the instinct among some businesses may be to keep a traditional account with modern tools operating on top, others have moved past legacy providers altogether.

"I'm seeing more and more CFOs skip the legacy providers,” says Pincus. His two most recent companies banked exclusively with a fintech provider, with no traditional bank account at all.

"There's the old-school legacy CFOs who are really not quite comfortable with the shift … and then there's probably the more AI-forward … tech-forward CFOs who are maybe a little bit more open to change," he says.

Newer providers are increasingly serving this group, he adds, noting that “the spread between old-school banks and new banks is just getting wider and wider by the year.”