5 Takeaways from Patricia Montesi at FinovateFall
Patricia Montesi, Co-Founder and GM of Qolo, joined a main-stage panel at FinovateFall in New York City to talk about a problem that looks like a deposit problem until you look closer: banks are losing commercial relationships one workflow at a time.
The deposit is just the part everyone notices.
The more consequential question is what happens before the money leaves. Consider who owns the card, approves the payment, and manages AP. The CFO also needs a clear view of cash, while the customer needs to know which platform to open first thing in the morning.
Those interactions are where the relationship is moving.
Here are five takeaways from the conversation.
1. The deposit is the last thing to move
A bank can watch a commercial deposit balance for months and still miss the moment it lost the customer.
Commercial relationships rarely disappear in one dramatic event. They get dismantled product by product.
The easiest product to replace usually goes first. For many commercial clients, that has been the corporate card. A business can add a new card program in a week without touching its operating account. The card was never the destination. It was the wedge.
Then the rest of the workflow follows: spend controls, expense management, AP, bill pay, reconciliation.
Every time another piece moves outside the bank, another reason to interact with the bank disappears.
The operating balance is usually the last domino. By the time it moves, the relationship that supported it may have been gone for years.
That changes what banks should defend.
If the deposit is the lagging indicator, protecting the deposit itself is a little like treating the smoke instead of the fire. The real relationship is in the workflow: payment initiation, approvals, controls, reconciliation and cash visibility.
Banks need to be there.
2. The best opportunities may sit in the segments your committee questions most
Commercial segmentation tends to be tidy. Revenue bands. Industry codes. Company size.
The problem is that tidy categories don’t necessarily tell you where the money is.
A more interesting signal is operational pain around money movement.
Consider a business running payments across three or four providers, with a spreadsheet filling the gaps. That is not an attractive picture on a segmentation chart. It is an attractive customer opportunity.
Someone will pay to make that mess disappear.
And once a platform becomes the place where that work happens, balances tend to follow the workflow.
That opens the door to customers many banks instinctively avoid: gift and loyalty programs with complicated funding and settlement patterns; insurance claims and other disbursement-heavy businesses; marketplaces paying out thousands of participants; vertical B2B platforms that already function as the system of record for an industry; franchises and multi-entity businesses moving money between entities every day.
These businesses can make a credit committee uncomfortable.
That is partly the point.
The cleanest segments are often the easiest to commoditize. Complicated businesses have more operational problems to solve, which creates more room for differentiated products and better margins.
And niche does not mean small.
One verticalized B2B platform can sit above hundreds of businesses and, through one integration, influence where those businesses keep and move their operating money.
The opportunity isn’t always the biggest logo.
Sometimes it is the messiest workflow.
3. A bank-fintech partnership only matters if the bank keeps the relationship
There is a category of fintech partnership that looks great in a press release and does very little for the bank.
A referral agreement can generate leads. A marketing partnership can generate headlines. Neither necessarily creates a durable customer relationship.
The same problem shows up in sponsor-bank and balance-sheet-rental models. Deposit balances may increase, but the fintech owns the customer relationship. The bank can end up with concentrated exposure to one counterparty and a book that can change quickly when a contract changes.
It is also the model that has attracted significant regulatory scrutiny.
The more durable model is different: the bank uses infrastructure to launch a commercial product faster than it could build it internally, while keeping the customer, the workflow and the compliance responsibility.
Banks already understand this logic.
They stopped building their own core processing decades ago. Nobody interpreted that decision as an admission that banks had stopped being banks.
It was an infrastructure decision.
Qolo’s own trajectory became part of that conversation in July 2026, when bank software provider CSI acquired the company. The logic behind that deal maps closely to the tension discussed on the panel: independent infrastructure companies can make product bets and carry the build risk, while scale and distribution can help those products survive the diligence required by large financial institutions.
Independence and scale solve different problems.
Independence creates room to build something the market hasn’t built yet. Scale creates a path for that product to reach institutions that need it.
Companies rarely get maximum amounts of both at the same time.
Knowing which one matters more at a particular stage is strategy, not branding.
4. Real-time settlement is not the same thing as real-time cash
Financial institutions can move money between one another in seconds.
Ask a commercial client how much cash it has right now, across its accounts, and the answer gets considerably messier.
The reason is structural. Real-time payment rails were added to banking environments that were designed around batches, files and end-of-day accounting. Moving the money faster did not automatically make the underlying information faster.
The customer experiences that mismatch every morning.
Someone else is monetizing it.
Platforms that aggregate balances across institutions can give a business a single view of its cash. That sounds like a visibility feature. It is actually a relationship feature.
The platform becomes the place the CFO checks first.
The bank still holds the balance. It still carries the funding cost and balance-sheet risk. But someone else owns the daily interaction.
That is a bad trade.
And fragmented visibility is not merely a UX annoyance. It can become a deposit problem.
If a customer cannot see its money in one place, it will find something that lets it. Once another platform becomes the control layer, it is only a short step from showing the customer where the money sits to suggesting where it should sit.
The bank may still own the account.
It no longer owns the moment.
5. Commercial banking’s AI moat has an expiration date
Consumer banking has an obvious AI risk: the agent becomes the interface, and the bank gets reduced to whatever balance sheet or rate the agent can find underneath it.
Commercial banking has a better defense.
Money cannot simply move because an AI agent asked it to. Commercial transactions require mandates, approval chains, permissions, controls and audit trails. Most fintechs have not built that entire stack well enough to make it disappear.
That is a real moat.
But it is not a permanent one.
The underlying data has to be real-time and machine-readable. An agent cannot act intelligently on a balance that updates once a day. It cannot reconcile against a file that arrives overnight. It cannot automate a workflow if the system of record is effectively invisible until batch processing catches up.
This creates an uncomfortable possibility for banks.
An institution can have excellent controls and still lose to a platform with merely adequate controls if the platform exposes its data and workflows through a real-time API.
Why? Because the agent can actually use it. Controls that software cannot reach don’t protect the workflow. They slow it down. And money has a habit of finding a way around friction. Commercial banking does have an AI moat. But the moat comes with a countdown.
The shift in commercial banking
Put the five ideas together and the pattern becomes hard to miss. The deposit did not move first. The relationship moved first. It moved to the card platform, the AP system, the cash dashboard, the payment workflow, the software sitting between the business and its bank. By the time the balance follows, the customer may already have decided who it considers essential.
That is why the next phase of commercial banking is less about defending deposits and more about owning the infrastructure around them. The banks that win will not necessarily be the ones with the biggest balance sheets. They will be the ones still sitting in the workflow when the customer decides where the money should go.
