An informal Q2 analysis of about 20 customer banks—including eight of the largest—shows that adoption rates for commercial information reporting sit at roughly 10% to 15%. That’s a strikingly low percentage for accessing the critical automated clearing house (ACH), wire, and balance reports commercial clients need to run their businesses.
Why so low? The data itself isn't the problem. The transactions it describes already happened, and the underlying systems capture them accurately. The problem is the report delivery. That critical information is exported to a flat file and arrives too late to answer a question at the moment a client needs it answered. A business leader deciding whether to fund a purchase or wait on an expected receivable still has to log into a portal, run a report, or call the Treasury desk and wait for a manual reconciliation.
That gap between having data and being able to act on it costs financial institutions and their commercial clients real money.
The disconnect was the focus of a conversation at Q2's CONNECT 26 customer conference among three people looking at the problem from different angles: Todd Klapprodt, senior product manager at Q2; Dean Jenkins, principal digital solutions strategist at Q2; and Camellia George, chief technology officer at Koxa, which partners with Q2 on Direct ERP to connect commercial clients' enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems directly with their banks' digital banking platforms.
Their shared argument was that the revenue opportunity here isn't hiding in a new product or an acquisition. It's hiding in data commercial clients already generate every day—if banks can deliver it more effectively.
That’s the job to be done for Direct Account Recon, part of Q2’s Direct Data Services suite of data-delivery solutions. Direct Account Recon automates delivery of completed Information Reporting output straight to a client's own systems via secure file transfer and Direct ERP.
The scale of the opportunity shows up in McKinsey research. For every $20 billion in commercial and industrial lending, upper-quartile banks generate roughly $175 million more revenue than lower-quartile peers, a gap driven by stronger cash management and treasury management fee income rather than loan volume.
As Klapprodt put it, “The important thing to consider is this isn't from acquisitions. This isn't from new products. This is essentially from stronger cash management and treasury relationships. So, ultimately, it’s fees, deposits, payments, and service penetration.
“It’s not how can we generate more revenue, but basically how much of that are we giving to the bank down the street,” he said.
Jenkins and George highlighted the pain points financial institutions have experienced with traditional data reporting solutions. “If you think about information reporting, what we have offered as an industry has really just been: Here's your data. We never put anything together for them,” Jenkins said.
Even when clients do log in, the reports rarely get used the way they were designed. Jenkins described a familiar request—clients asking to rearrange report columns not because they want to read the data differently, but because “they're aligning the columns to the feed so they can hit a button, create a file, turn around and re-upload it into their systems. Information reporting is becoming more and more obsolete as we go” if it doesn't reduce that manual work, he said.
George sees the same pattern. “It's not that the company doesn't rely on or want that data,” she said. “It's that they want it in the context of their other systems. They want it consistently. They want it cleanly. They want it structured in a way that their systems already use. They don't want the file. They want the ability to decide.”
The panel grounded the challenge in a scenario every commercial banker recognizes. It's Monday morning, and a client's CFO has a decision to make.
Can I act on my cash right now? A client needs to know if they can fund an equipment purchase or whether an expected receivable landed. Traditionally, that means logging into a portal, running reports, or asking the Treasury team to reconcile manually—a process that can take hours to answer a question that needs an immediate answer.
Jenkins pointed to the upside of closing that gap. “You're getting data in alerts or insights to other people in the organization who probably are not logging on to digital banking. There's a tremendous uptick in stickiness, actually, that is associated with this if you can start providing them more information more broadly within their organization.”
That's the real-time delivery problem Direct Account Recon is built to solve, automatically pushing completed reports to a client's own systems the moment they're ready instead of waiting on a manual download.
What's coming in, and what can I do about it? This is where cash visibility turns into a growth lever. Jenkins described the next stage. “We can start helping them make decisions. It may be, hey, we see that you have these outstanding payments pending and I can help you get those paid by the due date. Or, on the other side, I can see you have these receivables that are pending. I can make a decision of, hey, I'll give you the money now.”
George added that the value runs in both directions. Richer, real-time data doesn't just help the client decide. It helps the bank's Treasury team understand risk and opportunity in the relationship, and it removes the friction of double-checking manually entered numbers. As she put it, that certainty “is a confidence-building piece. It's a trust-building part of it, and that's the piece that I think is really driving those richer, deeper relationships.”
Klapprodt outlined three consistent monetization patterns emerging across Q2's financial institution customers.
Tiering. Basic historical reporting stays table stakes while real-time data with analysis becomes a premium offering clients are willing to pay for.
Bundling. Pairing reporting with other treasury services, since, as Klapprodt noted, “The reporting isn't the product; it's the delivery of the intelligence.”
Stickiness. Embedding data into a client's actual workflows, which “creates workflow dependency, not just loyalty.”
None of this requires a full portfolio rollout on day one. Jenkins' advice is to start narrow. “Identify potential businesses within your book that would have an interest in this—those that have a high volume of ACH transactions or a high volume of wire transactions.” Build the case for change with a direct cost comparison since the manual alternative already has a hidden cost in people and time.
George agreed and said the narrow start is strategic, not just cautious: “That's where you have the time and attention and the drive to do it. But that will train your whole team how to work with customers in this way. It will give you the microcosm that allows you to expand out.”
George confirmed the pricing model banks are landing on. “Instead of account by account or transaction by transaction, user by user … here's a business at this scale; it's one monthly fee. Here's a business on a different scale; it's a larger monthly fee.”
She added a point to keep in mind when pitching this internally. “Honestly, they want to pay for it because they want it to be good. They know that there's a cost to that and they're going to pay it one way or another. They'd like to do it with someone they have a relationship with.”
Klapprodt summed up the point succinctly. “Treasury management's always been about moving money. The real opportunity is helping clients understand what to do with it. How do I make the right decisions? How do we grow our business? How can our data drive the right decisions based on our strategy?”
For banks already running Q2's Information Reporting, that opportunity is within reach through Direct Data Services—including Direct Account Recon and Direct ERP—which turn existing reporting infrastructure into automated, real-time delivery. The question the panel put to every FI in the room is whether that data is reaching clients at the moment it actually matters or whether it's still just another file to download.
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