Why Automation Is the Next Competitive Edge in Business Banking

Treasury onboarding has long been one of the most labor-intensive processes in commercial banking. A customer says yes, and then the real work begins—forms, rekeying, handoffs, follow-up calls, and more rekeying. According to the 2025 Business Banking Customer Experience Report from OvationCXM, only three out of 10 businesses describe their onboarding experience as seamless, and 41% report significant pain when trying to resolve a single issue across multiple people and systems. 

These are not surprising numbers to anyone who has lived through the process. But they are a reminder that the gap between what business customers expect and what most financial institutions deliver remains stubbornly wide.

Two sessions at Q2’s CONNECT 26 customer conference tackled that gap directly. A hands-on workshop walked attendees through Q2 Treasury Fulfillment and how it can transform the fulfillment process. And a panel discussion brought together three financial institutions to share what they have built, what got in the way, and what they would do differently in their automation journey. Together, the sessions offered a candid and practical look at where automation stands today and where it’s headed.

Fewer steps, fewer errors, faster onboarding

Q2 Treasury Fulfillment is designed to automate the back-office setup of treasury services for commercial and small business customers. It sits inside Q2 Console and serves two distinct groups of users: front-office staff who collect client information and back-office staff who provision services on source systems.

The front-office form captures everything an account holder may need—digital banking enrollment, ACH, wires, positive pay, remote deposit capture, and more—in a single place, without multiple forms or systems. That information is never rekeyed. When the request moves to the back office, Q2 Treasury Fulfillment integrates directly with Q2's Commercial Digital Banking Platform, wires, and ACH solutions to automate setup, eliminating much of the manual work that has traditionally defined treasury onboarding. The solution supports net new customer enrollment, account additions and removals, subsidiary management, and existing customer maintenance.

Matt Marsh, senior business integrations analyst at Encore Bank, described how his team put that integration to work. Encore built its treasury onboarding process on Salesforce, using it to gather client information, generate agreements, and collect e-signatures. The missing piece was the hand-off to Treasury Fulfillment. Staff still had to pull documentation from Salesforce and rekey it manually. Encore’s vendor helped them write APIs connecting the two systems so that a single button click in the onboarding platform sends the request directly to Treasury Fulfillment for setup.

"No more double entry of information. We're able to keep that process flowing seamlessly and get the customer set up in a much faster manner," he said.

The practical impact of Treasury Fulfillment is significant. A new customer enrollment that once required 13 steps and seven separate contacts with the account holder can be reduced to eight steps and four contacts. Documents that previously had to be assembled and sent separately can be combined and delivered through integrations with DocuSign and Adobe eSign. Because setup is automated rather than manually rekeyed, errors are reduced and the quality assurance step that typically follows manual entry is often eliminated entirely. 

Three financial institutions, three paths to automation

Beyond treasury onboarding, the ways automation can benefit an FI are seemingly endless. The panel at CONNECT 26 brought together practitioners from three very different institutions—a large credit union, a regional bank, and a lean community bank—each of whom had taken a different approach to solving fundamental problems.

For some, partnering is the answer

Kimberli Green is vice president of Business Services for America First Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in the country with more than 130 branches and approximately 2,500 frontline employees. She described the environment that drove her team to act.

"We had a lot of friction, inconsistency, and compliance with our frontline. … A business would come in, and it was a fairly clunky experience all built on a consumer platform. We did a lot of Band-Aid fixes to try to help it become a better experience," she said.

Green’s team made the decision to partner with an external fintech rather than build internally. The goal was a digital-first business onboarding platform tailored specifically for commercial members—one that could meet business owners wherever they were, support multiparty applications, and automate compliance checks in the background. A year after launch, America First has doubled its digital adoption rate for business onboarding, reaching 40%.

The biggest lesson, Green said, was not about the technology. It was about change management.

"We were so focused on building the platform and the technology and the back end pieces. I didn’t think to bring our frontline along with us sooner, and it was such a shift. … It ended up being a change management crisis versus a technology crisis."

Leveraging tools they already had

Brittany Adams, principal product manager for Consumer and Small Business Digital Banking at Valley Bank, came to automation from a different direction. Valley Bank has a dedicated software development team that works with Q2’s APIs, and Adams recognized early that those tools could be used to eliminate the manual, paper-based onboarding processes that were being applied to small business customers.

"I remember discovering the Caliper API documentation after working on a different platform during part of my time at Valley, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is all here. We just need … to leverage it.’ "

Working with the account-opening team, Adams and her colleagues built three small business bundles—two of which include treasury services such as ACH and wires—that are automatically provisioned the moment a customer logs in to online banking for the first time. The bank opens several thousand accounts each month, and automating that provisioning process eliminated what had been thousands of manual clicks by operations staff every month.

Adams’ advice for others starting out was to document the process visually before trying to build anything, and to resist the pull of edge cases.

"We had a lot of personalities, people who wanted to contribute to the automation,” she explained, adding that many employees had a long history with the bank and had a lot of institutional knowledge. “I would recommend taking a stab at diagramming out what you’re thinking of and thinking through the population you want to build for."

For some, there's no legacy to undo

Marsh operates in perhaps the most constrained environment of the three. Encore is a 7-year-old bank with a single office in each of approximately eight states, a deliberately small number of full-time employees, and no legacy systems to contend with. At Encore, automation is not a project, it’s the operating model.

"Encore started with the idea in mind of trying to take a small community feel but couple it with advanced technology and take it to the customer. … Automation is a necessity for us to get our jobs done but also to bring that technology to our clients."

The Treasury Fulfillment integration is just one of Encore’s automation initiatives. Marsh also described the bank’s use of Q2 Direct Payables to automate wire processing for title companies and its recently launched Q2 Direct ERP that enables integration for clients using accounting platforms such as Sage, Dynamics, and NetSuite.

On vendor selection, Marsh was direct about where Encore spends its time.

"Taking the time to find the right vendor is huge for us. … Someone—a vendor—that understands the vision of what we’re trying to do that can adapt and change with us and develop with us was very key for us," he said.

Automation is a people project

One of the more striking themes to emerge from the panel was how consistently each speaker returned to the human dimension of automation. All three described projects in which the technology worked but where the harder challenge was getting the people around it to come along.

Green urged attendees not to wait until go-live to involve frontline staff. Adams described the value of bringing fraud and risk teams to the table with data and diagrams rather than arguments. And Marsh emphasized the importance of explaining the "why" to back-office employees before asking them to change how they work.

Michelle Annett, senior product manager at Q2 and the session moderator, drew the thread together.

"It’s interesting to me that we’re talking about automation, but every one of you talked about how important people were to bring along in the process and to win them over."

Green offered a closing thought that captured both the difficulty and the urgency.

"Don’t be afraid to take the risk. … If you want your financial institution to win in business, you have to do it differently because if you don’t, others will and they currently are."

What’s new and what’s coming in Q2 Treasury Fulfillment

The workshop session gave attendees a detailed look at current functionality and a preview of what is on the roadmap. Several enhancements have been released recently or are in active development.

The following capabilities are generally available now:

• DocuSign and Adobe eSign integration, so financial institutions can send treasury service agreements and supporting documents for electronic signature directly from within the solution

• An API that lets FIs managing their front-office workflows in a CRM, a competitor platform, or a homegrown system send data to the Treasury Fulfillment back-office form via without requiring sales staff to change the tools they already use

• An updated account table with enhanced account management capabilities, plus a credit union setting that accommodates credit unions using both an internal and an external account number

Several features are currently in development and expected to be available later this year:

• Integration with Q2 Positive Pay

• A self-service capability that will let existing digital banking customers request changes such as a higher ACH limit or a new positive pay account from within their online banking session, automatically creating a front-office request without any staff involvement

• Temporary limit management on the Q2 Digital Banking Platform, with Treasury Fulfillment support to follow, so support staff can set time-bound limit changes from a single form

• Rush request flagging to mark urgent requests for prioritized handling

• Wire address capture for subsidiaries, ACH contact fields, and a cloning feature for allowed actions and advanced entitlements

• A reporting infrastructure migration to a new platform that will let institutions extract significantly richer data from their Q2 Treasury Fulfillment activity

Read more about Treasury Fulfillment and watch this quick video to see it in action.