U.S. Bank recently launched two new products to its SMB offering: a spend management platform as well as an all-in-one checking account called Business Essentials that will help SMBs accept card payments with same-day access to funds. It also comes with a free mobile card reader, no maintenance fees, and the ability to integrate a business’ accounting into budget management software. These products are a result of a years-long strategy at US Bank that combines fintech acquisitions, like that of Bento Technologies which the firm acquired in 2021, with internal innovation to build products that can serve SMBs holistically and at scale. The Bento Technologies acquisition came as a part of the bank’s vision to bring banking and payment services into an interconnected ecosystem focused on simplifying cash flows and management for SMBs, says Shruti Patel, Chief Product Manager for Business Banking at the firm. Fintech acquisitions allow US Bank to plug capabilities into their systems that might have otherwise taken them years to build but there is always a risk of integrations leading to a choppy and fragmented experience for customers. US Bank was able to avoid this by keeping the main thrust of integration efforts aligned with and optimized for customer experience. The bank’s recent spend management tool is a result of teams like business banking, payments, IT, project teams, as well as the employees who joined from Bento owning the build regardless of where they were based in the country. “Team members were located everywhere from San Francisco to Minneapolis to Chicago. It was a real cross-bank collaboration,” she said. Banks need to integrate generative AI into their SMB spend management and cash flow tools to compete with fintech innovations like Lili’s Accountant AI, as small business owners increasingly use AI for content creation, data analysis, and marketing strategies while seeking faster answers and more efficient business execution. The possibilities for banks are massive: Integrating Gen AI in bank-offered spend management and cash flow management tools can help SMB owners get answers faster and execute business plans more efficiently. More broadly, CX is trending towards enabling a higher level of automation, where jobs to be done are executed by Gen AI and monitored by employees. Banks have yet to catch up onto this change and their movement is likely to be the same slow and deliberate gait we have seen in years past but it doesn’t mean that the C-suite is sleeping on this innovation. iIt’s just prioritizing the back office: “We are incorporating AI into our own operations and in innovations that benefit clients. For example, to make our interactions with customers as frictionless as possible, our customer service teams use AI for call transcriptions, knowledgebases that give the representatives quicker access to the information they need, and personalized product recommendations. We’re exploring a number of ways to use AI, including investing in our own data and technology infrastructure so we can deploy AI at speed and scale. We will continue to look at innovations that can help our clients save time and money and improve their operations,” said Patel.