2025 Small Business Banking Trends

It would be impossible to discuss the major trends in business banking for 2025 without highlighting cash-flow tools, generative AI, and real-time payments. Javelin wrote about all three topics extensively in 2024, and this report focuses on how these trends will redefine business banking in the year ahead. In 2025, we predict that: 

Cash-flow tools will reach at least 50% of the small-business market. The rollout of cash-flow tools has been slow, but it’s now reaching a tipping point, with seven of the top 20 FIs, and major vendors such as Q2 and Fiserv, incorporating these tools prominently in their platforms. Banks that fail to catch up soon risk losing daily engagement to nonbank tech companies. 

AI will elevate business bankers to advisory roles, but late adopters will struggle. Generative AI is a headline-grabbing technology, but the real impact in 2025 will be how it transforms business bankers’ roles. Many are expressing trepidation, and it will be incumbent on FIs and their technology partners to position AI as a tool that makes employees more valuable, not redundant. 

The market will recognize the true benefits of instant payments beyond speed. Messaging around instant payments has largely been about speed. Banks are missing an opportunity to communicate the broader benefits offered by FedNow and TCH’s RTP, and to design innovative payments products that take advantage of those capabilities.