Earnings Show Banks Chasing Mid-Market With Payments Platforms

Payments and treasury technologies have traditionally been positioned by the banks powering them as purely infrastructure. The same way baseball players need a field to play ball, the thinking went, financial services needed the indispensable machinery powering payments that helps clients move money, manage liquidity and connect corporate systems.

But those same banks, as highlighted by this quarter’s most recent earnings reports, are now realizing the possibilities available to monetize the intelligence, controls and workflows surrounding the movement of money.

J.P. Morgan Payments produced $5.3 billion in quarterly revenue, up 12% from a year earlier and marking what the bank described as its sixth consecutive record quarter. Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions business generated $4.74 billion, an 18% increase. Edenred, which provides digital solutions for employees, fleet managers and corporate payments upgraded its growth outlook of 8% to 12% for both 2027 and 2028.

The goal is no longer a perfectly integrated technology stack. It is a coordinated operating system, as evidenced by Alphabet’s own second-quarter earnings announcement which revealed that enterprise demand for its artificial intelligence solutions has jumped 81%.

Taken together, the quarter’s earnings show that payments, liquidity management and financial workflows are no longer merely supporting products around lending and deposits. They are becoming mechanisms through which banks attract operating balances, generate recurring fees, deepen commercial relationships and gain a larger role in clients’ day-to-day decisions; and channels through which third-party providers sell to financial institutions.

Read also: Two Years Ago vs. Today: CFOs and the ERP Shift

Banks Are Using Corporate Payments as a Relationship Engine

Earnings this quarter showed that, for financial institutions, the payment itself is not necessarily the most valuable part of the payment business. The strategic value lies in becoming the institution through which a corporate client receives funds, pays suppliers, manages working capital, holds liquidity and reconciles activity. Once those functions are connected, the bank occupies a central position in the customer’s operating architecture and can process additional activity and layer on new services without increasing costs at the same rate.

KeyCorp, for example, made gains across its priority growth businesses such as its commercial payments business which delivered double-digit fee growth over the past year. U.S. Bancorp, for its part, leaned on payments to power a record quarter. The bank’s second-quarter results showed payment services revenue rose 5.7% year over year to $1.8 billion, or roughly 23% of total company revenue. Credit card fee revenue grew 6.1% year over year, and corporate payment products and prepaid revenue climbed 11.8%.

Over half of B2B platforms (54%) report direct revenue increases after implementing embedded finance capabilities, while 67% platforms with more than $1 billion in annual revenue say embedded finance has produced a direct revenue boost. The findings come from “B2B Platforms Expand Embedded Finance to Enhance Customer Experience, Drive Revenue,” a December data brief from PYMNTS Intelligence produced in collaboration with Marqeta.

Read more: Fed Study Shows B2B Payments Are Becoming a Cost-Per-Event Problem

Banks and corporate customers have been integrating financial systems for years. Enterprise resource planning platforms connect with bank portals. Application programming interfaces carry balance and payment information. Treasury systems aggregate accounts across institutions. The more valuable question is becoming what else the provider can do because it sees the transaction.

A payment contains information about a buyer, supplier, invoice, authorization, credit decision and cash position. When that data is connected to enterprise systems, infrastructure can determine whether a payment should be approved, which rail should carry it, when it should be released, how it should be funded and whether it requires additional review.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience” found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead.

Read also: The $100 Million CFO Doesn’t Keep Score. They Call the Plays.

As Integration Cedes Ground to Orchestration, Compliance Becomes Part of the Product

The marketplace shift also changes the role of compliance. Compliance has traditionally been positioned as a protective layer applied to infrastructure: a set of controls designed to keep transactions within regulatory and risk parameters. But as payments become embedded in software and automated workflows, compliance is determining whether the product can function at scale.

Identity verification, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and permission management must now operate inside the workflow rather than outside it. The compliance layer cannot simply identify problems after a transaction has been initiated. It must shape what the system allows users, applications and autonomous agents to do.

That helps explain why value-added services such as cybersecurity, authentication and fraud management are becoming important growth businesses for payment networks. The provider that can approve more legitimate activity while blocking more harmful activity is not merely reducing risk. It is improving conversion, lowering operating costs and increasing the customer’s confidence in expanding usage.

In a batch environment, companies have time to detect problems and manually intervene. In a real-time environment, the payment and the decision surrounding it increasingly occur together. The bank that controls only payment execution risks becoming a utility. The bank that also helps determine when, why and under what conditions the payment should occur can command a more valuable position.