FNBO’s Maria Line on why transaction data matters more than the transaction itself, and what AI has changed about how fast a bank can act on it.
Loans generate a touchpoint once a year, maybe once every few years. Payments generate one every day, sometimes several times before lunch. That gap in frequency, says Maria Line, who leads commercial card and customer engagement at FNBO, is where primacy actually gets decided in commercial banking.
However, it’s the transaction data underneath, more than the payment itself, that she keeps coming back to in this conversation. It can signal whether a client needs more credit, or where they’re spending and with whom. The timing of their payments alone can show whether they’re making full use of their cash flow.
“It tells us a lot about those customers, and then it allows us to go out and have more robust conversations with them about what payment solutions they’re using and why.”
What’s changed more recently is the time it takes to get to that detail. Banking teams used to go out to different sources and piece the information together by hand, a process that could take hours, days, sometimes weeks. That same aggregation can now happen in seconds or minutes. AI can flag volatility in a customer’s program, or early signs of attrition, faster than a person working through the same data by hand.
That same data-first approach means Maria’s team doesn’t walk into every client conversation ready to sell card, or any single product for that matter. They start with what the business is trying to do, and the data that tells them which option actually fits. A client looking to maximize float will likely get more value from card, while one managing an unusual vendor relationship may be better served by ACH or wire.
Asked what she’s banking on next, Maria points to payments becoming even more invisible, embedded quietly behind the scenes as the data underneath them gets better at anticipating what a client needs before they ask. But she makes an important distinction. More predictive data doesn’t shrink the human role. It raises the stakes on it, since someone still has to turn the prediction into the right call for that client.
Watch the full conversation with Maria below.
Episode highlights
- 1:20 — Why FNBO stopped splitting the client relationship across separate teams
- 3:23 — How payments create primacy that lending can’t match
- 4:29 — Why the transaction data matters more than the transaction
- 5:42 — How card economics are shifting from rebates to results
- 7:20 — How AI is compressing the advisory timeline
- 10:52 — What Maria is banking on for the future of commercial payments
Featured speaker
Maria Line
As VP, Commercial Card & Customer Engagement at FNBO, Maria and her team finds ways to optimize commercial card programs to help organizations streamline their payments processes. Maria is also responsible for building FNBO’s supplier enablement organization, an initiative designed to provide further value to their commercial clients. Her goal is to create a best-in-class experience for each and every customer.
In this conversation with Joey Rault, Codat’s Chief Revenue Officer, Maria shares what she’s banking on for the future of commercial payments.