By Joey Rault, Chief Revenue Officer
Relationship banking has always been built on institutional trust and a deep understanding of client needs. For most of banking history, delivering on that promise at scale was difficult. The technology simply didn’t exist.
Commercial bankers today face a strange paradox. Business clients are generating more financial data than ever before, yet most banks don’t have the actual information they need to serve those clients better. They have extensive account histories but little visibility into operational realities like supplier relationships, cash flow patterns, payment inefficiencies, and external bank accounts. Bankers are missing the key client data that they can turn into meaningful advice.
Most banks want to be more consultative. But they’re operating inside systems shaped by decades of regulation, mergers, and technical debt.
The core problem isn’t awareness or intention. It’s infrastructure. Banks are trying to build deeper advisory relationships without the on-demand data layer those relationships require.
At Codat, we’ve spent nearly a decade working with top financial institutions to solve this challenge. We’re here to say (and to prove) that there’s a better way. We call it advisory intelligence, and it’s going to change the way commercial banking works.
What business clients actually want
Banks’ NPS surveys return the same feedback year after year. Commercial clients want consultative banking. Not the sort that appears in strategy decks or quarterly reports, but the kind that shows up in day-to-day conversations. Advice that reflects the reality of how their business runs.
They want bankers to advise when supplier payment terms are costing them money, identify cash flow issues before they escalate, recommend optimal payment methods at the transaction level, and deliver personalized financial advice that reflects a deep understanding of their business needs.
In short, the promise of relationship banking hasn’t changed. What has changed is the baseline expectation for delivering it.
Clients’ day-to-day lives deliver instant gratification. Their Amazon shopping experience is fully customized to their preferences. Their Netflix homescreen adapts to their viewing habits in real time. Even their business tools flag inventory shortages before they affect revenue. Clients now expect that same level of personalization, automation, and proactive guidance from every other interaction.
Fintechs and financial software platforms have already cleared this bar, surfacing data-driven insights and optimization opportunities for clients on demand. When their primary bank still offers manual workflows and periodic reviews, it introduces a real competitive vulnerability that puts relationships at risk.
Why data aggregation isn’t enough
I’ve watched dozens of banks invest in becoming ‘more data-driven’, and there’s a common pattern.
The plan is usually sensible. Centralize clients’ financial data, build powerful analytics capabilities, and extract valuable insights.
Leadership rallies around the vision, budgets get approved, and teams get hired. There’s genuine enthusiasm about finally delivering the sort of consultative banking clients are asking for. But the effort tends to stall in two places.
The first challenge is simply getting the data. ERP data is genuinely difficult to access. It belongs to clients, not to banks, and tapping into it requires their active partnership and consent. Many banks struggle at this stage indefinitely. The ones that succeed achieve something significant, because ERP data contains the richest insights into how businesses operate, from their supplier relationships and payments patterns to their cash flow dynamics and operational efficiencies.
Solving for data access reveals an even bigger challenge. Banks that successfully centralize their clients’ financial data discover they’ve only addressed half the problem. All of that valuable information is now in one place, but a highly skilled analyst still needs to spend days interpreting what it means for every client and every use case. But they don’t scale. A model that works for a handful of corporate accounts collapses when applied to thousands of mid-market clients.
Most banks treat relationship banking as a data aggregation problem. In reality, it’s a data intelligence problem.
The truth is, ERP systems were designed to run businesses, not to advise bankers. Even after you’ve centralized it, you still need an intelligence layer to transform it into personalized, actionable guidance at scale.
That guidance also needs to be trustworthy enough that bankers will stake their relationships on it. Relationship managers take their role as protective gatekeepers seriously, knowing every interaction could potentially bring tension to an account. Before they’ll call in a commercial card team or pitch a new product, they need to know it will add value instead of friction. That means an intelligence layer can’t just process data. It needs to deliver sound, contextualized recommendations that RMs will confidently bring to their clients.
Advisory intelligence addresses both challenges. It provides the infrastructure to access and process ERP data at scale, then transforms that data into personalized insights bankers are eager to actually use.
How advisory intelligence works
Advisory intelligence is an insights layer that sits between your data and your people, transforming raw financial information into personalized recommendations bankers can act on immediately. It makes bankers better at their jobs without asking them to become something they’re not.
As a concept, advisory intelligence is fundamentally different from traditional, high-touch advisory services like wealth management, corporate finance, or investment banking consulting — which are typically reserved for elite corporate clients that can cover the expenses of senior banker time and manual analysis.
Advisory intelligence, on the other hand, enables advisory relationships that easily scale. Bankers deliver personalized, strategic guidance, and the analysis powering those recommendations happens automatically behind the scenes. That’s what makes consultative banking economically viable across your entire commercial banking portfolio.
True advisory intelligence involves three capabilities working seamlessly together:
- Ongoing, on-demand access to business clients’ financial data: This means comprehensive data from ERP systems flowing securely and continuously, instead of intermittent statements and as isolated transactions.
- Intelligent enrichment and analysis that transforms raw data into opportunities: This means automatically identifying opportunities across spend management, foreign exchange (FX) optimization, supply chain financing, treasury operations, working capital, and more — answering the most critical financial needs for every client, consistently, and at scale.
- Insights delivered exactly when (and where) you need them: This means surfacing specific recommendations within the tools bankers already use — not on separate platforms or in dense, inaccessible reports — and in a format that’s ready to bring to clients right away.
When these factors converge, banking conversations can change overnight. Bankers start initiating strategic discussions and pointing to real opportunities with quantifiable impact. They stop asking for more information and start delivering actual advice. That’s what real consultative banking looks like in practice.
Why now?
Several forces are pushing banks towards this model now.
First, competitive pressures from fintechs have reset client expectations.
Mid-market businesses now receive sophisticated, data-driven service from digital-native providers that didn’t exist ten years ago. When their primary bank offers manual friction and generic pitches, that gap is glaring. Banks are actively losing ground to competitors that can demonstrate they understand their clients’ businesses better.
Second, the economics of relationship banking demand efficiency.
You’re measured on return on equity, which means that revenue matters, but only when it’s paired with cost management. Traditional advisory banking – with its senior staffing needs, time-consuming workflows, and quarterly reviews – doesn’t extend profitably to the mid-market. Advisory intelligence makes this sort of service economically viable across your book.
Third, the fundamental technology is finally ready.
The infrastructure of business-friendly data connectivity now works securely and reliably. Intelligent models trained on millions of transactions can identify financial opportunities with the same level of accuracy as expert analysts. Top banks like J.P. Morgan and BMO have proven it delivers verified results in real-world production environments.
Finally, preparing for an AI-first tomorrow means building the right foundation today.
To deploy meaningful AI capabilities in the future, banks need access to consented, categorized, and structured client data now. One long-term goal of advisory intelligence is establishing the groundwork of high-quality, on-demand data that will make AI-powered banking possible.
What happens when you get it right
Banks that implement advisory intelligence fundamentally change their role in client relationships:
- Bankers become proactive: Instead of waiting for clients to request new services or offer information, RMs initiate conversations about opportunities visible in their current data. A banker might contact a business about supplier payment optimization before that client even knows they have an issue.
- Recommendations become specific: Instead of broad tips about working capital management based on market trends, Treasury managers target individual suppliers, transactions, and opportunities with quantified benefits at the ready — making the next-best move real rather than aspirational.
- Service becomes scalable: Instead of relying on work-intensive processes and scarce, senior-level skill sets only top-tier clients can afford, advisory intelligence extends to the mid-market by automating advanced analysis. Now, every banker can deliver expert, personalized advice across their portfolio.
Where this goes next
More than a feature, advisory intelligence is infrastructure that unlocks compounding possibilities. Once you build it, you can use it everywhere across the commercial bank. The initial implementation might focus on commercial cards or working capital, but the same connectivity and intelligence extends naturally across treasury services, credit decisioning, foreign exchange, and more – anywhere better client data access can yield better advice.
That’s why leading banks are moving now. They understand that advisory intelligence isn’t about solving one problem. It’s about building an essential foundation that makes modern relationship banking work. Early adopters will spend the coming years expanding these capabilities across their business, adding use cases, serving more client segments, and enabling more RMs.
Banks that wait will find themselves trapped in a familiar cycle, spending years on internal projects that never quite deliver while watching competitors serve their clients with the strategic relationships that were supposed to be banking’s enduring advantage.
Why Codat is all in
At Codat, we’ve spent nearly a decade building the connectivity and intelligence that advisory intelligence requires. We work with over a dozen of the largest global commercial banks, including J.P. Morgan and BMO, to understand what actually works in production. We’ve proven the infrastructure can scale, and we’ve seen what happens when bankers get the intelligence they need exactly when they need it.
Advisory intelligence represents our conviction that every business, regardless of its size, deserves the kind of banking relationship that has historically been reserved for the largest corporate clients. We’re building it because we believe that banks can and should reclaim their position as trusted advisors — and because the technology that makes it possible finally exists.
Make your move
Want to see what advisory intelligence could mean for your bank? Explore our solutions for commercial cards and treasury sales to discover how we’re helping leading teams transform transactional relationships into strategic partnerships.
Or, get in touch with our expert team to discuss how we’d approach your specific commercial banking strategy.
ABOUT CODAT
Codat is an advisory intelligence solution purpose-built for modern commercial banking. Through specialized client and market data, forward-looking insights, and integrated workflows, Codat empowers banking teams to deepen their relationships, grow their revenue, and simplify their day-to-day work.
Founded in 2017 and backed by J.P. Morgan, PayPal, Amex, Plaid, and Shopify, Codat has successfully powered over 350,000 connections to business customers’ financial systems — with a platform trusted by industry leaders to turn scattered information into actionable, strategic advantages in real time, every time.