Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) power the US economy. They make up 99.9% of all US businesses and employ nearly half of the private-sector workforce. As such, they also make up the single biggest growth lever banks can pull right now.
They are, however, faced with a frustrating problem. SMBs are not being served the way they work. SMBs run their operations across a sprawling stack of accounting, banking, commerce, payments, and payroll apps — each holding a slice of the financial picture. Additionally, nearly half of SMBs manage their finances across multiple providers, resulting in fragmentation. Their bank only sees a slice of their financial picture, the SMB sees everything, and the relationship manager at the bank is asked to make decisions on partial data and has limited leading data to enable proactive conversations with their SMB clients.
That gap is where market share is lost. Most banks only engage with 10-20% of a customer's wallet, creating an opportunity for a fintech to step in and help the SMB manage its full financial picture.
Open banking is one lever banks have to help close that gap, and open data is where the bigger opportunity sits. Open banking unlocks bank account and payment data; open data extends that view across accounting, commerce, payroll, and the other systems where SMBs actually run their businesses. Together, they turn consented SMB data, from across every account the business holds, into fuel for cashflow insights, lending signals, and proactive engagement — and into a reason for the SMB to log in to their bank's digital platform every day. The global open banking market is moving quickly:
This guide walks through what open banking/open data is, why it matters for SMB growth, how it actually works for a bank, and the use cases driving real revenue today. Plus, it'll cover where most banks get stuck, and how 9Spokes helps them move.
Open banking is a secure, API-driven system that allows banks to share a customer's consented financial data with trusted third parties. For SMBs, it means their bank, accounting platform, and other financial tools can connect, giving banks a full, real-time view of the business and enabling smarter insights, faster lending, and more personalized services.
All three sit atop the same infrastructure: secure APIs, consented data, and a third-party provider capable of translating raw data into insight. That translation layer is where the real work, and the real value, gets done.
Banks have always had transactional data. What they have not had is the full picture of how their SMB customers actually operate. Open banking changes that in three ways that directly drive growth.
Industry research suggests the average US consumer holds around 8.5 banking products across providers. Yet only 3% of banks capture more than 80% of a customer's wallet. For SMBs, the gap is even wider, because their financial lives are spread across accounting software, payment processors, payroll platforms, and multiple banks and credit cards.
Open banking helps banks see and act on the rest of the wallet. When banks use transaction data to deliver genuinely useful insights, it can dramatically improve the SMB-bank relationship.
When a banker can see cashflow trends, outstanding receivables, seasonal revenue patterns, and spending behavior in one view, the conversation changes. Proactive outreach replaces reactive service.
SMBs need tools and advice from their bank to reach their full growth potential. Open banking lets banks deliver that with precision, spotting the cash shortfall before the SMB applies for a line of credit elsewhere, flagging the merchant services upgrade when card volume spikes, surfacing the accounting/payment product when idle balances cross a threshold. The data shows when the need is real. The banker just has to show up at the right time and offer a solution.
The mechanics are simple — even if the engineering underneath is not. It takes four stages to move raw data from multiple systems and platforms and transform it into actionable insights offered through a single consolidated digital banking experience.
With the SMB's explicit consent, secure APIs link the bank, the SMB's other financial accounts, and their business apps (accounting, commerce, payments, payroll).
A data aggregation layer pulls that data together, collects it, and normalizes it, so accounts and data from multiple sources can be compared in a single interface within the bank's existing online experience.
Raw rows become signals: cashflow forecasts, revenue trend lines, expense categorizations, receivables aging, benchmark comparisons.
Relationship managers and bank teams can also see the data, insights, and other signals in their workflows, SMBs see them in digital banking, and the bank's product, risk, and marketing teams see them in dashboards that drive decisions.
Open banking API calls are projected to reach 580 billion globally by 2027, and more than 87% of US consumers already use open banking to link financial accounts with third parties. The rails are being built. The question is whether banks are building their SMB strategy on top of them or watching someone else do it.
| Dimension | Traditional Banking Data | Open Banking Data |
|---|---|---|
| Data source | Only the bank's accounts | All consented accounts, across institutions |
| SMB view | Partial (limited to one provider) | Full financial picture |
| Data refresh | Batch, often next day | Daily/near real-time via secure APIs |
| SMB consent | Implicit at account opening | Explicit, revocable, permissioned |
| Use case fit | Statements, basic reporting | Cashflow insights, lending signals, engagement triggers |
| RM view | Fragmented, point-in-time | Holistic, always-on |
Open banking is not just about aggregating data; it's about using it to move the needle. Here are five use cases with the clearest return for banks.
SMBs log in regularly when the platform answers the questions they actually care about: Where is my cashflow risk this month? Am I growing — and where is the opportunity? What's changing in my business? Banks that aggregate consented data and turn it into clear, plain-language answers earn the one thing every digital strategy is chasing: a reason for the SMB to log in regularly. Frequent engagement protects primary-bank status, deepens the data over time, and compounds into every other use case below.
Banks lose SMB lending volume to online lenders largely because of the slow, friction-heavy application process. Open banking helps close the gap. Consented revenue, expense, and deposit data feed directly into underwriting models, enabling pre-qualified offers, faster decisions, and alternative models like revenue-based financing. The bank captures loan volume that it previously leaked with risk-adjusted data that is often better than what a fintech can see.
Relationship managers armed with timely data retain accounts that a reactive team will lose. When something changes in an SMB's data, a large, unusual deposit, a cash shortfall trending three weeks out, a new accounting integration that signals scale, the banker can reach out at the exact moment it matters. Proactive engagement replaces the quarterly check-in, protecting balances, reducing churn, and surfacing cross-sell moments before a competitor does.
The bank that shows an SMB their full financial picture — across every institution they use — becomes the default place they start their day. With SMBs banking across multiple providers, a consolidated multi-bank view is one of the strongest tools available for locking in primary-financial-institution status, consolidating deposits, and reducing churn to competitors.
Cross-sell conversion climbs sharply when the offer matches a real signal in the data rather than a segment assumption. Open banking gives banks that signal: merchant services surface for the SMB whose card volume just tripled, a business credit card lands with the one whose expense data shows growing travel, a treasury product reaches the one sitting on unused cash. The bank moves from mass offers to moments that convert, increasing both fee income and customer trust in the same motion.
The logic of open banking is clear. It's the execution where most banks get stuck. Three challenges come up time after time.
Most banks have customer data scattered across core banking, CRM, loan systems, and legacy marts. Layering open banking data on top of fragmented internal data only compounds the problem. The fix is a unified aggregation and insights layer that sits across all of it.
Building direct API connections to accounting platforms, payments providers, and hundreds of fintech apps is not a one-time project — it is a permanent engineering commitment. Lack of API standardization adds friction at every integration point. This is why most banks partner with an ISO 27001-certified third-party provider rather than trying to build and maintain the stack in-house.
Even when the technology is in place, SMBs won't use a feature that is buried three menus deep or asks for consent without explaining the benefit. Adoption requires thoughtful UX, clear value in the first session, a reason for the SMB to come back tomorrow, and a structured onboarding and education program that helps SMBs understand what the data unlocks for them. This is where the insights layer matters most because "see your cashflow across every account" is a reason; "connect your data" is not.
9Spokes is a white-labeled data insights platform built specifically for financial institutions that serve SMBs or are looking to grow their SMB clientele. It integrates into the bank's existing digital channels via single sign-on, keeps the bank's brand front and center, and delivers both a customer-facing experience and a banker-facing intelligence layer from the same data foundation. Two products do the work.
The SMB Financial Hub is a configurable, white-labeled platform the bank embeds inside its existing digital banking platform. SMB customers connect business and personal accounts across 800+ financial and business service providers — banking, accounting, commerce, payments, and more — and get a unified view of their entire financial life inside the bank's experience. Specifically, SMBs can:
The commercial point is simple: the bank gives the SMB a tool they would otherwise assemble themselves across four or five apps, and in doing so becomes the default place the SMB starts every day.
The Customer Insights Hub delivers the same consented data back to the bank but shaped for relationship managers, product teams, credit teams, and marketing. It can be embedded into existing data channels or run as a stand-alone platform, and it gives the bank a deep view of SMB financial and operational health. That view powers four things:
The platform is designed around the constraints banks actually live with. ISO 27001 certified and annually penetration-tested, hosted on AWS and Azure with documented BCDR plans and 99.9% uptime, AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.2 in transit, and compliant with GDPR, PSD2, and CCPA. Every implementation is supported by a dedicated technical account manager, standardized SLAs, and Quarterly Business Reviews with multi-disciplinary teams assigned during scoping to keep delivery on time and on budget.
The result is what banks actually need from open banking: not more raw data, but a white-labeled, embedded platform that turns consented SMB data into daily engagement on the front end and better decisions on the back end — all under the bank's brand, on the bank's digital channels, and measurable in deposits, revenue, retention, and risk.
Ready to grow your SMB client accounts? Reach out to 9Spokes today.