It's late. A small business owner is looking at their accounts. The same questions surface every time: Can I pay my bills next week? Am I growing? What do I do if the answer is no?
Their bank app shows transactions. Their accounting software shows invoices. Their card terminal shows sales. None of them answers the question — because the answer lives in the space between.
That gap is where small businesses lose sleep. It's also where financial institutions lose engagement, lose intelligence, and lose ground to fintechs that have figured out how to close it.
That’s why we built Pulse — a new intelligence layer inside our SMB Financial Hub that synthesizes data from connected sources into answers no single tool can produce alone.
Small businesses are the backbone of every developed economy and the largest commercial cohort that most banks serve. They are also the most financially fragile.
A few data points worth keeping in mind:
SMBs see their numbers and banking transactions, but that data isn’t insight or an answer to their questions.
Pulse is built around the questions every owner asks — about cash health and growth, and the actions that answer them.
With just a bank account connected, Pulse surfaces:
When accounting is connected too, the insights compound:
"$8,000 in overdue invoices — collecting extends your runway from 14 to 22 days."
"$19,000 in bills due in 14 days — this exceeds your current balance by $3,000."
Neither the bank app nor the accounting software — nor a card terminal — can compute that on its own. Only the combination can. That is the whole point of Pulse.
Add merchant data and Pulse opens up the second question owners care about: Am I growing? Users can gain insight on whether revenue is pacing against the same period last year, if average order value is increasing or decreasing, what the transaction volume is, and see site-by-site performance for businesses with more than one location. None of these are visible from a bank app, an accounting tool, or a terminal report on its own — and together they take an SMB from “will I survive?” to “where do I double down?”
SMBs are the most contested segment in financial services. Fintech challengers are aggressively unbundling the relationship, and the institutions that win the next decade will be the ones whose digital experiences are sticky enough to keep the primary relationship intact.
Pulse is built to do three things for the institution behind it.
1. Drive engagement that sticks. When SMBs see real answers, they come back. When they come back, they connect more sources. Every additional source compounds the value of the platform and the depth of the relationship.
2. Generate first-party SMB intelligence — without a document request. Everything an SMB connects can flow back to the institution: financials, cash position, multi-bank relationships, merchant activity. That intelligence can power lending signals, churn prediction, relationship management, and cross-selling opportunities.
3. Differentiate on a dimension competitors can’t copy quickly. Most SMB digital tools are commodity dashboards bolted onto a core. Pulse is configurable — institutions choose which insights surface and at what thresholds — and embeds directly into existing digital banking. There is no core dependency.
Pulse is a direct response to the SMB’s need for answers to questions about their business’s performance, transactions, expectations, and future. It is also a direct response to how AI has reshaped user expectations — owners now expect answers handed to them with clear next steps, not dashboards to interpret — but it delivers that experience without putting an LLM between customer financial data and the user. That means lower risk: no sensitive SMB financial data uploaded into a language model, and none of the data-handling and privacy trade-offs most financial institutions are still cautious about. The hard part of this product was never generating the prose; it was synthesizing insights across banking, accounting, and merchant data. That synthesis is what Pulse does. If an institution wants to layer conversational AI on top later, the substrate is already there — data connected, normalized, and structured.
Banking shows you where you stand. Adding sources shows you what’s coming and what to do about it.
Pulse is built explicitly around that distinction. It draws cash and growth insights from banking, accounting, and merchant data — and provides a daily brief that surfaces what matters most. Cross-grouping synthesis and additional source types follow as the platform grows.
Pulse is live inside our SMB Financial Hub, and we’d like to show you the benefits that occur when SMBs get answers instead of data.
A focused demo walks through banking, accounting, and merchant data layered together — the same flow your SMB customers would experience. Let us show you how it works.
Get in touch to see Pulse in action.