Jeff Galloway
July 8, 2026
I spend a lot of time talking to commercial and treasury banking leaders, and I keep noticing the same thing: pretty much every other part of the bank has modernized.1 Loan decisioning is largely automated. Fraud monitoring is automated. Even consumer account opening is largely automated.
But when a high-value commercial client is ready to onboard treasury services? All of a sudden it’s 1996 again.
Back to the Future was more like ’86 than ’96, but it’s a great title, so I’m rolling with itTreasury teams may have moved off of Netscape Navigator and floppy disks,2 but a lot of the classics remain: legacy spreadsheets, rekeyed data, risk worksheets filled out by hand, emails back and forth (credit where it’s due – they’ve adopted email!).
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this may end up being the last frontier of manual banking (the Word doc credit memo featuring Clippy may still win the title).
And in my conversations with treasury and cash management leaders, it’s quietly costing them more than they realize.
Where the Time Actually Goes
On a recent webinar we co-hosted with our friends at TruStage, I shared a number that should stop any treasury leader mid-scroll: treasury teams are spending roughly 50% of their time simply collecting and reconciling data.3
Not advising clients or building these critical relationships. Just chasing down data that, in most cases, the financial institution already has somewhere.
That’s the real cost of a manual treasury onboarding process: having a high value team member doing something that’s been automated in other parts of the bank since the Clinton administration. It’s the structural drag on the highest-value activity a treasury team can do, deepening the relationship with the client.
Clients Notice Before You Do
The internal efficiency problem is obvious and something that bank teams grasp instantly when they see a modern onboarding workflow. The client facing issue is less obvious, but is the one directly impacting your customer experience.
I pointed to a striking data point during the session: more than 90% of treasury professionals say customer service responsiveness is their number one criteria when evaluating a banking relationship.4 Not pricing. Not product breadth. Responsiveness.
When onboarding is slow because of outdated tools and manual workflows, that friction shows up immediately, often before the relationship has even really had a chance to grow. A commercial client who waits days for a risk rating packet to clear approval, or who has to resubmit information because it didn’t carry over from their loan or deposit application, is forming an opinion about your institution in real time. And if that opinion is “this is more work than it should be,” they have other options.
Clippy was the real OG of AI slopIn other words: a slow, manual onboarding process that’s old enough to buy its own alcohol can cost valuable team member time while actively pushing clients toward institutions that have figured this out.
This Isn’t a Hypothetical Problem
What I appreciated most about this particular conversation is that it wasn’t theoretical. Three banks joined me on the call – Victory Bank, First Bank and Trust, and Encore Bank – and they described, in their own words, what manual treasury onboarding actually looked like inside their institutions before they fixed it: hours of manual data entry per account, risk-rating worksheets calculated by hand, multi-day turnaround times on packets for clients with complex entity structures.
I’m going to dig into all three of those stories, and the specific results that came out of solving for them, in the next post in this series.
For now, here’s my takeaway: if treasury onboarding still runs on spreadsheets and manual data entry at your institution, your clients are feeling the drag and your team is being pulled away from the value add activities that drive growth and deepen customer relationships. It’s time to reclaim your team’s time and modernize your treasury onboarding process.
