Mark Hartley, chief executive and founder of BankiFi, thinks that arrangement is what is costing mainstream banks their primary relationship with small and medium-sized enterprises. In written answers to The Fintech Times he argues the fix is not for banks to build the missing tools, but to embed other people’s.

BankiFi describes the change as a shift from bank to gateway. Asked what that looks like for a small business today, Hartley put it in terms of where the work happens. It means, he said, “giving small businesses access to everything they need to run their business from within their bank’s mobile and online banking platform”.

He cited JumpCloud research from 2025 which, he said, found that 51 per cent of UK SMEs use between five and ten different applications, while 83 per cent would prefer to access everything in one place. “The bank is the natural home for that because customers already trust it with their money and data,” he said.

“Checking balances and making payments is no longer enough,” Hartley added. “Businesses increasingly expect integrated workflows covering invoicing, payments, bookkeeping, cashflow and tax, all delivered through a single trusted experience. The bank becomes the gateway to running the business, not just managing the bank account.”

What changed, on his account, is expectation rather than technology. Business owners now want the same connected experiences they have as consumers, and open banking and real-time data sharing have made fragmented ones feel dated. “Neobanks recognised this early and built integrated services into their platforms from day one, raising the bar for the whole market,” he said.

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