Executive Summary

It is estimated banks spend from $300 to upwards of $1,000+ to open a new business account. Across all new accounts, banks estimate that only about half turn into active relationships, and even a business that calls you primary keeps about 40% of its deposits somewhere else.

At those rates, a bank opening 1,000 small business accounts a year spends $300,000 to $1,000,000 on opening alone, and to add insult to injury approximately 40% of that money buys an account nothing runs through. These numbers do not even include ongoing costs. The question we need to ask is why and what can be done about it.

The reason is the switch. A business's automated payments, deposits, payroll, and tax withholding are all tied to its old account, across 20 or more separate systems. Whoever handles the money at the business, usually the business owner, CFO or controller, has to update every one of them manually. Most put it off, and the new account stays open and empty.

Software now exists that runs the switch for the business, saving the business owner or CFO hours to days and raising the funding rate on new operating accounts by 29%. The trouble is that every provider selling it to banks makes the same pitch. What separates them is simple. One kind makes the changes for your client. The other kind tells your client to make them.

This paper covers the three ways a switch gets done. It gives you seven questions to ask any provider, with examples of strong and weak answers. It ends with a scorecard for your calls. The conclusion is direct. Deposits move when the provider makes the changes.

The Problem

Deposit growth in business banking comes down to how many new accounts become primary, operating relationships. The economics are well documented. Curinos measures a primary checking relationship at eight times the fee revenue and ten times the average deposits of a non-primary relationship. The bank only wins that if the business moves its income and payroll into the account you just opened.

Two words carry weight in this paper. Clients are the businesses that bank with you. Customers are the people and companies that pay those businesses. Their payments fund the account you opened.

Moving that activity takes updates across dozens of tools:

• Income settles through Stripe, Shopify, Square or another processor.

• Payroll runs in Gusto, Rippling or ADP.

• Bills and subscriptions sit on cards and autopay arrangements nobody has looked at in two years.

• Vendors have to be paid from the right account. Each payment instruction has to be found, whether it lives in an AP tool, a billing page, a supplier portal or accounting software.

• Customers who pay by ACH or wire need new remittance details.

Someone at the business, usually the owner or whoever runs finance, has to sit down with twenty logins on an evening or a weekend and work through them. They take one look, decide it can wait, and go back to running the business. Months later the account is still empty, it has cost the bank a monthly fee waiver and a line on the dormant account report, and the banker who opened it is the one being asked why.

What if the switch happened for them? The client signs in once. The changes get made inside the tools the business already uses. Revenue starts landing in the account you opened. That is what the better providers now offer.

The Three Switching Paths

The difference comes down to who does the work and what exists when it is finished.

Manual. Someone combs through the last few months of statements to find which tools, vendors and customers are tied to the old account. They track the list in a spreadsheet and work through each login by hand. Your relationship team carries this, or the business does. It holds up for a handful of accounts and fails at volume. The spreadsheet is the only record. A business that stalled at the fourth tool looks the same to you as one that finished.

Outsourced orchestration. Discovery is automated, so the business gets an accurate list. Everything after that stays with them. They get a checklist, reminders, status tracking and usually a chatbot. The chatbot answers questions about a step. It does not complete the step. Discovery is automated and the switching is not. Finishing still depends on the business, or on a service team working the same logins by hand.

Switching infrastructure. The provider runs discovery and then makes the changes inside the tools the business already uses. The business signs in and the work happens off them and off your team. At the end there is a completed update in each tool and a record of which ones went through. The same flow sends new remittance details to the business's customers and moves payees. The bank gets step-level data on where each business is and where it stopped. A person steps in only where a tool leaves no other route.

To sort a provider into one of the three, ask what exists at the end of the flow. Either money has moved into the account you opened and operating activity is running, or the business stalls partway and the account stays quiet.

Seven Questions to Ask

The first three questions tell you which model you are looking at. The last four are diligence you run once you know. The strong answers below are illustrations of what a good answer sounds like. They are examples, not results from any provider.

Stage One: Which Model Is This?

Ask these three of everyone, including your own team if you are weighing an in-house build. A provider that stumbles on all three does not need Stage Two.

1. What does it change about your deposits?

Start with the money. You can buy a tool that tracks data, watch your team log in every day for a quarter, and see nothing move in your deposit numbers. A revenue tool for your bankers is a claim about your sales process. It is a separate claim from moving deposits. Ask which line on your deposit report changes and by how much.

Ask:

• Which number does this move, the funding rate or the primary relationship rate? Did you measure it on live accounts or model it?

• Does your product make the change, or tell my client to make it?

• How do you define an activated account? Would my finance team count it the same way?

• Of the businesses that start a switch, how many finish? Where do the rest stop?

• Take a real group of accounts you switched for another bank. What was the balance before, how much moved, and how long did you measure?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "Here are 412 business accounts opened at one bank between March and May. Median balance at open was $2,100. Thirty days later the switched accounts held a median of $18,400, against $4,900 for the accounts we did not touch. 31% more of the switched accounts funded." Real accounts, a stated baseline and window, and someone willing to walk you through the math.

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! "15% higher primacy." Higher than what? Measured on whom? Over what period? Watch for engagement numbers standing in for deposit numbers: logins, checklist completions, notification opens, chat sessions. A headline figure sourced to internal analysis has nothing behind it.

Takeaway. A dashboard shows you a workflow. It does not show you deposits. A provider that executes the switch produces the numbers first and the visibility second.

2. How does one switch get done, start to finish?

Pick one tool and make them walk you through the whole thing. Stay on that tool. This is the question most likely to get deflected, which is why it is worth the time.

Ask:

• When a business moves Gusto payroll to the new account, what makes the change happen? What does the business still do by hand? How long does it take?

• Gusto redesigns its screens regularly. When that happens, how long is the switch broken, and how does the fix ship?

• When someone is stuck on the Gusto direct deposit screen, does your chat support answer a question about the step or complete the step?

• Where does a person step in, and what can that person see?

• Show us a completed switch and the changed details inside the tool. Then show us one that fails. If they say it never fails, they are not being straight with you.

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "For Gusto payroll, the person who handles the banking signs in. The agent navigates to the direct deposit settings, and deterministic code writes the account and routing values. The system re-reads the page to confirm the change held. Median time is 26 seconds. When Gusto moves a screen, monitoring flags the break within hours and engineering ships a fix against the new path."

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! "Our flow guides your client through updating their payroll provider." Guided means the business is still doing the work. Other warning signs are a demo that stays on the dashboard while the switch happens off camera, and coverage quoted as a count of integrations when nobody will define what an integration completes. Some demos run on test credentials where nothing writes to a live account. Ask to watch one run on a real account.

Takeaway. "Guided" means orchestration, whatever the headline says. A named write step, a confirmation read and a log behind both means the provider executes.

3. Which direction does the money move?

This is where consumer switching technology gets misapplied to business accounts.

A consumer's income arrives from one place. An employer sends a paycheck through a payroll provider. Redirect that one instruction and you are most of the way there. Payroll connectivity providers built deep coverage of exactly that. One states that it connects to 90% of US payroll providers. Another states that its product supports personal deposit accounts only.

A business is the opposite. The money that funds its account is inbound revenue. It comes from a processor settling card volume, an invoicing tool, a customer sending an ACH against saved remittance details, or a check in the mail. Payroll is an outflow. A direct deposit tool can move the owner's own pay, if the owner takes a salary at all. The revenue keeps landing at the old bank. Ask what full payroll coverage does for a shop that settles card volume through Square.

Ask:

• Which direction of money does this move, income arriving or payments leaving?

• How many of your integrations are built for business tools rather than consumer ones? Which ones? Do you have a published coverage list?

• If the business settles through Stripe, Square, Shopify or Toast, what changes the payout account, and who does it?

• When customers pay by ACH against saved remittance details, how do those details get updated? How do you confirm the customer acted on the notice?

• What share of a typical client's monthly inflows and outflows does your coverage touch?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "A shop on Stripe settles into whatever account sits in Stripe's payout settings, so that is the field we change. For customers paying by ACH, we generate the remittance notice and send it. We mark that customer confirmed once the first payment lands in the new account. For customers who will not use a portal, the notice goes out by mail with the same confirmation logic behind it."

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! A payroll coverage percentage offered as the answer to a question about business income. Payroll belongs in the flow. For most small businesses it is an outflow, so a switch built only around payroll leaves you with an account nothing is funding.

Takeaway. Payroll coverage is consumer switching technology aimed at a business account. It moves the owner's paycheck and leaves the revenue at the old bank. What funds the account is income platform payouts, invoice payments, ACH and wire against saved remittance details, and checks. Ask which of those the provider changes, who sends the notice to the business's customers, and what counts as confirmation.

Stage Two: Diligence on the Ones Still Standing

These four take real time and pull in Risk, InfoSec and whoever owns your analytics. Run them once you know you are looking at execution.

4. What does coverage look like across your book?

Your clients do not all run the same stack. A restaurant lives in Toast, Square and a payroll provider. An agency lives in Stripe, QuickBooks and a pile of subscriptions. A contractor gets paid by check and updates customers by phone. Coverage tuned to one segment leaves the others stuck. Bring your own tool list to the call.

Ask:

• Which tools do you complete automatically, which need a person, and which do you not cover?

• What happens when a customer or vendor has no portal? A check, a wire form, a phone call or an emailed remittance change?

• Can this deploy in pieces, for example income first or payroll first?

• How long does it take to add a new tool, and who decides the order?

• Here are the top ten tools in our book. Which do you complete today?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "Gusto, automated. Rippling, automated. ADP Run and Workforce Now need a guided step, about four minutes. Paychex Flex is not covered yet and is scheduled for Q3. Send us your top ten and we will mark them up before the next call." A real list, a method against every line, ordered by what your book uses, and a stated path for the tail.

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! A wall of logos, or a count of integrations that nobody will define. The bigger warning is silence on offline payments. Wire forms and emailed remittance changes are in your book whether or not the provider has an answer for them.

Takeaway. No named list and no method against each line means the tail never gets covered and the switch never completes. You will find out what is missing from your own stalled accounts, months later.

5. Who touches account data?

The business's account and routing numbers are the most sensitive fields in the flow. Your risk committee will start here. The answers decide how long your vendor review runs. Send these questions ahead of the call so the documents show up with the answers.

Data residency comes up for a reason. The 2023 Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Relationships puts subcontractors inside your diligence obligation.7 It tells banks to evaluate how much a third party relies on subcontractors and whether that reliance raises risk. The agencies define a foreign-based third party as one whose servicing operations sit in another country under that country's law. OCC Bulletin 2002-16 on foreign-based service providers stays in force and supplements the 2023 guidance.8 Offshore handling of account data widens the fourth-party exposure you inherit. Your examiner will ask about it.

Ask:

• What system handles account and routing numbers? Do AI agents or any commercial language model ever see them?

• What InfoSec, Risk and Legal diligence has this cleared at a bank our size, and how long did it take?

• Where does the data sit? Does any of it leave the US? What is your SOC 2 status? Can we verify deletion after a switch finishes?

• When a person steps in, which fields can they see, and where is that access logged?

• Which subcontractors touch any part of this, and where are they?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "Account and routing numbers go into a vault and come out at the write step. Nobody on our side can read them. The agent doing the navigation never receives them. They are scrubbed from logs. Failures route to the engineers who own that integration, and what they see is a tool name and an error state with no account data. SOC 2 Type II, report in the trust center, plus a standing response to more than 100 diligence questions. All data in us-east-1. We cleared full diligence at a top 50 US bank last year."

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! "Bank-grade security" with nothing behind it, a SOC 2 Type 1, or a Type 2 still in progress. If you ask where the data sits and hear where the company is headquartered, that is the same problem. A future commitment adds nothing to a review happening now.

Takeaway. A provider that cannot trace the data path end to end hands your risk team the job of proving it. The gaps are usually where data gets reused or leaves the country.

6. What is doing the work?

Screens move, writes fail and tools change without notice. The question is what catches that. If the answer is a room of people retyping account numbers into portals, you are buying labor with an automation label. That cost grows as you grow.

Ask:

• When a switch runs, how much of it is code and how much is a person?

• When a screen changes or a write fails, what catches it and what ships the fix?

• Is this orchestration with an agent wrapper on it, or does the system perform the write?

• Going from 100 switches to 10,000, what grows, infrastructure or headcount?

• What share of switches complete without a person touching them? Where does the rest go?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "Failures route back into the system. Monitoring catches a changed screen and the run retries on the updated path. Anything the system cannot resolve goes to the engineers who own that integration, as a bug with a fix window attached. Going from 100 to 10,000 switches adds infrastructure. Our headcount goes into building coverage, not clearing a queue."

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! When headcount and location don't come up, the work is usually being done by people. That cost grows with your volume, and it grows on your side of the contract.

Takeaway. Refusing to share headcount and location usually means people are doing the work by hand. That cost grows with your volume, and it grows on your side of the contract.

7. What can you see?

Bankers and ops teams rarely see where a new account stops moving. Switching is the moment that visibility shows up or does not.

Ask:

• What do our bankers and ops team see while a switch is running?

• Which tool do your clients abandon most often, and at which step?

• Can we cut activation by branch, by acquisition channel and by business type?

• How does the data reach us: a dashboard, an API or a report into our warehouse? How do you report transaction data and surface cross-sell opportunities to our bankers?

++A strong answer sounds like:++ "Every step on every live switch is instrumented and tied back to the account number. You can export it. We can tell you that 34% of your clients never update income in Square, 20% run payroll in Gusto, 80% use QuickBooks, and 40% invoice no customers at all."

!!A weak answer sounds like:!! A view of progress and open tasks with nothing tied to balances. "Real time" offered as a feature without saying what is being observed in real time.

Takeaway. Workflow status and nothing else puts you back at orchestration with a better-looking dashboard.

Running the Reference Call

When you speak with the provider's reference customer, ask four things:

1. How much did funded accounts move, against what baseline, and over what window?

2. How many clients finished a switch, and how many of those became primary relationships?

3. What did the provider complete without your team touching it?

4. What broke, and how long did the fix take?

Vendor Scorecard

Ten questions, one row each. Fill it in during the call, not after it.

Every account that stalled at the fourth tool and never went primary is acquisition spend you already booked.

How InstaSwitch Answers

The seven questions lead to one conclusion. A provider that makes the changes moves deposits. A provider that reminds the client to make them does not. InstaSwitch is built to make the changes. Here is how it answers each question.

Deposits. Results come from live business accounts and never from projections. We measure funding within seven days of account open, tools completed against tools started, and balance movement by cohort. We will walk through the math on request.

How a switch gets done. 35 automations complete common switches in under 30 seconds. Agents handle navigation, because screens change constantly. The business signs in. The write itself runs on deterministic code, so the values that land in the field are the values we sent.

Direction of money. Income goes first. Income platforms, invoicing and customer remittance details come ahead of payroll, bills and vendors, because inflow is what funds the account.

Coverage. Real switching at the portal level across Gusto, Stripe, Square, Shopify, QuickBooks, Bill.com and more. A library of guided switches covers the tail. The flow deploys as individual modules, so the tools your clients use turn on first.

Account data. Account and routing numbers stay tokenized. They never reach the agents or a commercial language model. InstaSwitch is SOC 2 Type II certified. The approach cleared full InfoSec, Risk and Legal diligence at a $40B financial institution.

What does the work. The system performs the write after the business signs in. Failures route back into the system. Anything that cannot be resolved automatically goes to the engineers who own that integration, with account data stripped out of what they see.

Visibility. Step-level data on live switches shows where each business is and where it stops. For most banks this is the first look they have had at client behavior after account open.

Deployment. Three to five days embedded, or zero engineering hosted.

Before writing a line of code, the team ran 300 business switches by hand. They sat with owners and logged into payroll systems to see where the work lives. That is where the coverage list came from.

If account opening is outpacing activation at your bank, book a discovery session. We will map which questions matter most for your book.

Sources

1. Industry estimate. Fully loaded acquisition costs vary by institution; most consultancies put the cost of a new account at well over $200. The Financial Brand, "The Importance of Primacy in Banking," March 21, 2024.

2. Digital Banking Report, "The Power of Primacy," February 2024, survey of 200+ financial institution executives. Institutions estimate that a bit more than half of new accounts convert to active relationships. Reported in The Financial Brand, "The Importance of Primacy in Banking," March 21, 2024.

3. Curinos, 2023 US Business Banking Survey (n=2,640). Businesses keep about 60% of their total deposits with their primary bank. Reported in Curinos, "How To Win In Small Business: 5 Takeaways," September 23, 2024.

4. Curinos, "Deposits In '24: It's Gonna Cost You," January 9, 2024. Primacy multiples of eight times fee revenue and ten times average deposits, stated for primary relationships.

5. Pinwheel, Direct Deposit Switch. Product supports personal deposit accounts only. Pinwheel FAQ as published by Union Bank (accessed October 2026); product page at pinwheelapi.com.

6. Atomic, Direct Deposit Switching product page. Connects to 90% of US payroll providers (accessed October 2026).

7. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FDIC and OCC, "Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Relationships: Risk Management," final June 6, 2023.

8. OCC Bulletin 2023-17, June 6, 2023. Confirms OCC Bulletin 2002-16 remains in force and supplements the interagency guidance.