From Complexity to Clarity: How Integrated Intelligence Is Reshaping Commercial Banking

Two weeks on from the 2025 nSight Banking Conference, one thing still stands out clearly: complexity is the enemy of progress in commercial banking.

From over 200 conversations our IBISWorld team had with senior credit professionals, technology experts, and treasury, lending, and risk leaders, a recurring pattern emerged. Banks are overwhelmed by data, but underserved by insight. Their systems are robust, but often disconnected. Their teams are skilled, but not always aligned.

There’s a growing need for a centralized, trusted source of industry information that can serve multiple departments, in real time, within the platforms bankers already use. That’s why IBISWorld’s integration methods within nCino, Salesforce, Snowflake, and via API, captured so much attention.

Banking’s new priority: Unified, embedded intelligence

Whether you’re managing loan approvals, monitoring portfolio health, or preparing for client meetings, you can’t afford to wait for manually assembled research briefs. Decision makers at nSight made it clear: they want intelligence to be embedded, not adjacent. But when resources are fragmented or overwhelming, they create friction, slowing decisions instead of streamlining them.

This is why IBISWorld has accelerated our commitment to introducing new data integrations, including the new partnership with nCino, which was jointly presented in a product pod session showcasing our integration at the conference. Whether it's through an API, Snowflake, Salesforce, or our upcoming integration into nCino's new Continuous Credit Monitoring tool, integrated insights can reduce time spent on research by bringing everything into one platform.

For commercial banks already committed to digital transformation, this integration is not a cosmetic add-on—it’s a strategic infrastructure play.

What bankers told us matters most

1. Breaking down silos and creating a shared understanding

At nearly every session, a familiar frustration emerged: small business, corporate banking, treasury, risk, and underwriting teams all speaking different languages. Marketing has different data than credit. Risk sees a problem only after the loan is booked. Relationship managers spending time on loan packages only for them to be declined.

This fragmentation erodes internal trust and delays decisions. Bankers are calling for a unified intelligence layer—one that integrates with existing workflows and acts as a common reference point across the institution.

IBISWorld has long helped banks address this challenge by serving consistent, reliable industry data across the entire loan process—not just to one team, but to everyone involved:

• Relationship managers use IBISWorld to become trusted advisors, preparing for meetings with industry-specific Call Prep Questions and insights into top banking products by sector.
• Credit analysts rely on IBISWorld to assess borrower viability using sector-specific trends, performance benchmarks, and forward-looking risk scores.
• Portfolio managers monitor emerging risks and market shifts with automated updates on cost drivers, risk factors, and industry health.
• Treasury specialists develop credibility with their customers by leveraging financial ratios to understand performance and liquidity challenges.

By aligning teams around the same trusted source, IBISWorld eliminates second-guessing, strengthens collaboration, and helps banks move with speed and confidence.

2. Smarter, proactive risk management under pressure

Today’s risk teams are expected to do more with less. Increased regulatory scrutiny, macroeconomic uncertainty, and evolving credit conditions have only heightened the need for precision and proactivity. Access to more data can help portfolio and risk managers build better predictive models, but it also raises a familiar challenge: too many disconnected resources that don’t talk to each other.

As one portfolio manager at the event put it:

“The economy is changing rapidly, with trends like tariffs shifting all the time. We use many different systems which don’t always speak to each other, but we need them to and that’s our goal. More integration would allow leadership to create dashboards and reporting to make better decisions and increase oversight into our portfolio health for board reporting, especially needed in volatile times like these.”

Instead of combing through disparate sources, teams can access verified, digestible data through IBISWorld’s early warning indicators, real-time updates, and analyst-backed risk insights—streamlining oversight and strengthening confidence in every decision.

3. Practical AI and automation—not another buzzword

AI was, unsurprisingly, one of the conference’s headline themes. But the most thoughtful conversations weren’t about generative chatbots or moonshot ideas—they were about practical automation.

Bankers want to reduce low-value admin work, automate data prep, and upskill junior team members with smarter tools—all without sacrificing compliance or the personal relationships that drive client retention.

IBISWorld’s structured data is designed for this exact use case. Whether used within an AI-powered dashboard, a CRM assistant, or a portfolio monitoring tool, our integration options help banks:

What to take back to your team

Here are three strategic actions you can take now:

1. Audit your current integrations

Ask your teams:

• Are we speaking the same language across departments?
• How often are we toggling between different windows, exporting, or copy-pasting data into memos or tools?
• Could the insights we rely on be available within the systems we already use?

If the answer to any of these is “yes,” IBISWorld’s integration suite can help simplify your tech stack and improve output. Our APIs, and nCino, Snowflake, and Salesforce integrations embed relevant industry insights directly into the platforms your teams already use, creating consistency across origination, monitoring and relationship management.

2. Close the advisory expectation gap

According to Barlow Research’s Q4 2024 data, 73% of middle market and 66% of small business clients expect their bankers to bring industry-specific knowledge. However, only 49% and 53% of those clients, respectively, feel those expectations are being met. That’s a 13–24% trust gap—and a major opportunity for banks leveraging IBISWorld to stand out.

IBISWorld helps close this gap by providing:

• Call prep questions tailored to each industry segment.
• Top products and services typically used by businesses in that industry to advise customers and open up opportunities.
• Co-branded industry briefs to share with customers and reinforce banker credibility.

These tools enable bankers to step confidently into more strategic, advisory-led conversations—regardless of previous sector experience.

3. Align firmwide on decision-making intelligence

Risk, Credit, Business Development, Marketing, Treasury, Finance—these teams all need to operate from a single source of truth, not six disconnected spreadsheets or conflicting dashboards.

In today’s banking environment, alignment isn’t just about having the same data. It’s also about trusting that data. Predictive models are only as strong as the inputs behind them, which is why firms are leaning on verified, analyst-written insights and proprietary risk scores from IBISWorld.

By embedding IBISWorld across the organization, teams gain confidence in the information guiding their decisions, leading to faster alignment, more accurate risk assessments, and stronger client outcomes.