For most finance teams, digital transformation starts well. Early processes get digitized, results come in, and the case for continuing is easy to make. The harder question is what happens after that initial progress, when the straightforward work is done, and the rest turns out to be more complicated than expected.
It's a pattern Brandon Sather, senior vice president and head of Strategy for U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems, has seen play out more times than he can count. Working closely with commercial clients on payment operations, he's watched teams make strong starts only to stall somewhere in the middle.
"You get most of the benefit from going from zero miles an hour to 20 miles an hour," he says. "Going from 20 to 40 delivers less benefit. You're still going faster, but you're just not getting as much benefit from that pace."
Research by Visa in collaboration with U.S. Bank puts hard numbers behind what Sather observes: 53% of finance departments are stuck in the early stages of digital transformation. And the reasons why have less to do with technology or ambition than most leaders might expect.
Too many priorities, not enough runway
A big part of the problem is structural. Finance teams are being pulled in too many directions at once, and digital transformation (despite its long-term value) rarely wins in a head-to-head competition with immediate priorities. Half of all finance teams are actively trying to balance cost-cutting against investment in future growth, while driving revenue, improving cash flow and managing risk dominate the day-to-day.
Business-wide digital transformation ranks well below all of them.
When every initiative is competing for the same limited resources, the hard, slower work of transformation keeps losing out, and organizational inertia sets in. Edge cases compound the problem further. Nearly every finance operation has processes that only surface monthly or quarterly, built on institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads and has never been written down. These are exactly the areas transformation needs to reach, and exactly the ones that are easiest to keep deferring.
Don't mistake automation for transformation
Even when teams do find the runway to push forward, there's another trap waiting: treating transformation and automation as the same thing. Sather is direct about the distinction. Teams that digitize an existing workflow without pausing to question whether that workflow makes sense in the first place aren't transforming anything; they're just making a broken process run faster.
The real work involves examining each step, each handoff and each requirement, while honestly asking what can be stopped, restructured or done more efficiently. Automation is most valuable as the final step in that process, not as a substitute for it.
How leaders frame the effort internally matters just as much as how they execute it. When transformation gets positioned as cost reduction, the message that filters down through the organization tends to land as something much simpler and more threatening: that jobs are at risk. "If that's the whole point of transformation—ripping cost out of the business—I think you're missing the forest for the trees," Sather says.
His team has found considerably more traction by framing it instead as cost reallocation, or in other words, a shift in how people spend their time, moving energy away from low-value repetitive tasks and toward higher-impact work like solving client problems, evaluating capital investments and identifying opportunities that were simply invisible when staff were buried in manual processes.
Start with payments
For teams that are ready to move, Sather's advice is consistent: start with payments. Digitizing inflows and outflows is the most natural entry point, partly because every bank and fintech offers tools to support it, and partly because once payment data starts flowing in real time, it unlocks the reporting capabilities that make genuinely higher-value work, like cash flow and working capital forecasting, actually achievable.
From there, progress depends on getting the right people aligned around a shared goal. Initiatives that lack buy-in across procurement, capital expenditure and operating teams rarely survive long enough to reach the RFP stage. Transformation needs internal sponsors, and often it's the product team (not finance) that ends up in that role, because new offerings simply can't launch without the infrastructure to support them. Company size shapes the constraints, too: large enterprises hit resource limits measured in dollars, while smaller firms, where the controller often doubles as the accountant and the FP&A lead, measure them in hours.
The teams that break through think differently
The finance teams that manage to push past the early-win plateau tend to share a few things in common. They define what success looks like before the work begins, they bring along the people whose daily routines will actually change, and they sequence their investments carefully so that each phase builds enough credibility to fund the next one.
What distinguishes them most, though, is how they think about the work itself. The teams that stall treat transformation as a technology project. The ones that break through understand it's an organizational one—and that distinction, more than any platform or tool, is what ultimately determines how far they go.
The value of a partner who knows the patterns
Navigating digital transformation is considerably easier with a partner who recognizes the patterns and knows where the pitfalls tend to appear. U.S. Bank works with commercial clients at every stage of the journey, from digitizing payment operations to building the real-time data and reporting capabilities that make higher-value work possible. If your team is ready to move beyond the early wins and build something that lasts, U.S. Bank can help you find the right next step.
