Earnings Show Banks Turning Transaction Banking Into a Platform Business

The most surprising narrative from firms like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, BNY, Wells Fargo and others was the excitement with which their leaders pointed to tangible returns from years of investment in transaction banking modernization.

What stood out was not simply growth in treasury and trade revenue lines, but the way management teams described those gains. Rather than framing them as cyclical or rate-driven, banks increasingly tied performance to structural improvements in payments processing, liquidity visibility and cross-border settlement.

For an industry often criticized for moving slowly, the tone taken by executives on the earnings calls suggested that something more durable is underway. It’s a re-architecting of legacy systems that is beginning to pay off in real-time treasury management and cash intelligence.

This matters because transaction banking, once treated as a low-margin utility, has become a strategic control point for corporate clients navigating volatility, globalization and instant commerce. The earnings calls hinted that banks are no longer just catching up to FinTech challengers; they are redefining the category on their own terms.

Read also: The 2025 Upgrades That Pushed Treasury to the Center of the Enterprise

From Back-Office Plumbing to Strategic Infrastructure

For decades, the core systems underpinning treasury, payments, custody and settlement were designed for batch processing and end-of-day reconciliation. They worked well enough when corporate treasurers planned liquidity days or weeks in advance and cross-border payments took several days to complete. But as supply chains digitized and capital moved faster, the mismatch between real-world velocity and banking infrastructure became a constraint.

The modernization programs now surfacing in earnings discussions target that constraint directly. Banks have invested in cloud-native cores, API-based integration layers, and event-driven architectures that allow payments and balances to be updated continuously rather than periodically. The payoff is not just speed, but coherence. Bans have a single, near-real-time view of cash positions across accounts, currencies and geographies.

For fiscal year 2025, Citigroup said Wednesday (Jan. 14) that its Services business generated approximately $21 billion in revenue in 2025, up 8% year over year. The bank’s Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) processed millions of payments daily across more than 90 countries while playing a central role in U.S. dollar clearing worldwide, with Citi’s cross-border transaction values growing at a double-digit rate.

Citi executives explained how the company’s multiyear investment in data platforms, controls and application rationalization reached a critical mass in 2025. More than 80% of its transformation programs are now at or near their targeted end state, and hundreds of legacy applications have been retired. These efforts reduced operational risk, but they also lowered marginal costs in high-volume businesses like TTS.

Elsewhere across the bulge bracket landscape, JPMorgan Chase revealed during a Tuesday (Jan. 13) earnings call that its commercial banking payments revenue for the fourth quarter was up 9% year over year, to $5.1 billion. The global bank’s Securities Services revenue was up 13% year over year, to $1.5 billion for the quarter.

CEO Jamie Dimon also pointed to JPMorgan’s work in tokenization and digital infrastructure, saying the firm has been “quite involved in the whole blockchain technology space for some time” and is using those capabilities across the company.

See also: The Digital Asset Dictionary: Tokenized Deposits for Payments and Treasury

The Move to Real-Time Intelligence

What made the fourth-quarter earnings particularly instructive was the way modernization appears to be driving operating leverage. Transaction banking revenues are scaling without commensurate increases in cost, suggesting that newer platforms are reducing manual intervention, exception handling and reconciliation work.

This is a critical inflection point. Historically, payments growth often strained legacy systems, forcing banks to add staff or outsource processing. Modernized infrastructures invert that relationship. Incremental volume flows through the same digital rails, while analytics and controls are automated. The result is a business that behaves more like a software platform than a traditional service operation.

For example, Bank of America’s Wednesday earnings presentation showed a 13% year-over-year increase in global treasury service charges. The bank also highlighted that its CashPro app was responsible for $336 billion in corporate payments, up 18%.

Elsewhere, BNY shared Tuesday that its Payments and Trade businesses were up 3% year over year, while its securities services posted a total revenue of $9.7 billion, up 9% year over year. The company is also focused on bridging corporate back offices with financial blockchain solutions.

“Our focus on innovating new products and solutions is centered on building trusted market infrastructure for the long term and serving our clients in new and evolving ways, including increasing delivery of new capabilities connecting the traditional and digital asset worlds,” BNY CEO Robin Vince said on the bank’s earnings call.

Still, not every bank reported outsize growth. Wells Fargo on Wednesday shared that for the fourth quarter, its Treasury Management and Payments business grew 3% from the quarter prior but posted just a 1% gain year over year.

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