There are quite a few lending solutions these days for small businesses — Funding Circle, OnDeck, Kabbage, and Square Capital, to name a just a few — but innovation and digitization are lagging in other areas, such as digital account opening.

Enter Gro Solutions, a sales and marketing platform for financial institutions. Atlanta-based Gro has been in the digital account opening space since 2015, and today launched a new account-opening product for small businesses, an added component to the company’s digital sales platform. “We’re bringing the 21st-century experience to business banking,” CEO David Eads told Bank Innovation. “We want to create a great user experience for customers and employees. The employees need a great experience too, and if they don’t have one, it indirectly leads to a bad customer experience.”

Christine Barry, research director Aite Group’s wholesale banking practice, noted that digital account opening was “a high area of focus for banks serving small business,” and that while the industry is served by several known players such as Bottomline, “there is demand in the space.”

She continued, “Banks measure success by their ability to sign on and retain business banking customers. But they admit they’re very weak in this area.” In a recent survey conducted by Aite Group, more than half of bankers rated their institutions as “not at all efficient” or “somewhat efficient” at onboarding business customers.

“Our goal has always been to provide flexibility to the bank to make the change,” Eads said, referring to the ability of bank employees to update the settings of the Gro product. “There are multiple levels of configuration,” Eads said. There is the most basic level which just about any employee can handle; a deeper, spreadsheet version for Excel experts; and an HTML/CSS version for those with web-building experience.

Why all these configuration layers? “So they don’t get stuck with professional services,” Eads said. “I don’t want the consulting business.” That said, Gro will help banks get set up, which can happen in as little as one week.

“We think we’ve cracked the code on retail account opening, but business accounts are where banks make their money,” Eads said. “The tools are still far behind for business banking.”

Jim Marous of The Financial Brand and the Digital Banking Report has been an evangelist for online account opening for many years. In a recent post, one of many on the topic, he stated categorically, “Building a strong digital account opening process should be a priority for all organizations… Beyond supporting a mobile account opening process, organizations must provide the technology and insight for frontline staff (and digital applications) to engage easily and advise accurately. Engagements must be personalized for each customer, with cross-selling to be intelligent and contextual.”

The account-opening can take place anywhere. Eads said Gro is “agnostic” about where customers interact, whether it’s the branch or on a mobile device anywhere.

Gro has “scores” of customers using its retail solution, and several piloting the new solution announced today.

“There are a number of processes with the possibility of automation [in banking],” Eads said. But for business banking, with its smaller number of higher-value customers,” banks are still operating paper-based processes, “stored in manila folders,” Eads said. “The technology that produced the mobile solutions we’re all used to using, the business model of active users doesn’t match business banking,” he said.

“I think there’s a lot of room to run after account opening,” Eads said. “There’s the marketing process, for one. Some are paper-based, some are disconnected.”

Gro raised $4.25 million from TTV Capital in 2017. Eads noted this investment “allowed us to step on the gas,” and build products like that launched today.

“Banks don’t have the right capability in this area,” Barry said. “But they are looking for it.”