When I first joined 11:FS, I worked on a small business banking project. I felt nervous - it was my first B2B project and there were many technical terms that I had to keep up with.

That changed as soon as we started interviewing the business owners. Hearing them describe their day-to-day struggles, I realised many didn't understand it either. Most weren't financial experts. They were just people trying to sell something they loved. I found that oddly reassuring.

More recently, I worked on an invoice financing project. The jargon and niche terms returned and, as a result, so too did the nerves. This time we were interviewing senior financial decision-makers, so I made sure to learn more niche terms like "factoring" and "discount margin" before running interviews. Surprisingly, a few of them needed us to pause the interview and explain some financial terms. 

It made me wonder: why do banks forget to design for the human behind a business?

Stop assuming financial fluency

The people using business banking tools don’t necessarily have financial backgrounds. Many smaller businesses can't afford a dedicated finance team. Yet banks keep building products that assume expertise their customers don't have, leaving them to figure things out on their own.

Some fintechs are getting this right. Tide explains financial products in plain English throughout its app. It’s not buried in a help centre, but woven into the experience itself. Relay, a US business banking platform, strips out complexity entirely, building around how small business owners actually think about money rather than how accountants do. Qonto takes a similar approach in Europe, simplifying financial management with intuitive interfaces and clear, jargon-free language designed for everyday business owners. 

"We lost 10 to 15 minutes in some interviews simply explaining banking jargon to customers."

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Time is the metric that banks aren't measuring

Banks love talking about big wins - faster loans, instant approvals and same-day transfers. But that's not what most customers experience on a Tuesday morning. The real cost is time. 

In my invoice financing project, we lost 10 to 15 minutes in some interviews simply explaining banking jargon to customers. Each pause meant that we lost time asking specific questions to explore their invoice financing needs. It was time we couldn't get back. 

I then realised that each interruption was a datapoint in itself. Each confused pause wasn't just friction in these customer interviews — it was a signal of a deeper, unmet need. Making invoice financing truly frictionless isn't only about helping businesses access cash quickly. It's about using intuitive language that a business owner never has to stop mid-task, open a new tab, and Google what "ledger level" actually means.

If that's happening in a 60-minute session, imagine what it's costing customers every single day. It's a silent tax nobody's measuring.

Starling Bank quietly tackled this with its business account onboarding - reducing it to minutes by asking only what they actually need, in language that makes sense. Less time lost before customers even get started.

If customers can't find your product, it doesn't exist

Customers don't describe needs the way banks describe products. They're not searching for "revolving credit facilities" - they're Googling "what to do when cash runs out." That gap isn't just a marketing problem. It means useful features go undiscovered, and real needs go unmet. 

Monzo Business leans into this by using plain language and contextual feature discovery - based on what stage your business is at, not what the product team decided to call them. 

The best banks give customers their time back

The financial firms that will win aren't necessarily the ones with the most features. They're the ones whose customers barely notice the banking at all - because nothing confused them, nothing slowed them down, and everything just worked.

And that all starts by answering a simple question: what does this tool/platform/website feel like to someone who didn't go to business school?

Closing this gap doesn't necessarily require a full product overhaul. Some of the most effective changes are surprisingly small.

  • Adding a simple "i" symbol beside technical terms gives customers a quick explanation without interrupting their flow. 
  • Building smart search that responds to natural, everyday language — rather than forcing customers to know the exact term that your bank uses internally — means people can actually find what they're looking for. 
  • And in many cases, the simplest fix of all is just committing to plain language throughout the experience from the start.

But none of these fixes land well without one thing first: actually speaking to your customers. Understanding how they describe their own financial situations, in their own words, is what makes a product feel like it's been designed for them. 

If you're wondering where your proposition falls short on this, that's exactly the kind of question our 11:FS Ventures team helps answer. From running customer research to benchmarking your app experience, we work with financial services firms to close the gap between how banks talk and how customers actually think. Get in touch to find out how we can help.