Banking on Scale: How M&A and Market Shifts Reveal Finance’s Role in Building Resilience

In our Mid-Year Banking Review, we explored how banks were navigating policy shifts and leading with AI. Since then, the story has evolved, and finance is once again at the center of it all.

What’s Changed and Why It Matters

In our last outlook, we observed U.S. banks piloting AI and responding to shifting federal policies with tactical agility. Today, these dynamics have transitioned into structural shifts that are reshaping balance sheets and strategic priorities with lasting impact.

Navigating Credit Stress & Wavering Investor Confidence

Credit stresses remain a dominant concern for all banks, especially regional institutions given their exposure to CRE and commercial lending. U.S. regional banks remain concentrated in portfolios vulnerable to borrower fraud and deteriorating loan quality. Zions Bancorp’s $50 million charge-off tied to commercial loans and Western Alliance’s nearly $100 million fraud lawsuit, along with the Tricolor bankruptcy that led to $170 million in losses at JPMorgan, highlight growing challenges in commercial and subprime segments and signal broader stress across mid-market and consumer lending. As Jamie Dimon cautioned following these developments, “My antenna goes up when things like that happen. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more… Everyone should be forewarned on this.” His remarks underscore the growing sensitivity among investors and executives to the potential for hidden risks beneath otherwise stable metrics.

While overall asset quality remains favorable and bank capital ratios have strengthened, rising delinquencies and nonperforming loans in certain sectors warrant greater vigilance. For finance leaders, this means closely monitoring granular portfolio risk analytics — such as charge-offs, delinquencies, and loan concentrations — to advise business partners on strategies that mitigate future losses through modifications, tightened credit standards, or proactive restructuring. These insights should flow directly into financial, operational, and capital planning frameworks to ensure agility and resilience in uncertain conditions.

The Shifting Regulatory and Structural Landscape

Regulatory expectations in the U.S. continue to evolve beyond Basel III implementation, with enhanced focus on AI and model governance. The Federal Reserve and OCC are driving tighter scrutiny on model risk management, data lineage, and transparency standards to ensure that financial institutions not only comply but also architect controls that embed auditability and explainability. This regulatory evolution transforms compliance from a periodic exercise into a strategic imperative, requiring banks’ finance teams to build integrated, automated data ecosystems supporting regulatory, audit, and investor demands concurrently.

Consolidation as a Catalyst for Scale and Resilience

Scale and technology investments are also accelerating consolidation within U.S. banking, as institutions respond to margin compression and rising compliance costs.

Fifth Third Bancorp’s $10.9 billion acquisition of Comerica is emblematic of a broader domestic trend where mergers enable diversification, cost rationalization, and the scaling of modernization efforts. Notably, around the same time Huntington Bancshares Incorporated agreed to acquire Cadence Bank in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, joining the wave of mega-regional bank combinations. These mergers don’t just add size; they push the acquirers into the “top 10” club of U.S. banks by assets — marking a pivotal step for what were once purely regional players. The implication for markets is substantial: Consolidation builds the scale and resilience needed to compete in a rapidly changing banking landscape while also increasing the systemic importance of these institutions.

With 52 bank M&A deals announcing $16.6 billion in value in Q3 2025 alone, its highest level in years, the pace of consolidation is accelerating. For finance leaders, this trend presents a dual mandate: Harmonize and automate processes across legacy systems swiftly, while preserving the local agility and specialized insight that regional and mid-sized U.S. banks rely on to differentiate in their markets. The winners will be those that scale smartly — achieving efficiency and strength without losing the nimble, customer-centric DNA that often defines their competitive edge.

Convergence of Pressures Reshaping the Industry

Together, these forces are redefining the competitive landscape for banks. Rising credit risks stress capital and investor confidence, evolving regulatory clarity facilitates deal-making and prudent governance, and consolidation provides the scale necessary for sustained technology and data investments. For finance leadership, this means evolving beyond reactive reporting to proactive scenario planning, integrated risk-finance analytics, and agile capital allocation that anticipates disruption and positions the organization for resilient growth.

Resilience: From Safeguard to Strategic Advantage

If the past year proved anything, it’s that resilience isn’t built in calm periods — it’s forged through volatility. The pressures reshaping banking have made resilience not just a defensive posture, but a measure of strategic strength.

Finance sits at the center of that shift. In a world where economic, regulatory, and operational risks can converge in days, finance leaders must go beyond maintaining control — they must enable agility.

Resilience in practice means:

Strengthening data integrity and real-time visibility.
Eliminating manual, fragmented workflows to drive automation and provide capacity for rich analytics.
Embedding continuous scenario modeling to test responses before they’re needed.
Connecting financial and operational signals so finance can guide, not follow, the organization’s response.

Modern finance teams that can see, simulate, and steer outcomes across silos are redefining their value — not as scorekeepers, but as catalysts for confident, data-driven decisions.

And while governance and process discipline remain essential, technology has become the critical enabler. By unifying data, automating controls, and embedding AI-driven insights, finance can move from reacting to volatility to managing it with intent.

How Finance Builds the Backbone of Resilience

At the September OneStream FSI Summit in New York, leaders from Accenture, PwC, and OneStream shared a common message: Finance must become the backbone of resilience. True stability depends on how finance organizes its work, connects systems, and uses intelligence to guide decisions. Here's how:

1. Reimagine the Work of Finance

Accenture’s research showed that disruption across business ecosystems has accelerated by 183% since 2019, and nearly all organizations (98%) view technology — especially gen AI — as their primary lever for adaptation. Against this backdrop, incremental efficiency gains won’t suffice. Finance must fundamentally rethink how it delivers value by:

Automating and simplifying routine processes in close, reporting, and forecasting to eliminate friction and reduce manual effort.
Redirecting 30-50% of finance’s capacity from data collection to deep analysis, scenario planning, and business partnering.
Breaking down traditional silos by connecting finance, operations, and risk data into a single, digital decision environment.
Treating every reporting cycle as an opportunity for continuous improvement rather than mere repetition.

2. Build a Unified Decision Core — Lead with CPM Before or Alongside ERP

PwC highlighted how CFO priorities are shifting away from cost-cutting toward enhancing metrics, analytics, and reporting. Yet, many organizations still start finance transformation from the transactional ERP layer, which improves data capture but not decision quality. Instead, finance should lead with CPM to create:

A comprehensive performance model that links financial statements with capital, liquidity, and risk plans, all built on one consistent data foundation.
Early integration of regulatory frameworks (i.e. Basel III Endgame, LCR, and NSFR) to ensure compliance informs system design from the outset.
Shared data model alignment early on, designing the chart of accounts, entity structure, and dimensionality once to serve both ERP and CPM, reducing duplication and accelerating time to value.
Streamlined testing and integration that validate end-to-end data flow, from GL to consolidation to management reporting, ensuring consistency across systems.

3. Apply AI With Purpose

Despite heavy investment, only 45% of executives can measure ROI from AI, and fewer than half of models reach production. Finance doesn’t need science projects, it needs AI that works at scale:

Concentrating deployments in finance-controlled domains such as forecasting, anomaly detection, and variance analysis where ROI is tangible.
Ensuring all AI outputs are explainable, traceable, and compliant with governance standards.
Training AI models on governed CPM data sets to maintain consistent, reliable inputs across processes.
Keeping finance professionals in control by embedding robust guardrails developed jointly with risk and compliance to manage operational and other risk considerations.

By deploying AI thoughtfully, finance can shift from explaining historical results to anticipating future outcomes, thus becoming a predictive and prescriptive force in the organization.

A Connected Approach to Resilience

These three actions reinforce each other: reimagine work, unify decisions, and operationalize intelligence. When connected through a unified platform like OneStream, these disciplines form the foundation for continuous insight—linking data, process, and performance into one intelligent ecosystem. The goal isn’t to chase technology, but to build a foundation where clarity, speed, and confidence work together.

Finance modernization isn’t a one-time project, it’s a steady evolution. By connecting data, processes, and insights, finance becomes a constant source of truth with resilience built on clarity, not complexity.

M&A: The Real-World Stress Test for Resilience

The CFO playbook outlined at the FSI Summit is compelling in theory, but M&A are where it’s put to the test.

In 2024, an American regional bank announced its largest deal it’s history and expanding its total assets by over 50%. The transaction accelerated growth but also tested how quickly finance could align systems, integrate data, and deliver trusted results across two complex organizations. Their finance team faced the classic M&A challenge — turning scale into stability. They needed real-time visibility into consolidation, risk, and profitability as the merger closed. With OneStream, the bank was able to:

Automated consolidation and reporting across the newly combined organization, eliminating manual mapping, integration, and data reconciliation.
Establish consistent, finance-owned reporting across hundreds of entities and branches.
Integrate profitability and risk data to monitor spread rates, loan mix, and portfolio performance.
Use scenario modeling to forecast balance-sheet impacts and assess merger outcomes.

M&A remains the ultimate stress test for resilience. It exposes fragmentation, pressure-tests process discipline, and rewards finance teams that can deliver clarity and control at deal speed. By centralizing these capabilities within OneStream’s unified platform, institutions can harmonize reporting, planning, and analytics to accelerate post-merger integration and strengthen long-term performance.

Setting the Stage for 2026

The past year has redefined what resilience means in banking. It’s no longer about recovery, it’s about readiness. The institutions that have performed best amid volatility are those that treat resilience as a design principle, not a reaction plan.

Resilience by design means building a finance function that evolves as fast as the environment around it, where every process, model, and data connection is structured for transparency, agility, and control. It’s the architecture of a more intelligent finance organization—one that learns from disruption, adapts in real time, and grows stronger through change. OneStream provides that foundation—bringing data, planning, reporting, and AI together on one governed platform to help banks build resilience by design and move from surviving disruption to shaping what comes next.

As 2026 approaches, the conversation will shift from resilience to reinvention. The question isn’t how finance can keep up, it’s how it can lead.

See how OneStream can help finance teams build resilience by design and lead with intelligence.