By Om Kapoor June 27, 2025
Last month, we made a splash in Nashville with our annual conference, OneStream Splash. We laid out our vision for the future of finance: unified, intelligent, and finance-owned. The real message, however, was bigger than technology. The focus was on finance stepping into the role the business needs most right now — a strategic leader in times of complexity and change.
Every industry feels this shift. But in banking, the stakes are especially high. Economic headwinds, compliance demands, and competitive pressure have placed new expectations on finance — to do more than report. Finance also needs to lead.
That’s only possible when finance is unburdened. Free from homegrown systems, legacy consolidation tools, and spreadsheet-bound processes that limit visibility and slow response. With a unified platform, embedded intelligence, and finance-led control, banks can shift from reactive to resilient.
And the institutions gaining the most momentum? They’re the ones where finance owns the data, governs the process, and drives transformation from the center.
Finance Without Limits: Redefining the Architecture
At Splash this year, a powerful idea took center stage: finance without limits starts with the right architecture.
Banks today are navigating complex, high-stakes demands: faster insights, evolving compliance standards, and constant business change. Yet many finance teams remain constrained by legacy consolidation systems, homegrown solutions, and spreadsheets that weren’t built for agility. These limitations force teams into workarounds, draining time and diluting strategic impact.
But leading institutions are breaking the cycle. They’re stepping back to define a finance-first architecture—one that unifies data, governs processes, and embeds intelligence across the enterprise.
Case in Point: A U.S.-Based Community Bank's Shift to Unified Architecture
A U.S. community bank began its transformation by replacing fragmented reporting and manual processes with OneStream’s unified platform. Here are just some of the bank’s initial wins:
- Faster close and regulatory reporting cycles
- A finance-owned, governed data model
- A single source of truth across the organization
With that foundation, they rapidly expanded into other areas:
- Capital and margin analysis
- Stress testing
- Operational allocations for loans, personnel, and facilities
Now, the bank’s preparing to layer in forecasting, reconciliations, and mortgage analytics—powered by the same unified architecture.
This approach is finance without limits: not just more efficient, but more strategic, scalable, and resilient in the face of uncertainty.
Accelerating Time to Value for New Models and Planning Cycles
Finance teams need to move fast — especially when forecasts shift, market conditions evolve, or new reporting needs arise. Yet in many organizations, every new model, dashboard, or update still requires IT support, creating delays and limiting agility.
Those obstacles fuel a frustrating cycle: business needs change, but finance is stuck waiting. IT bottlenecks slow down response times, while siloed processes and redundant development efforts prevent teams from iterating quickly. At Splash 2025, finance leaders made it clear — they’re ready to lead, but their tools haven’t kept up.
That’s why OneStream introduced Genesis—a no-code design environment that gives finance the tools to build, configure, and adapt processes independently. Whether launching new models, creating dashboards, or iterating planning cycles, Genesis puts control back in the hands of finance.
With Genesis, organizations can accelerate time to value in multiple ways:
- Rapidly build and deploy financial and operational models without coding
- Reuse content blocks to accelerate solution delivery and maintain consistency
- Create and personalize dashboards, menus, and user experiences
- Modify existing dashboards with enhanced analytics and insights
- Enable workflows infused with artificial intelligence (AI) using prebuilt components for narrative summaries and commentary
By eliminating complexity and enabling self-service, Genesis allows finance teams to move at the speed of the business — delivering faster insights and greater impact.
Embedding Intelligence Where Finance Works: The SensibleAI Advantage
AI often promises transformation—but in practice, many solutions fall short. They’re disconnected from day-to-day workflows, require technical expertise, and operate as black boxes finance teams can neither trust nor explain.
OneStream redefined what AI can look like in finance: transparent, explainable, and embedded directly where work happens.
The SensibleAI™ Portfolio brings predictive, generative, and agent-based intelligence into the OneStream platform, eliminating the need for side tools or data science support. By design, the platform helps finance teams overcome common pain points, such as manual and time-consuming reconciliations, rigid forecasting processes, and limited analytic capacity.
The portfolio includes the following:
- SensibleAI Forecast: Delivers rolling forecasts powered by machine learning (ML), with 85%+ time savings and 25%+ improved accuracy
- SensibleAI Studio: Provides anomaly detection, diagnostic analytics, narrative summaries, and natural language querying
- SensibleAI Agents: Enables intelligent digital assistants to summarize findings, flag anomalies, extract insights, and trigger workflows
With SensibleAI, finance teams gain a host of capabilities:
- Monitor close processes continuously and flag anomalies early (e.g., sign reversals, documentation gaps, manual adjustments)
- Detect reconciliation risk and prioritize exception-based workflows with explainable AI
- Reduce forecasting cycles while expanding planning accuracy and reach
- Generate narrative commentary for board decks, management reports, and audit support
SensibleAI makes it possible for finance to scale insight, automate complexity, and lead with confidence—all without writing code.
Unifying Financial and Operational Insight with Agile Financial Analytics
Today, finance is expected to do more than report what happened. Finance must also explain trends, test assumptions, and guide decisions in real time. That becomes nearly impossible, however, when operational and financial data live in separate systems.
Siloed data ultimately creates blind spots. When finance faces delays in accessing or aggregating information, insights arrive too late to drive decisions. Static reports and rigid tools simply can’t keep up with the pace of business.
Enter Agile Financial Analytics (AFA), which solves the issue by unifying financial and operational data in a single, governed platform. With real-time access and drill-down capabilities, finance teams can analyze trends, identify root causes, and model outcomes at scale.
With AFA, organizations are equipped with the tools to do more:
- Harmonize transactional and structured finance data for integrated analysis
- Drill into drivers of cost, margin, or performance at the transaction level
- Run multi-dimensional analysis across business lines, geographies, and cost centers
- Build dynamic planning models that adjust in real time as data changes
- Align financial reporting and planning with operational trends for faster, more accurate decisions
From cost allocation to profitability modeling, AFA equips finance with the tools to move from reactive reporting to proactive performance leadership.
From Transformation to Momentum
At Splash last month, one thing became clear: the banks gaining traction aren’t just implementing new tools. Banks embracing the transformation are building a foundation for continuous finance-led transformation.
Whether finance is closing the books faster, accelerating forecasts, embedding intelligence, or unifying operational data, there’s a common thread. A modern finance architecture empowers teams to lead.
With OneStream, banks are moving beyond incremental improvement. They’re scaling insight, control, and agility across the enterprise—turning complexity into clarity and action into momentum.
Ready to Build What’s Next?
Whether you’re modernizing reconciliations, launching AI-driven forecasting, or integrating operational data into planning, OneStream gives finance the platform to lead with confidence.
Learn more and explore what’s possible at onestream.com/financial-services.
