The Hidden Cost of Open Finance Support — and How Managed Services Fixes It

Why banks that own Open Finance connectivity end up losing the accounts they worked hardest to win — and how Ninth Wave’s Managed Services turns that same connectivity into a driver of customer loyalty.

The Problem: Connectivity Support Isn’t a Core Banking Skill

Every bank that offers commercial Open Finance connectivity (linking a business customer’s ERP, accounting, treasury, or wealth platform to their bank accounts) runs into the same wall shortly after go-live. The bank’s tech support team excels at answering questions about the bank’s website and policies. It is not equipped to answer questions about Oracle NetSuite, Quicken, Xero, Workday, Carta, Monarch Money, or the dozens of other third- and fourth-party applications a sophisticated commercial client might use.

As William Trapani of Ninth Wave put it in a recent conversation about the problem:

“No matter how big you are, you can’t train your entire staff on hundreds of applications… this really becomes a one-off function that very few banks and wealth managers take the time to train tech support in.”
William Trapani, Ninth Wave

The result is a predictable, frustrating pattern. A commercial client calls the bank’s tech support line with a connectivity question. Support can’t resolve it, so the client is given a generic 1-800 number for the ERP vendor. That vendor’s support desk is built for accounting questions, not bank connectivity, so the client is bounced back to the bank, no closer to a resolution. What should be a same-day fix stretches into a two-week ordeal involving multiple calls, with nobody clearly owning the problem.

It Doesn’t End at Onboarding

Even after a client is successfully connected, the relationship isn’t static. On average, connections that run smoothly for three to four months start to break: a new user is added who doesn’t understand the setup, a password reset cascades through a chain of third-party services, or, most commonly, the ERP or fintech vendor pushes an API update the bank never tested. A transaction that worked Monday silently fails Tuesday, and the bank has no way to know why until support calls start piling up.

Security compounds the problem. Many banks, particularly tier two and tier three institutions with only five or six security personnel, versus 100+ at the largest banks, still rely on screen-scraping and username/password authentication rather than full OAuth tokenization and multi-factor authentication. Building that capability internally is a multi-year, specialist-heavy undertaking most banks can’t justify for a single use case.

The Cost Is Real and Measurable

Industry estimates put the cost of a single tech support call at roughly $17 to $27, and connectivity issues consistently fall at the high end because an IVR can’t resolve them and they always require a human who understands both the ERP and the bank’s own systems. One of the top five U.S. banks had lived with this problem for two to three years, absorbing hundreds of these escalated calls annually, with the bulk concentrated during tax season, when clients need their data to move cleanly.

The real cost isn’t the per-call expense; it’s what happens when the client gives up. A commercial customer who can’t get automated bill pay or statement downloads working reverts to manual processes, loses any sense of stickiness to the bank, and becomes an easy target for a competitor who can offer smoother connectivity. As Trapani noted, “once somebody has done this automation with us, they are kind of tied to the bank and married to the bank,” but the inverse is equally true: fail the connection, and there’s nothing holding the client in place.

The Solution: Ninth Wave Managed Services

Ninth Wave Managed Services (MSO) is built on a simple premise: connectivity support is a specialized, constantly shifting discipline, and it is far more efficient for a dedicated expert to master it once and support many banks than for each bank to build that expertise in-house from scratch. Ninth Wave has done exactly this for over 15 years, and its specialists are certified across the major ERP and fintech platforms: NetSuite, Quicken, Xero, Workday, Carta, Monarch Money, and the broader ecosystem of applications that connect through partners like Plaid, and other aggregators.

Every Ninth Wave customer already receives Core Product Support as the foundation of the relationship: 24x7x365 monitoring, bug fixes and defect resolution, platform upgrades, and Level 3 engineering escalation. On top of that foundation, MSO is offered in two premium tiers that let a bank choose exactly how much of the connectivity burden it hands off.

Proactive, Not Reactive

The most valuable part of MSO is what happens before a client even notices a problem. Ninth Wave continuously monitors transaction success rates; when failures rise above the normal 1–2% baseline, the team proactively alerts the bank rather than waiting for support tickets to pile up. When a third-party vendor plans an API change, Ninth Wave runs it through parallel testing on its own platform before the change reaches production.

“Last year, we caught it twice where basically there was a change that they didn’t think would affect us downstream, and it did. We were able to stop it before it went into production… their clients weren’t impacted.”
William Trapani, describing a wealth-management client’s recurring API cycle

In that case, a client whose issues had historically taken three to four days to resolve got a same-day (in most cases within 24 hours) confirmation that a new API release was safe, and a three-day resolution on the one occasion where it wasn’t.

A Structured Path to Better Security

For institutions without the internal headcount to modernize authentication, Ninth Wave can also serve as an interim managed security layer, implementing OAuth, tokenization, and multi-factor authentication across open finance connections without requiring the bank to staff up its own security department. This is typically a one-to-four-year bridge, giving smaller institutions security parity with the largest banks while they build out their own capability.

Practical Guidance for Banks Handling This Alone

For institutions not yet using Ninth Wave, three practices materially reduce the pain of connectivity support:

• • Understand the full workflow. A single transaction can pass through several layers of connectivity software before it reaches the bank; knowing that chain is the only way to identify where a failure actually originated.
  • Build a documented onboarding cheat sheet. A concise, 8–10 step guide for each ERP-to-bank combination, handed to tech support and, ideally, published for clients, turns a frustrating, undocumented process into a repeatable one.
  • Equip tech support with a keyword-driven knowledge base. A short list of core terms (connectivity, ERP connectivity, automated bill pay, and similar) helps support staff route a vaguely described issue correctly, rather than searching endlessly through generic documentation.

These steps help, but they only narrow the gap. They don’t solve the underlying issue: the landscape of third- and fourth-party applications changes constantly, and no internal team can stay ahead of it while also running the bank’s core support operation.

Conclusion: Let the Experts Own Connectivity

The pattern across every problem in this report is the same. Bank tech support teams are asked to master a constantly shifting set of third-party applications that has nothing to do with their core job of supporting the bank’s own systems and policies. When they can’t keep up, clients wait, get frustrated, resort to manual workarounds, and, in the worst cases, leave for a competitor who can offer a smoother connection.

Ninth Wave Managed Services closes that gap by design, not by accident. Because Ninth Wave supports hundreds of third- and fourth-party applications across its entire client base, not just one bank’s, its specialists spot problems, patterns, and upcoming API changes earlier and more often than any single institution ever could. That is not a temporary staffing fix; it is a structural advantage that grows stronger over time, because every issue Ninth Wave resolves for one client sharpens its ability to prevent the same issue for every other client it supports.

The result for a bank that adopts MSO is straightforward:

• • Connectivity issues are resolved in hours instead of weeks because the SME who understands the exact ERP or fintech platform is already on staff and trained.
  • Corporate customers stay satisfied and loyal; the data shows retention climbing from roughly 80% to over 90% once a client’s connectivity is properly automated and supported.
  • The bank’s technical support staff are freed from a specialized, low-frequency, high-difficulty problem set and can focus their time on the core banking issues they are trained to handle.

Banks can build part of this capability in-house. But given the pace at which new ERPs, fintech tools, and connectivity standards emerge — NetSuite today, something else in eighteen months — no internal team can match an organization whose entire business is staying ahead of that curve for every client it serves, simultaneously. Ninth Wave Managed Services doesn’t just fill a support gap; it consistently outperforms what any single bank can build and maintain on its own.