For most finance teams, the start of digital transformation often goes smoothly. Digitizing early processes yields immediate results, and the reasons to continue are clear. The real challenge appears after the initial progress—when the simple work is done and the rest is far more complex than expected, how should the team proceed?

Brandon Sather, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Enterprise Payments at Bank of America, has seen this pattern frequently. He has long worked with commercial clients on payments and has watched many teams start strong, only to stall midway through transformation.

"Going from 0 to 20 miles per hour captures most of the gains," he says. "Going from 20 to 40 miles per hour yields diminishing returns. You are faster, but the return per unit of speed is far less."

Research conducted by Visa and Bank of America provides quantitative support for Sather's observation: 53% of finance departments remain in the early stages of digital transformation. The reasons have less to do with technology or ambition, as most leaders assume, and more with structural challenges.

Too many priorities, not enough runway

A major root of the problem is structural. Finance teams are pulled in many directions at once, and digital transformation—despite its long-term value—often loses in direct competition with urgent immediate matters. Half of finance teams are struggling to balance cost reduction with investment in future growth, while daily operations are dominated by revenue generation, cash flow improvement, and risk management.

Enterprise-level digital transformation ranks far below all of these.

When every initiative competes for the same limited resources, transformation—difficult and slow to show progress—gets continuously sidelined, breeding organizational inertia. Edge cases worsen the problem: nearly every finance department has processes that occur only monthly or quarterly, relying on institutional knowledge stored in employees' heads and never documented. These are exactly the areas transformation needs to address, and exactly the parts most likely to be postponed indefinitely.

Do not equate automation with transformation

Even when teams do find runway to move forward, another trap lies ahead: confusing transformation with automation. Sather is blunt about this. If a team digitizes existing processes without examining whether they make sense, that is not transformation—it is simply making an already inefficient process run faster.

The real work lies in examining each step, each handoff, and each requirement one by one, and honestly asking: which parts can be stopped, restructured, or done more efficiently? Automation is most valuable as the final step of this examination process, not as a substitute for it.

How leaders position this effort internally matters as much as how they execute it. When transformation is framed as cost cutting, the message reaching the organization's front lines is often reduced to something more threatening: jobs at risk. "If the whole point of transformation is cutting business costs, I think that is missing the forest for the trees," Sather says.

His team found that reframing transformation as "cost reallocation" gains significantly more buy-in—in other words, changing how employees spend their time, shifting effort from low-value repetitive tasks to higher-impact work such as solving client problems, evaluating capital investments, and uncovering opportunities that are completely invisible when employees are buried in manual processes.

Start with payments

For teams ready to act, Sather's advice is consistent: start with payments. Digitizing money inflows and outflows is the most natural entry point, partly because every bank and fintech offers the tools to support it, and partly because once payment data flows in real time, it unlocks reporting capabilities that make truly high-value work like cash flow forecasting and working capital forecasting possible.

After that, progress depends on aligning key people around common goals. Initiatives lacking support from procurement, capital expenditure, and operations teams often struggle to survive to the RFP stage. Transformation needs internal sponsors, and this role often falls to product teams rather than finance, because new products cannot launch without infrastructure support. Company size also shapes constraints: large enterprises face resource bottlenecks measured in dollars, while smaller companies—where the CFO often doubles as accounting, FP&A lead—face them measured in hours.

How breakthrough teams think differently

Finance teams that move past the early-win plateau often share several traits: they define success criteria before starting; they involve employees whose daily work will be affected throughout the process; and they carefully sequence investments so that the credibility built at each stage supports the next.

Yet the most critical difference lies in how they perceive the work itself. Stalled teams view transformation as a technology project; breakthrough teams understand that transformation is fundamentally organizational change—and this understanding, more than any platform or tool, determines how far they can go.

The value of familiar patterns: the role of a partner

In digital transformation, having a partner who can recognize common patterns and anticipate pitfalls makes the process far smoother. Bank of America works closely with commercial clients at every stage of transformation, from digitizing payment operations to building the real-time data and reporting capabilities that support high-value work. If your team is ready to move beyond early wins and build sustainable results, Bank of America can help you find the right next step.