Why the Financial OS for midmarket businesses lives inside the ERP

Brian Hernandez

VP of RevOps

at Rutter

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The first generation of fintech transformed financial access. Faster onboarding, self-serve tools, embedded finance, modern APIs, digital banking experiences. For SMBs, this shift was transformational. Small businesses could finally manage payments, treasury, expense management, lending, cash flow, and financial operations through modern platforms instead of fragmented legacy banking.

That model still works at the SMB end of the market. Mercury, PayPal, Airwallex, and Square are where SMBs run their financial lives.

When businesses move upmarket, operational complexity changes, and the Financial OS moves with it.

Midmarket finance is an operational coordination problem

Midmarket finance teams operate differently from SMBs. Workflows become cross-functional:

AP teams, treasury teams, controllers, procurement, reconciliation, and payment operations
Multiple banks and payment providers running in parallel
Approvals and policy logic that span departments

Finance is no longer about access to financial tools. It's about coordination. That's why the ERP becomes strategically important. NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage Intacct, Workday, SAP, and other ERPs are where midmarket controllers, treasury teams, and AP teams actually work. The ERP coordinates payments, approvals, treasury, reconciliation, procurement, AP/AR, financial reporting, and cash management. The ERP becomes the Financial OS.

Side-by-side comparison diagram titled "Operating Model · SMB vs Mid-market finance operations." The left card, labeled SMB · Standalone fintech apps, shows a linear flow from Bank (single provider) to Fintech App (all-in-one) to Business (1–2 operators). Characteristics listed: linear single-provider workflows, one owner across most finance ops, fast self-serve onboarding, standalone apps work well, and minimal coordination overhead. The right card, labeled Midmarket · Cross-functional coordination, shows a hub-and-spoke diagram with a central black ERP node connected by dashed lines to Bank A, Bank B, Treasury, AP, Recon, and FX. Characteristics listed: multiple banks, providers, and systems; cross-team workflows across AP and treasury; ERP becomes the coordination layer; operational embedding is more important than connectivity.

The need has always been there. The supply side is finally catching up.

Finance teams have wanted financial workflows inside their ERPs for as long as midmarket businesses have run on NetSuite, Dynamics, Sage, and Workday. The demand isn't new. What's new is that fintechs and banks now have rails worth embedding — real-time FX, instant payouts, modern card APIs, programmatic banking — and the infrastructure to embed them at scale is finally available.

Standalone portals become operationally limiting

Standalone financial portals still work for SMB use cases. For midmarket finance teams, they create friction. A controller reconciling card spend inside Dynamics doesn't want reconciliation workflows split across the ERP, banking portals, spreadsheets, and AP systems. Every context switch is operational overhead. This is why connectivity alone is no longer enough.

Side-by-side comparison diagram titled "Operating Model · Disconnected portals vs ERP-native workflow." The left card, labeled Disconnected · Connectivity Only, shows a Finance Team Operator at the top connected by red dashed lines to five separate surfaces: ERP (NetSuite), Bank Portal (login required), Spreadsheet (manual input), Treasury (separate portal), and Approvals (email chain). It is labeled "5+ context switches · coordination overhead grows with scale." The right card, labeled ERP-Native · Operational Embedding, shows a Finance Team Operator above a single Inside the ERP container that holds six unified workflow pills: Payments, Reconciliation, Approvals, Treasury, FX, and AP Automation. It is labeled "One workflow surface · zero context switches."

ERP-native financial workflows are becoming strategically critical

The market is moving from connected financial products to operationally embedded financial workflows. The first phase of embedded finance focused on embedding financial products into SaaS applications. The next phase is moving into systems of record.

The best financial products no longer connect to ERPs. They operate inside them. APIs move data. ERP-native workflows move operations.

Diagram titled "Operating Model Evolution · From standalone fintech to ERP-native. Same company, different stage." A horizontal timeline runs from an SMB fintech app card on the left to a midmarket ERP hub-and-spoke node on the right, illustrating how company complexity grows. The timeline has four stages with paired top and bottom labels: Tools (specialized SaaS) with finance living in app + 1 SaaS, Integration (APIs and portals) with multi-app finance, Coordination (cross-team workflows) with ERP plus integrations, and Embedding (ERP-native) with ERP-native finance. The left side notes Access via single provider and standalone apps; the right side notes operational embedding across multiple banks, providers, and ERP-native workflows. A thesis statement at the bottom reads: "Midmarket isn't a different species — it's the same company at the stage where access stops being the bottleneck and coordination starts."

Why this is hard to build

Every ERP ecosystem brings its own SDK, authentication model, permissions system, deployment requirements, workflow structures, approval frameworks, and UI extension model. Treasury workflows inside Dynamics work nothing like AP workflows inside NetSuite or reconciliation inside Sage Intacct.

Most fintechs and banks underestimate how hard this is at scale. The result is slow internal projects, brittle one-off deployments, and limited ERP coverage.

We've spent the past five years building integration infrastructure across these ERP ecosystems with the leading banks and fintechs. The operational complexity is real.

The next phase of financial infrastructure

The next generation of financial infrastructure won't be defined by APIs and connectivity. It will be defined by how deeply financial products embed into operational workflows. The first generation of fintech digitized financial access. The next generation will operationalize finance inside the systems of record midmarket customers run on.

Midmarket isn't a different species. It's the same company at the stage where access stops being the bottleneck and coordination starts. The fintechs and banks we work with that win this shift will be the ones capable of bringing modern financial rails directly into the ERPs where midmarket finance teams operate:

NetSuite
Microsoft Dynamics
Sage Intacct
Workday
SAP
And other major enterprise ERPs

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Meeting your customer where they actually work isn't a feature. It's a market shift, and the fintechs and banks already moving on it are pulling ahead.
We just launched Rutter Embedded ERP for exactly this. We build native financial experiences inside your customers' ERPs, powered by your APIs.

→ See how it works

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