Eastern Bank

Small and midsize banks would pay for access to the Monit app and offer it to small-business clients as an add-on service.

Eastern Bank in Boston could raise as much as $1.7 billion to spend on acquisitions and technology investments that it says will be necessary to respond to customers' increasing preference for digital tools.

The startup spawned in Eastern Bank's innovation lab says its bank customers asked for client-friendly software for account opening, credit cards and more types of commercial lending.

Numerated, a vendor of loan prospecting, marketing and underwriting software that was developed within Eastern Bank, now has $32 million.

The Pittsburgh bank is using software initially developed by a fellow mutual to help build out its platform.

In the past few years, APIs have become a surprisingly hot topic, considered by many as a golden key to open banking and innovation.

Karen Mills, who led the Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013, is joining the Eastern Bank spinoff Numerated as an adviser and investor as it tries to bring online-lending technology to community banks.

Thanks to big tech companies, the business world is moving to third-party platforms, or online marketplaces where buyers pull sellers' products off digital shelves. A growing number of financial institutions — including BBVA, Citi and community banks like Eastern — say they can't afford to sit out the trend.

Everyone agrees good corporate governance involves a board that is just the “right” size and has a “good mix” of knowledgeable insiders and independent watchdogs. But setting bright-line rules for banks as varied as M&T, Wells Fargo and Eastern Bank is hard.

At a time when customers are rapidly switching to digital banking, scores of branches are closing. But many institutions — mindful that brick-and-mortar locations remain a critical sales channel — are also experimenting with physical layouts that are focused on technology and generally smaller than traditional branches. In some cases, they have even done away with employees. Here is a look at some of the designs that banks have built as they seek to fuse the physical with the digital.