Sybrin

Part I


Corporate Banking Challenges
- an Outsider’s Perspective

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 is driven by data, connectivity, and a customer-centric focus. Digital disruptions are influencing the retail banking sector’s strategies, pushing it towards a changing landscape focused on building a new age banking ecosystem of well-connected, fully aware, and 100% secure customers.

Business Banking

As banks are reinventing and reshaping the industry, the corporate banking segment, comprising one third of the global banking industry’s top line revenues, simply cannot be excluded.

Meeting the demands of business customers is a daunting task for banks and financial institutions, especially during this time of Fintech intrusion, declining profitability, reduced productivity, and the changing regulatory landscape. This, coupled with a long list of stakeholders and complex requirements, has created a critical need for banks to relook their digital transformation strategy for the corporate banking enterprise.

Whilst well into their journey of reshaping the retail landscape with digitial technologies, the same has yet to be achieved in the world of corporate banking.

For example, to attain maximum benefit from digitisation within salary transaction processing alone, implementing the following simple features will deliver great results, both for the bank and for their corporate clients.
  1. Complexity
    Although similar, the corporate banking ecosystem is complex with multiple stakeholders and sub-segments, each with a niche set of needs. Lack of a single unified umbrella of products and services, along with failed attempts to achieve this, have resulted in disjointed services and an overly complex solution.

    The newfound thirst for corporate banks to provide transaction-banking services such as salary payments, cross-border transfers, and digital account opening to the digital corporate banker, is creating the need for an end-to-end system that simplifies processes and reduces complexities.

  2. Legacy IT systems
    Built on the traditional IT infrastructure model, the back office legacy systems - despite being scalable, robust, and efficient in transaction processing - have failed to provide a data centric platform to enable meaningful CX improvements driven by the cutting-edge technologies of AI and robotics.

    These robust and scalable legacy systems have challenged the dream of the digitally literate corporate banker, who foresees customer-centric design, seamless interactions, and a 360° view, as the much-needed change within the corporate banking landscape.

  3. Cultural expectations
    Enterprise clients - small, medium or, large - want to feel that their bank values their business and can anticipate and meet their changing business needs. Corporate institutions want to feel looked after by their banks as their trusted partner and expect better than average customer service.

    Despite the good relationship with their corporate customers, the lack of unique solutions targeted toward the niche business need of each corporate banker, is the biggest hurdle in releasing the trapped value within the current corporate customer base.

  4. Increased investment and declining profitability
    Increased competition from Fintech companies, as well as regulatory changes requiring expensive investments, have led to declining profits within the corporate banking space. Digital transformation has burdened the already challenged industry with the costs of mitigating risks, and any unforeseen financial and revenue loss.

    Unleash the hidden revenue from the added regulatory compliance expenditures for KYC and centralised debit orders, through advanced analytics and greater insights into digital corporate banker behaviour, allowing for better cross-selling and up-selling initiatives.

Although the outlook of the corporate banking industry may be a little dim, and clear threats are visible across the value chain, not all is lost. In the upcoming blogs, we will be discussing how to overcome these challenges in the industry by introducing more personalised and sophisticated services and solutions, as well as offering speed, self-service, and better visibility. Be sure not to miss the rest of the articles in this series.

Redefine your Corporate Banking Experience »

Sybrin Insights

Have a look at what is happening in the industry at our insights section and read all about our events, blogs, case studies, and trending news.


Find out more »
Like what you see? Let's talk »