Banking
Corporate Banking In 2022 – An outlook on the industry
F
ollowing the accelerated pace of change brought about by the 2020 pandemic, what large corporate businesses are looking for from their banks is moving at speed. Troublingly, there’s a perception that those banks themselves aren’t fully keeping up.
Digital matters
It’s vital they do so. The tumultuous economic cycle we’re currently undergoing after all comes with opportunity. With drops come rises, and two-thirds of the value generated during a recovery cycle comes in the immediate two years afterwards.
Minimising friction and increasing efficiency are key demands from large corporates, lessening day-to-day direct interaction between them and their banks. Businesses want either self-service or machine to machine interaction with banking systems, and digital first is now very much expected. Our research confirmed it was more important to businesses than face-to-face interactions, a trend that’s not going to reverse with three times the number of corporate clients reporting they want to communicate through APIs.
Yet what complicates things is the changing demands put on corporate banks by business. NTT DATA recently surveyed nearly 900 senior decision makers across 12 countries to gain a clearer understanding of the current picture. Here are some of its key findings. 40
A big, irreversible change is that businesses clearly want a lot more interaction with their banks, but they want it on their terms. That means on a machine rather than human level.
Banks need to adjust both their culture and their technology stack to keep up: it’s
high priority, but also beneficial work too. Digital first allows them to offer customers a more flexible, bespoke service, that’s also more streamlined when it comes to scaling down - and ideally up! But the tech stack needs to cover ground to accommodate that, and at pace. To facilitate customers who might now want to start a transaction in one place and complete it in another, and to cater for the numerous daily interactions they’re now having with banking services. This is a by-product of online banking that’s long been building. The days of customers interacting with banks every week or so are gone. Our research concludes that the relationship now is a lot more frequent - but far less face to face. Quick evolving banks are adapting to this, particularly disruptors who originated from the tech sector. It goes beyond self-service banking: the drive now is
