Corporate Banking is evolving. Long held notions of a highly complex, bespoke and manually dependent value chain are fast eroding. Institutions seeking to differentiate their go to market propositions are seeking ways in which to blend the best of high touch relationship management with digitally derived insights and client service collaboration platforms that focus on elevating client experience through relevance and speed of execution.
The traditional Corporate Relationship manager typically meets their CFO client solely in the context of the entity that the CFO represents, however, that person or one of their family may have a personal banking relationship with the bank and corporate relationship managers often only have a superficial understanding of this personal relationship which might have a significant inf luence on how their corporate relationship grows. Similarly, their client might well be elected to the Board of another company that their colleague is covering and ceasing this opportunity to demonstrate support and advice in a time when their client is settling into their new role will prove invaluable to the long-term benefits of this relationship.
Modernizing the Corporate Banking division along the following four pillars allows banks to truly uplift client experience and find new areas of value in the race to grow share of wallet.
Transforming the coverage model
Helping Relationship Managers to a) simplify their operating environment and b) better understand their client environment; enable significant opportunities for raising productivity and improving client experience.
Simplifying the frontline operating environment
Relationship Managers have to access a diverse set of systems, reports and news sources in order to adequately prepare for client meetings and present relevant financial solutions. By ‘hollowing out’ key functionalities from systems and aggregating client data feeds into one place creating a single operating platform for your relationship managers, a CRM on steroids if you will significantly simplifies the operating environment for your front line.
Enabling client insights
Relationship Managers are expected to have the right information at the right time in order to serve their clients’ needs. Targeted insights that help relationship managers deepen their understanding of their client’s business developments, industry dynamics and macro-economic trends places them in a strong position to help act as their primary banking partner.
Reimagining traditional corporate banking customer journeys
Corporate Onboarding is repeatedly highlighted by clients as one of the biggest points of friction they experience in their interactions with banks. Elevating levels of journey automation with cloud based natural language processing for company documents; building integrations with licensing and identify authorities to obtain company license information from source providers, all helps to reduce reliance on the client to surface information that can be sought directly by the bank.
"Modernizing the Corporate Banking division along the following four pillars allows banks to truly uplift client experience and find new areas of value in the race to grow share of wallet"
Providing a vault window back to the client to bring transparency to all information shared by them to the bank also helps to avoid asking for information previously shared by the bank as well as acting as a useful secure source of documents easily accessed by the client. The same principles should be applied to similar journeys like KYC updates and Trade License renewals.
Boosting top line growth and reducing credit risk through Predictive Analytics
Analyzing how Machine Learning models can be deployed to every possible facet of how corporate bankers go to market is the hallmark of how a modern corporate banking practice differentiates itself from its peers. Whether your AI models are focused on top line growth helping to identify cross sell opportunities based on client clustering algorithms or providing insights on payment f lows from POS terminals to give visibility to cash management or FX opportunities or whether they help reduce credit risk through early warning signal optimization or false positive reduction on AML detection; investing in the development of an in house data science capability will pay significant returns and enable identification of new areas of growth.
Solving key client problems through an innovative product development organization
Last but not least, investing in building a business led, product driven innovation studio that has the single objective of engaging with clients and employees to analyze the biggest problems being faced by them provides the right environment to bring domain expertise, transformation talent and engineering capability together to create a powerful problem-solving organization. Challenges such as giving visibility to high value payments by building a parcel delivery style app that gives candor and transparency to your service promise or tokenizing account balances to solve for liquidity management challenges require organizations to create the operating space for multidisciplinary teams to come together as a single unit bringing their unique perspectives to extensively prototype, user test and create innovative solutions to their clients’ biggest problems.
