How can banks battle the dichotomy of fragmented value chains and corporate demand for more joined-up finance, risk, payment and working capital services, on an increasingly global scale?</h4> Corporate clients demand more joined-up finance, risk, payment and working capital services, on an increasingly global scale. And they expect access to these services more quickly, at any time and with greater transparency than ever before.</p> In the short-term, banks have pressing priorities. The need to drive costs down, while also deepening relationships with existing clients. Bank disintermediation from corporate transactions isn’t just buzz – some argue that it’s already here</a>.</p> Whether you see this as a threat to traditional commercial banking or not, alternative finance providers, B2B market places and new technologies are a disruptive force. Banks are re-evaluating how they interact and engage with their clients.</p> In this environment banks must remember what they are really good at and find ways to enable their core strengths to add value to corporate clients that goes beyond delivering transactions. Across sales, client and product onboarding, product delivery, and service management, corporate clients often cite inconsistency and varying levels of quality and service across different regions and products.</p> To maintain relevance and prevent loss of market share forward looking banks are focusing on seamless experiences from channel to operations. They are looking at how common workflows across products and billing engines can energise their sales process through greater insight across the commercial banking offering – to be more agile in response to corporate RFPs. By leveraging the spend on ‘big data’ and regulation, and turning core domain expertise and insight into innovative and compelling service propositions, banks will remain at the centre of connected commerce.</p> While enhanced digital and mobile strategies are key to future sales and client interaction, many corporates are still dissatisfied with their online banking services. In a recent EY report (Successful Corporate Banking) 63% of corporates said that innovation in services and product is key, yet only 40% rate their bank as performing well in this respect. Improving self service for clients can drive both efficiency and sales – the two sides of the revenue coin.</p> Beyond a unified digital proposition, banks are looking at how to enable service innovation from a product lifecycle point of view. For example, we see banks focused on integrated and standardised credit lifecycle management to bring consistency across commercial lending origination, servicing and monitoring. In addition, enterprise pricing and billing platforms are on many CIO shopping lists and innovation in this area will continue to be fed as customer business insight is enabled across the corporate banking organisation.</p> To improve sales performance corporate banks need to consistently offer the right product, to the right customer, at the right price and at the right time. These kinds of enterprise ‘middle office’ components can drive a single view of the customer and enable product and sales to structure more targeted product and pricing bundles and segment client groups to align products to needs more accurately and proactively.</p> According to analyst firm Towergroup, banks with higher sales technology enablement can improve high-end sales performance by more than 50% and reduce low performance by even greater margins. The time is now. Banks see the opportunity to realise ROI from their heavy investments in regulatory change and data. Leveraging this, and creating an environment that allows service innovation for revenue growth will give banks the power to predict, build, price and deliver the future solutions for corporate clients.</p> </p> Contributed by Ben Singh-Jarrold, Global Solutions Group, Transaction Banking – Misys.</strong></p>