By Andy Nelson, Head of Banking & Financial Markets at NTT DATA UK&I

We live in an era where the development of new technologies is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Once peripheral solutions such as A.I. and machine learning are quickly becoming commonplace across multiple sectors, banking being no exception.

In 2008, the financial crisis forced banks to heavily invest in digitisation, giving customers more accessibility and opportunity with their money. Since then, investments in tech solutions have continued to grow. Today, they’re a major priority for banks across the globe.

For years, corporate banking had been slowly moving away from desks, telephone calls, and filing cabinets and toward seamless omnichannel platforms. In the future, the world of corporate banking will likely have fully transformed into digital interfaces and platforms.

Recent events spurring change

Adding fuel to the fire, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the need for both rationalisation and digitisation across all banking platforms. Suddenly, corporate clients demanded flexible and integrated banking services. New and innovative tech solutions are gold dust in today’s market and now banks are racing to keep up with demand.

Another lasting effect of the pandemic work was hybrid working structures, which greatly accelerated the trend of digitisation across banking. Post-pandemic, banks are even more laser-focused on growing their tech stacks to stay ahead of corporate demand.

Earlier this year, global research from NTT DATA, Corporate Banking Outlook 2022, examined the latest trends across corporate banking. The most common theme in the report was the implementation of technology into banking solutions. We found that platforms, onboarding processes, know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) initiatives, are all in the process of a technology revolution.

That begs the question, what does the future hold for corporate banking?

Evolving to meet corporate demand

In banking, evolution often comes through the process of overcoming challenges. In this way, by examining the most pressing challenges faced by banks today, we can gain foresight and begin to map out what is to come.

A significant pain point for banks is matching corporate demand for tech solutions. Our research found that 85 per cent of banks are working on rationalising their portals, and 57 per cent of those banks are doing so to improve client experience. This finding demonstrates the shift to the use of portals ahead of client-to-client banking.

It also exemplifies a shifting mood amongst corporate clients away from traditional communication channels and toward all-in-one interfaces. Banks are already investing to achieve this vision, and I predict they will ramp up this investment in future.

Across the board, there are multiple areas where banks are failing to meet corporate demand. Of these areas, one of the biggest disparities between corporate demand and banks’ investment was in the demand for expanding or creating omnichannel offerings. As a result, I predict heavy investment into omnichannel offerings in the future and that they will become the golden standard for client interaction in the next ten years.

Omnichannel corporate lending solutions are another unmet client demand for banks. Demands of this kind were scattered throughout this report across multiple sectors including construction (70%) and healthcare (55%). As a major area of improvement, it’s a demand that will shape the future as banks work to satisfy their corporate clients’ needs.

Interestingly, many corporate banks are moving to Open-APIs to facilitate the disaggregation of the core services underpinning their omnichannel solutions. Ultimately, making these solutions as homogenous and streamlined as possible will be the key to improving the client experience.

In light of this, the future of corporate banking starts to become a little clearer, with streamlined, omnichannel platforms that place the client at their core.

A client-centric future

Corporate clients no longer want to communicate with banks over the phone. Those days are gone. Instead, they want the ability to make fast – indeed almost instant – decisions. As a result, customer service is likely to be replaced by self-service, where banking services can be adapted to each client as required.

As we move into the future, corporate banks are very much being led by their clients. The bank of the future must be innovative, marrying new and emerging fintech with the history and global reach of traditional banks. It’s not a process that will happen overnight, but I expect plenty of partnerships between FinTechs and traditional banks over the next ten years. In fact, these partnerships have already started to appear. Deutsche Bank’s partnership with Traxpay back in 2020 has already proven successful, generating significant revenue over the past two years.

Ultimately, it will be the corporate banks who act early and place clients at the heart of their operations that are most likely to succeed. That being said, being in control of data is also vital. Clients are demanding increased connectivity where they can move through data sets freely without interruption. Data has to flow securely between services, enriched by artificial intelligence. It is no easy task, but it is the key to meeting clients’ demands and most importantly, achieving client loyalty.