Banking News

Global analyst meeting insights

(13 January 2020 – Global) East & Partners analysts across Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and London review key business banking themes for Q4 2019. East’s analyst meeting summary provides a unique insight into emerging research and client thought leadership for 2020 and beyond.

East’s analyst meeting insights link ‘voice of the customer’ analytics with our client bank and financial services providers emerging strategic planning and implementation, providing an exclusive ‘behind the curtain’ view of business banking markets from both the demand and supply side.

Trust and transparency continue to steer decision making among banks and corporates alike. East & Partners enhanced advocacy research offering adds much needed granularity to current industry standards based on net promoter scores or likelihood to advocate a provider, noting the additional complexity of business banking relationships relative to other industries. As it stands, negative advocacy continues to be the hallmark for most business banking dealings.

Across institutional banking teams, the middle market and SMEs, the majority of providers are simply not regarded positively enough by customers to actively recommend their primary provider to a friend or colleague. CFOs and corporate treasurers will instead mostly negatively advocate based on poor product and service experiences. In many cases customer expectations are rising faster than bank’s can keep up, raising both threats and opportunities for incumbent bank majors and nimble new entrants respectively.

East & Partners 2020 Outlook investigates current trends in business and banking and where we see markets moving tomorrow. Supply chain finance (SCF) has seemingly reached a tipping point despite sentiment shifting against the wide scale usage of certain products and definitional challenge around what  SCF actually encompasses. recent East & Partners research suggests winning SCF businesses could potentially open doors for new banking relationships.

Cross border payments and FX demand continues to evolve in line with digitisation and technology advances as risk management becomes ‘mission critical’ for increasingly internationalised operations. Achieving best of breed value for money ratings has rapidly become the path to winning new customers hearts. Fintech is failing to become the panacea for time poor CFOs and corporate treasurers.

The future of client onboarding in financial services must incorporate the voice of the customer. Deeply dissatisfied CFOs and corporate treasurers in the institutional segment are grappling with lengthening lead times and complex administrative processes. What must banks do now to get onboarding right? East’s latest global insight report addresses corporate’s growing concerns in this critically important area.

East & Partners monthly Research Notes delve into subjective topics influencing business banking. A sneak peek at upcoming issues for 2020 includes topics ranging from quantifying the link between customer trust and relationship share growth, deep dive bank case studies and forecast analytics across transaction banking, credit and customer sentiment arms of East’s core reporting and thought leadership programs.