(4 November 2025)
To Our Clients, Partners, and Industry Colleagues,
As 2025 draws to a close, the past year has reminded us of a truth we often forget in good times – markets are highly changeable. They rarely move in straight lines, they don’t wait for consensus, and they certainly don’t pause to let you catch your breath.
There is no doubt that this year is another one of profound shifts in the financial services landscape. We’ve seen central banks tighten, then hesitate. We’ve seen asset classes move in ways that defy the textbooks. And we’ve seen banks, large and small, recalibrate their ambitions in real time.
(A lot has already been written about President Trumps’ impact on trade and financial markets this year so while these impacts have been felt globally and have had real repercussions, I don’t have anything new or groundbreaking to add to the cacophony, so I won’t.)
In such an environment, instinct is valuable, but evidence is priceless. When decisions involve billions in capital and decades of client relationships, “feeling” the right answer is not enough. You have to know.
Cutting Through the Noise
At East & Partners, we’ve built our business on one simple idea: listen to the right people, at the right time, in the right way, and the market will tell you what’s coming.
We have always believed that the voice of the customer is the single most underutilised competitive advantage in financial services. It’s not about surveys, sentiment scores, or dashboards for their own sake. It’s about listening intently to the decision-makers who matter most and translating that into actionable strategies for our clients.
Over the past year, our team has expanded its coverage across SME, corporate, commercial, and institutional banking segments in more markets than ever before. This has enabled us to uncover patterns in client behaviour and expectations that are not just incremental insights – they are often the difference between market share gained and market share lost, margins lifted or depressed and product wins/losses.
In the first half of this year alone, our research shows:
- Wallet share fragmentation is accelerating across all banking products, even for incumbent leaders.
- API and embedded finance uptake has more than doubled year-on-year in core banking services.
- 1 in 3 corporates across Asia-Pacific plan to switch their transaction banking provider in the next 6 months.
- 30% of US corporates have changed their primary trade and supply chain bank in order to better navigate their China strategies.
Yet, behind those numbers lies opportunity. A shifting market is a listening market – and that’s where banks and financial service providers that act on insight, not assumption, will win.
Providers that lean into this reality with agility and creativity will capture the next wave of growth. Those who ignore it will quietly, and perhaps permanently, lose relevance.
Our work is to help ensure our clients are always in the first group.
Results That Matter
We have grown our research services exponentially and now support clients with insights and analytics from across 39 countries. We’ve seen our research directly inform billion-dollar lending strategies, reshape transaction banking offerings, guide go-to-market messaging, and help banks anticipate, rather than react to, market shifts and client demand.
This performance is underpinned by a culture of rigour. Every dataset we release must meet three tests: it must be representative of the right decision-makers, it must reveal a story others aren’t telling, and it must be delivered in time to make a difference. If it doesn’t meet these tests, it doesn’t leave our desks.
We measure success by whether our insights move decisions, not just whether they fill reports.
Looking Ahead
Artificial intelligence cannot be overlooked for its impact, abilities, and potential, and is something we are watching closely. At this stage, we believe there is still a need for banks and financial service providers to hear directly from their clients and the broader market via an independent and trusted partner very much captained and steered by human hands. There is still a need for clients to differentiate themselves from the mass amounts of AI produced messaging, branding, and marketing which all still sound not quite right, to validate and innovate market entry strategies and opportunities, and to arm their RMs and sales teams with insights that matter to their target market, not just their existing captive clients.
The coming year will be shaped by four priorities for East & Partners:
- Deepening Relevance — Expanding coverage in high-growth regions and topic areas where competition is intensifying and client expectations are evolving faster than solutions.
- Enhancing Access — Strengthening our on-demand insight capabilities which gets our insights into the hands of decision-makers faster than ever before.
- Elevating Impact — Working alongside our clients to embed insights into execution, ensuring strategies are acted upon, not just acknowledged in a slide deck.
- Heightening Customisation — Increasing the flexibility in how we work with clients, so the insights are fit for purpose and dynamic rather than static and stuck.
As always, we will continue to invest in our people. High quality, original data is the raw material, but it’s the judgement, curiosity, and discipline of our analysts that turn it into intelligence you can act on.
The following key subjects are front and centre in much of our current work with financial services providers and banks. Buyers are increasingly wanting relationships with providers that add real value and enable them to benchmark themselves against their peers. These represent both pressures and opportunities for their financial services partners. The below are as true for Corporate/Bank relationships as there are for Financial Institution/Financial Institution relationships and technology partners with the banks. For service providers looking to enhance and extend their relationships with their financial institutions clients the below are critical end user focus points.
- Enhancing Working Capital
Maximising available liquidity and ensuring trapped liquidity is efficiently released is top of the ladder in what corporates are looking for in help from their partners and banks. Generative AI solutions also are having an early and profound impact on how quickly and accurately treasuries can identify lazy liquidity and put it to work.
- Improving Risk Management
The multiple challenges confronting global corporates just keep growing. Risk mitigation has now assumed mission critical status in the way treasury teams look to manage their businesses. Tools offering quick diagnostic solutions have become a key requirement in bank RFPs and are starting to drive switching behaviour.
- Supply Chain and Tariff Volatility
Tariff uncertainties have greatly exacerbated supply chains and their funding that have already been in a state of flux for some time, whether onshoring, supplier and product rationalisation, margin management or fraud mitigation, both physical and digital. Corporates are relying on their trade banks as never before to help them navigate through these very choppy waters. Trade lenders adding real value to the financing relationship will win this race – and we are seeing real successes happen.
- Payments and Coins
Frictionless, fast and information rich payments solutions, both domestic and cross border, are a real focus for treasuries as a swarm of new, innovative providers enter the ring. Banks are steering cautious paths amongst these FinTechs which are variously competitors, partners and customers. Digital currencies are also challenging old payment models at an incredible pace of change.
- RM, Onboarding and the Customer
In an increasingly digitised financial world, we are seeing the changing role of the Relationship Manager contributing increasingly important value to the customer relationship. They are not being replaced with platform solutions, quite the opposite, having bandwidth freed to truly embed themselves inside the corporate customer and continue to enhance the relationship. The death of the RM has been greatly exaggerated.
With the increasing ascendancy of governance, procurement and risk functions within banks, onboarding has become a serious pain point for corporates (and not just corporates). We repeatedly hear horror stories around demands for AML and KYC compliance being imposed on even long, multi-decade relationships. Anything that responsibly lowers these barriers will win hearts and business – concierge models are proving very successful.
- Capital Efficiency Pressures
Banks are under intensifying pressure to manage capital allocation with greater precision as regulatory frameworks tighten and margin headwinds persist. This has created a ripple effect for product innovation, credit appetite, and pricing models, with clear implications for competitors and service providers alike. Institutions that can find ways to do more with less and share risk more effectively will put themselves ahead of the competition.
- Technology Integration and Legacy Drag
Many banks are advancing digital transformation agendas, but legacy infrastructure continues to weigh heavily, slowing down innovation and increasing costs. The gap between frontrunners who successfully and quickly integrate new platforms and laggards still wrestling with outdated systems is widening. Lead times in reconfiguring platforms with fresh functionality are blowing out. This creates both a threat and an opportunity: providers that deliver scalable, interoperable solutions can become indispensable partners in helping banks leapfrog constraints, those who fail to adapt risk being locked out of future ecosystems.
With more and more of our work also centring on the bank as the interviewee, complementing our traditional corporate based view, we are privileged to be at the intersection of financial services insights.
Final Word
Volatility will remain the constant. Headlines will keep competing for your attention. And well-meaning voices will continue to predict with confidence what they cannot possibly know.
Noise is abundant; clarity is rare. Our commitment to you, as it has been since day one, is that East & Partners will always be on the side of clarity, and we will always champion the true voice of your customer and deliver our clients real evidence-based insights.
We are not in the business of guessing the future. We’re in the business of preparing you for it.
Thank you for your trust and your partnership.
Paul Dowling
Principal Analyst
East & Partners
Download the pdf version of this letter to print or read offline here