From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, corporate and investment banks were a tremendous engine of technology innovation.
Banks are one of the greatest engines for generating data: daily, they collectively produce petabytes of transactions, prices, risk metrics, customer information….
The one area where digitalisation within the corporate and investment banking industry has been taking place for the longest is within the realm of e-commerce.
A digitalised corporate and investment bank is erected on four distinct and complementary pillars.
“Corporate culture” refers to the beliefs and norms that determine how a company’s employees and management behave when conducting business interactions and transactions.
A decade after the financial crisis, the buyside (asset managers, hedge funds, institutional investors and large corporates) have changed at least as much as the investments banks that serve them.
Over the past decade, both the environment in which CIBs operate and the rules that they need to abide by have drastically changed.
What originally started as ‘electronification’ – the automation of external-facing, front-office processes and workflows – has become much more pervasive, and it now encompasses the entire value-chain.
The so-called digital transformation of the ways in which investment banks operate as businesses overall began more than one decade ago. However, not all of the technology that banks needed in order to fully realise this transformation has always been readily available, and the last five-to-10 years have seen a significant rate of growth in the data processing and analytics needed to realise ideas that have been gestating for some time.
Investment banks have traditionally structured their operational activities along discrete business lines, which were traditionally split up by asset class and geography.