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 growing use of algorithms to automate trading activities is garnering increasing regulatory attention, which highlights the need for dedicated risk management processes and systems.
The so-called digitalisation of the capital markets arena – in which an increasingly larger number of previously manual processes within investment banks gradually become automated – is an on-going process that traces its roots to the late 1980s, when e-trading was originally pioneered.
A new report from GreySpark Partners explores the digital transformation that the wholesale investment banking business model is facing, and which resembles a real industrial revolution for the sector. The report “Digital Transformation of Investment Banking” examines the influence of regulations, buyside institutions, the competitive landscape and technology innovation in driving this revolution, which ultimately will cause banks to become more reliable manufacturers of financial products and services, adopting leaner and more efficient business models.
