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GreySpark Delta-X

GreySpark Delta-X

The Digital Maturity Index for Corporate & Investment Banking

In 2013, capital markets consultancy GreySpark Partners began exploring the growing trend of digital transformation within the global investment banking industry, subsequently explicating the findings of that examination over the course of several research reports. GreySpark’s perspective underpinning the identification of digital transformation as a trend within the industry is simple: The automation of front-office client- and markets-facing processes and workflows resulting from the adoption of e-commerce and e-trading business models and principles will revolutionise the historical configuration of the whole of the corporate and investment banking sector over the next 10-20 years.

Our Value

What remains complex is the development of a precise understanding of when efforts toward achieving new, digitally-transformed states will fully manifest within the banking industry, resulting in the creation of an automated, front-to-back reality for wholesale markets financing, lending and trading services.

In 2019, a new GreySpark service offering – the Digital Maturity Index for Corporate & Investment Banking – aims to bring clarity to that complexity through the assembly of 60-plus banks’ assessments of the veracity of their respective digital innovation target states and the expression of those objectives to-date within the sophistication of their current front-office functional capabilities.

Interested in GreySpark's Delta-X Services?

In 2019, a new GreySpark service offering – the Digital Maturity Index for Investment Banks – aims to bring clarity to that complexity through the assembly of 60-plus banks’ assessments.

GreySpark Delta-X Service Offering

Digitalisation applied to Corporate & Investment Banking

Whichever strategy they follow and whatever transformation they undertake, investment banks now face four existential threats:

  • The commoditisation and unbundling of the products and services that they offer;
  • The compression of margins resulting from this great simplification and the ensuing, increased competition;
  • The progressive, but ineluctable, elimination of informational advantages; and
  • Figuring out which workforce is needed and the jobs it has to perform.

To overcome these challenges, one must rethink and change a bank’s ways in depth:

  • Which behaviours should be encouraged or deterred?
  • How products and services are manufactured?
  • How they are marketed and distributed?
  • How to manage data as the most valuable asset the bank holds?
  • How to hit the “reset button” and purge 35 years of accumulated technology debt?

Defined, the digitalisation of the investment banking business brings several very tangible opportunities:

Improved Productivity

  • Beyond the automation of labour-intensive tasks. Equipped with the right information, banking professionals can maximise their outputs by leveraging two uniquely human abilities – empathy (may that be with clients, colleagues, business partners or suppliers), and rational decision-making in new or uncharted circumstances.

Reaching Clients Everywhere

  • With few exceptions, most investment banks have retrenched to and are refocusing on their core geographies and client franchises. With fewer resources on the ground, only e-commerce and e-distribution solutions can enable banks to remain relevant to their existing and potential customers.

Reaping the Benefits of Network Effects & Ecosystems

  • Investment banks can no longer offer everything to everyone, everywhere or do everything themselves. Shared platforms enable the rebuilding the economies of scale no longer achievable on one’s own.

The Ability to Move Faster, Further & Deeper

  • By integrating technology from the onset into the design of products and services, development cycles are dramatically shortened. It becomes possible to fail fast, to adapt iteratively to market circumstances and client demands, to innovate both incrementally and radically.

Delivery

GreySpark has built a robust methodology exclusively applied to Corporate & Investment Banking.

To drive and incentivise constructive change in behaviour, practices and outcomes, objective assessments and measurements of that change are required.

GreySpark designed Delta-X for that sole and explicit purpose:

  • Delta-X is specific to Corporate & Investment Banking;
  • Delta-X is precise, covering 20 discrete metrics organised in the 5 pillars relevant to Global Markets activities;
  • Delta-X is objective, independently assessing the metrics against a constant set of benchmark measures; and
  • Delta-X is scalable, best applied at business unit level and roiled out across the bank, with annual evaluations.

By adopting GreySpark Delta-X, our clients’ senior management, innovations heads and digital officers can:

  • objectively assess the level of maturity of each of their business units;
  • create positive incentives to foster emulations between lines of business, and
  • drive continuous improvement year after year within each unit.

GreySpark has developed a rigorous and standardised methodology that maximise the relevance and accuracy of the evaluations, while minimising the efforts required from our clients:

  • Data gathering activities combine surveys and direct interviews;
  • Evaluation and scoring are performed independently;
  • Individual scorecards and recommendations delivered within four weeks of project start;
  • No hidden fees with a fixed price per assessment;
  • Ability to perform multiple assessments within a given bank in parallel; and
  • Provision of up-to-date industry benchmark data.

Media

Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
4 Jun, 2019

What is ‘Digital Age’ Technology for CIBs?

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, corporate and investment banks were a tremendous engine of technology innovation.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
29 May, 2019

What Does Managing Data as an Asset Mean for CIBs?

Banks are one of the greatest engines for generating data: daily, they collectively produce petabytes of transactions, prices, risk metrics, customer information....
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
21 May, 2019

What Does “Digital Distribution” Mean for CIBs?

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.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
15 Apr, 2019

What does “Digital Manufacturing” Mean for CIBs?

A digitalised corporate and investment bank is erected on four distinct and complementary pillars.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
2 Apr, 2019

What Does a “Digital Culture” Mean for CIBs?

“Corporate culture” refers to the beliefs and norms that determine how a company's employees and management behave when conducting business interactions and transactions.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
25 Mar, 2019

What Are Buyside Clients Seeking from Digitalised Corporate & Investment Banks?

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.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
18 Mar, 2019

Is Digitalisation an Opportunity for Corporate & Investment Banks?

Over the past decade, both the environment in which CIBs operate and the rules that they need to abide by have drastically changed.
Delta-XDigital Industrialisation & TransformationInsights
12 Mar, 2019

Is Digital Transformation a Threat to the Business Model of Corporate & Investment Banking?

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.
  • Digital Transformation: The Capital Markets Innovation Landscape 2023

    £1,850.00
  • Digital Transformation: Artificial Intelligence Applications & Use Cases in Investment Banking 2022

    £1,850.00

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