Welcome to the latest edition of the podcast series: The Banker’s Plumber – Lessons Learned. What’s up in banking? What’s changing? What has gone wrong? What is going right?
Today, the focus on something I am calling the “consortium conundrum”. Banks want to and need to become more efficient; produce the same for less or more for the same. Some improvement steps they can take on their own. Only some though. A very large part of the cost base for banks is driven by the need to collaborate with other market participants. Working on collaboration is all about infrastructure, trying to reduce friction and fragmentation. Getting enough banks to march in the same direction is really hard, unless there is a deadline. Herding cats.
What needs to be done, what works, what doesn’t?
To help explain the picture, I am delighted to have as a guest today James Maxfield, MD at Ascendant Strategy. James is a veteran of the operations side of wholesale banking. James is a frequent and thoughtful commentator on the future of banking.
Takeaways:
People & Process: the C-suite need to really understand end-to-end process – 35% of revenue is spent on the costs of MO / BO, 70% of that is people. Is the process as efficient as possible?
Complexities in outsourcing: move without understanding, moving broken processes,
Shared service function: senior management start with a big assumption “why not just do it” – hard to bring on a common platform, because 10 banks do the same things 15 different ways, even with the same platform. Hard for a provider to run these things in parallel; poor economics. Collateral management; what you can buy is better than what you have built
DLT: can happen, but market-wide change will take time
