Technology-driven next-gen corporate banking: Trends and implications in APAC and Japan

Corporate banking is at a critical juncture of accelerated change. External factors are driving disruptions and opportunities in corporate banking. Banks are at risk of falling behind in their response. Players in the corporate banking arena need to ensure that they keep pace and take significant strides to compete effectively with financial institutions at the vanguard of technology as well as digital giants and FinTech firms. Companies need to cease product-centric approaches and embrace a customer-centric approach, one that reimagines and improves the customer journey. Banks need to digitise paper-based processes and assign top priority to shifting from intuition-driven decision-making to data and analysis-driven decision-making. Asia-Pacific (APAC) dominates the global bank profit landscape, generating 43 per cent of total global bank revenue, with the Chinese market forming the centrepiece of growth strategies for the region. Having said that, moving ahead, China will not be the sole growth engine. The global situation is characterised by uncertainty stemming from factors ranging from negative interest rates and the emergence of trade protectionism to US-China trade friction and Brexit and now coronavirus (COVID-19). Against this backdrop, the future of corporate banking growth can be expected to be heavily dependent on performance in digital economies, where technology plays a prominent role. This paper discusses how, now more than ever, as technology iteration continues to speed up, banks should seek to pursue evolution and innovation in the corporate banking arena.