2025, A fresh new year with great new opportunities. The world seems to get ready for a rather turbulent year when it comes to geopolitics.
Banks have generally had a profitable 2024 and are getting ready for some major shifts in 2025.
On the regulatory side:
On the commercial and client side banks might see some major shifts in certain areas:
1) Both on the bank as well as the corporate side (artificial) intelligence and ML will improve risk management capabilities and provide opportunities to better deal with volatile markets.
2) Further automation and smarter trading. Intraday position management and optimization based on new business updates will become available even to medium-sized corporates based on their integration with banks as well as platform sophistication.
3) Focus on less balance sheet utilization through brokerage fees, asset management and capital markets solutions.
4) Investment products: banks are improving their offering for excess cash with solutions that are comprehensive and attractive through their composition (security level, yield, allocation spread) and distribution: smart channels and multi-issuer oriented.
1) Offering advanced liquidity insights in Global Transaction Banking portals. Not only do large consultancy firms like KPMG and CapGemini write about this trend, TreasurUp has also experienced an increased demand in advanced liquidity solutions as most financial journeys for business clients start with liquidity information.
2) Forecasting tools. Both for cash flow forecasting and exposure forecasting, companies are seeking new tooling based on more advanced analytics. Banks can play an important role here as they have a large part of the required data through accounts and transaction/trade capture platforms.
3) Smart cash pooling and liquidity optimization: through enhanced computer power and analytics, companies can optimize their liquidity which should result in improved cash utilization, reduced idle balances, lower financing costs and optimized interest earnings. Banks have a lot of ground to gain here.
1) Embedded finance: banks are extensively embedding their services in ‘external’ channels and services. Besides the regular payment integrations in many e-commerce and ERP platforms, they have started offering credit and excess cash solutions straight from a company’s financial software environment.
2) Marketplaces: areas like supplier finance, trade finance and securitization have seen a growth in new market places where companies can – for example – put their receivables up for financing.
3) Bank’s GTB portals: the Global Transaction Banking portals are nowadays getting a lot of attention in terms of adding serious sophistication in the areas of liquidity insights and optimization, Open Finance and Pooling intelligence, financial reporting, routine transaction automation and interest analytics. When combined with other product areas of the bank, these portals can become very useful and powerful tools for businesses.
In short, 2025 will be a great year with lots of things to work on for banks and their fintech partners. Bring it on!